Edit: Some motivation for this question. There seems to be many answers concerning the "outwards" influence, i.e. reasons for the Roman imperialism. I am more concerned with influence in the other direction, namely how the expansion affected Roman society.

The text in question:

It is worth noting that the construction of both Harvard and Yale was assisted by lotteries, and that a scheme to help finance the Continental Congress in 1776 by means of a country-wide lottery was abandoned only because of the difficulty of selling tickets at that troubled time.

Luc Sante - Low Life: Lures & Snares of Old New York, 1992

How accurate would this be, seeing as he predates the rise of Christianity by at least 300 years? The exact quote from the song is "Hellenism he spread far and wide/The macedonian learned mind/Their culture was a western way of life/He paved the way for Christianity".

Hello, for my year 11 Modern History class we have been tasked with writing an essay on a specific aspect of nazi Germany. I have chosen their use of propaganda and other means of controlling the masses, but firstly we must create one main research question and 4 sub focus questions. For the first focus question, I'm trying to create a question that in a sense says, How did his early life effect and mold the way he operates as a leader and the methods he used. But im not sure how to say that any better. Any help, or further input would be muchly appreciated. (Other focus question ideas would also be greatly appreciated) Thankyou all!

We've all seen the photographs of the dictator Hitler watching his massive Military Parade in Berlin April 20, 1939. But where in Berlin was this? I have a accurate map of Berlin at that time and I want to be able to pin point this.

Ok, that's a mouthful of a title, so to be more specific:

I've been reading a ton on World War I, and just finished I Was a Spy, the story of the life of Marthe Cnockaert, a Belgian spy during WWI. Wikipedia claims it was ghost-written by her husband. I kind of mentally split passages from the book into three categories:

1. Much of the book is very in line with what I've read about areas under German occupation - the gradual reduction in supplies followed by Ersatz replacements, the shifts in tone in German propaganda throughout the war, a thriving black market, field hospital work, fear of and violent response to perceived civilian snipers, etc.

2. Other parts of the book play out like a thriller - dynamite, bombings, numerous close calls with sexual assault, boozing up soldiers to extract secrets, conniving German chemists mixing up chlorine gas, trap doors, people being knocked out with chloroform, forgotten tunnels, coded messages, seeing the Kaiser in person, timely arrival of costumed allies, and the like. All of these things and more definitely did happen to various persons throughout the war, but (I would assume) rarely all to the same person.

3. Even more confusingly, some parts play out almost exactly like British and French propaganda pieces. A baby is impaled on a bayonette; the conscripted but pure Alsatian soldier just wants to become a priest; all "Tommies" are inevitably rough around the edges but good-humored, good-natured, and feisty; most Germans are "cadaverous," scheming, vain, and/or violent; etc.

Category 1 I'm fine with - it's another individual's personal view on experiences that affected millions that are absolutely verifiable.

Categories 2 and 3 I'm conflicted about. Some of it seems spiced up for the reading audience: It's certainly a fun read, but possibly experiences from other spies were included or portions were fabricated entirely. On the other hand, some of it seems sanitized for print - again, it seems unlikely that a young woman in her 20s in an occupied country would repeatedly evade sexual assault despite frequently being locked in rooms with licentious German soldiers in varying states of intoxication.

What's a good historian (or just someone who wants to think critically about historical topics) to do with a source like this? A good bit of me just wants to say her husband wanted to write a spy novel and used his wife's name to make a buck. On the other hand, Marthe Cnockaert lived through an extraordinary period in human history, so some extraordinary events are bound to have happened. I don't just want to pass it off with a "the text was just appealing to prejudices and expectations of the time," either.

I feel like there are more nuanced ways of reading a text like this. Any historians care to help? Thanks for reading this!

I am interested to know, since I'm not much of an expert in he history or cultural norms of Tsarists Russia, did the Imperial Russian Army have high ranking officers (on the level of Colonel, General, Major General) that were say Jews or other minority groups in Russia?

In 107BC Gaius Marius instigated a series of reforms to the structure of the Roman army that, among other things, shifted the allegiance of soldiers towards their generals as apposed to Rome itself. This is widely accepted by modern historians as being a contributing factor to the frequent civil wars that brought an end to the republic, but I cannot find any reference to this dimension of the reforms in the works of ancient Roman Historians. Did they never consider the potentially destabilising effect of the reforms?

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I ask this because the history of places like Kashmir and Tibet have far-reaching impact on the political situation in the modern world. Depending upon the way one construes such events, biases may form and narratives may be spun, all of which will impact a nation's view of itself or it's reputation worldwide.

For example, France is often mocked by people for being conquered by Germany quite so easily in the Second World War. But there was significant opposition, and they were instrumental in helping the allies. I feel this gets glossed over in history.

Or, for another example, India and its internment of ethnic Chinese people in 1962. This barely gets mentioned, not even in Indian history text books.

It's possible, therefore, for popular history to diverge very widely from what actually happened.

I know there is resistance here to historical revisionism. Nazi sympathisers, for example, get no say here, which is clearly right. But say the issue gets slightly different -- say a historian says that China has a rightful claim to Tibet because it was part of the Qing dynasty.

How can I, as a lay person, evaluate this comment to be true or false? How can I tell a proper historian from a Jared Diamond? Are there clues I ought to look out for, certain schools for certain fields that are considered definitive sources, or something of the sort?

I trust the contributors here. They're great. But still, as a rule, how can I know something I'm learning is true and not a fiction?

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Not sure if this is the right place to ask this but, my father and I are watching at TV show about violence in Chicago and I'm trying to tell him that I believe that, The Italian Mob of the 1920s has had a direct impact on modern day gangs in Chicago. Is there any correlation or proof to any of this? Thanks in advance!

A lot of questions arent very serious, like the hot blooded male ones recently as a prominent example. Given the academic goal of this subreddit, it seems at odds to not focus on questions and topics more similar to what someone would study at university. The reason I care is because this is a nice sub with nice users and nice mods but I feel the potential is being wasted when looking seriously into gimmicky questions asked on a lark.

This might be a really stupid question, but did people have good ideas of what it looked like? Not just the colors nor the shape, but like mapping and the like. Did they have the continents down? What really helped them get an idea of its look before space travel? That is stupid, I mean like how did they get a spot on precise idea of the earth on maps and stuff before looking from space

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I've noticed a somewhat common viewpoint lately saying that the USSR was about to invade Japan, and that the US was forced to use the atomic bomb to force Japanese surrender before this could happen.

Is there any credibility to this whatsoever? It is my understanding that the USSR lacked the naval capacity to support such an invasion, and that only the US Navy could have done so at the time. Furthermore, although the Pacific War had been all but decided at this point, the Japanese home islands were still heavily defended and could have repelled a poorly supported Soviet attack.

It seems like people are conflating the Soviet invasion of Manchuria/attack on Hokkaido with an outright invasion of Japan proper, but it seems to me that this would have been a historical impossibility considering that the Soviets had basically no way of crossing the ocean in sufficient force.

How did healthcare work back then?