I was listening to a podcast today and a woman was talking about how detached we've become from the land and whatnot. She said that during the Irish Potato Famine there was wild vegetation that people could have eaten but they had lost the ability to tell what could be eaten safely. Is this true to any extent?

Is it Eurocentrism at work or is there a narrower scope of events historians are looking at?

Follow up question: Was Japan considered a world power in 1941?

I have read Storm of Steel. Helmet for my Pillow is on my list. I just found out about The Jungle is Neutral and will be adding that as well

Memoirs involving any conflict in history (not just WW2) are welcome!

Ancient Greece and Rome produced countless narratives, poems, and plays that are widely studied today and canonized as among the greatest works of Western literature. But it seemed that, shortly after the start of the Common Era, Europe stopped producing literature that is today seen as part of the great Western canon, and didn't pick it up again until well over a thousand years later (with the sole exception being Beowulf).

Why is that? Do scholars just find this period of literature less interesting for study, or were there fewer works being produced, or do fewer works survive? If fewer works survive, why are there more surviving works of literature from ancient Greece and Rome than from this later 1200-year period?

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Why did they join, and what did their forces contribute?

Were they still allowed to fight for the United States military? Did any of them have to be discharged to be placed in internment camps, or did the US government seem to overlook the soldiers due to them being enlisted?

It's been ages since I watched it, but I remember in "Battle of Britain" an argument by two boys about whether you needed to be an officer to fly Spitfires. I don't remember the result of their tiff, but it is less important who was right, really, than the fact it was an argument that might have been had, as it seems to imply that there were important divisions based on rank beyond simply organizational hierarchy. And this being Britain, while certainly you no longer bought commissions, I feel it is hard to separate perception of rank from perception of class, so I don't think I'm overstepping in assuming that the latter was a driving force as much as the latter.

So my question breaks into three broad sub-questions:

• How did class influence what and where a member of the RAF was assigned, especially within broadly similar roles: i.e. did you have a better chance of flying a Spit than a Hurricane if you had a hoity-toity accent; and did you have a better chance flying a fighter than a bomber likewise?

• Presuming that there was an effect there, how did it change over the course of the war, as the RAF had to expand for its wartime role, and also replace personnel who were killed or invalidated out?

• And finally, how much of this was driven by social dictates and expectations, and how much of it was actually built into how the RAF was organized and run?

My sense is that the Nazis and their talk of a "Third Reich" is the main source for seeing the German Empire as the "Second Reich," but I don't know how the German Empire conceived itself. The Holy Roman Empire only ended in 1806, in living memory when the new Empire began. How did contemporaries understand their connection?

Since there were plans on at least the Soviet side for invading Western Europe, how would've they organized the supply of the Warsaw Pact troops? Would the major ways that which logistics would've been handled have changed a lot as the Cold War moved forwards?

As an Athenian he was an outsider to the Spartans the direct translation does make sense, but does anyone know if this name was inherited or posthumous? For someone who spent much of his life being an outsider to whoever he was around his name feels a little too accurate

As usual w/ classical Greek sources I can find nothing

(this is the Anabasis Xenophon just to be clear)

I want to venture too far into modern politics, but I'm curious about whether the US faced similar problems to what we see all the time in developing democracies today. Were there oligarchs who were beyond the reach of contemporary law and who leveraged their wealth with impunity? Corrupt courts and other civil servants? Non-state actors with credible force of arms who governments had to appease? Hidden (or not-so-hidden) power brokers behind the scenes of the nation's governance?

I know that the king of Pergamon gave his kingdom to the Romans in his will because he had no sons, and that Tiberius Gracchus wanted to use the royal treasury of Pergamon to pay for the implementation of the land reform laws that had been passed but hadn't been funded, and that this was considered an outrage by the nobility because normally the lands and money would have gone to the senate to be divided amongst themselves, and that this was part of an escalating series of political crises that ended in the fall of the Roman Republic. Feel free to correct that if it's wrong, btw.

Anyway, I was listening to a podcast about that era, and it occurred to me that I've never heard anything about what the people of Pergamon thought about it. I know that it's extremely difficult to know what the common person thought about much of anything 2100+ years ago, but do we have at least a rough idea? Personally, I can't imagine being very happy about the idea of my country being bequeathed to the Romans in a will.

So I can't remember exactly how, but last night I stumbled upon the wikipedia page for the Dutch East India Company and was absolutely blown away by the sheer scale of the company. I knew it was a very large company and extremely profitable, but I had no idea that it was also the first publicly traded company and established many of the features of modern corporate finance.

I suppose my question is: do any of you have recommendations for books on the history of the VOC and how it was run, as well as its impact on the development of modern business and corporate finance in the West? I'm not a historian and have more of an interest in business and finance. Thanks!