I currently got Destiny Disrupted, The Story of Britain, The Iron Kingdom and A History of France from the Earliest Times to the Treaty of Versailles. Is there any other good recommendations?

I'm not sure if this is the right place for this question, but I recently finished Inside the Third Reich by Speer and it caused me to look more into Speer's work as an architect. I have found that many of his designs have been called garish and oversized. However, I wonder if this has more to do with his work being identified with Nazism rather than from an objective standpoint and I do think there is something to the idea of "ruin value" in architecture. Obviously, I'm not a Nazi, nor am I defending Speer's use of slave labor in his role as Minister of Armaments I'm just curious if there are any objective critiques of his work and if there are any defenders for it.

TL;DR: Moon has marias and craters - how did that fit into the idea of the celestial spheres being perfect bodies?

Full question:

In the geocentric model of cosmos, the earth was at the center with the celestial spheres - the moon, the sun and the planets - rotating in perfect circular orbits around the earth. Moreover, these celestial spheres were considered to be perfect bodies.

It's well known how people like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton contributed to the heliocentric model. One of Galileo's contributions was that he used the new telescope technology to observe how the sun had spots, which didn't make sense according to the idea that the celestial spheres were perfect bodies.

But what about the moon? If the moon was considered a perfect body in the age of the geocentric model, how did natural philosophers and scientists at the time explain its plains and craters which are clearly seen even without a telescope? I mean, even if you don't know they are plains and craters, you can see that the so-called perfect sphere isn't perfect. In other words, the moon appears to have spots.

Edit: added information about moon's marias (plains).

I asked this question in archeology, got no answers, so maybe that was the wrong subreddit. Anyone here know, or know a better subreddit for an answer?

I'm looking for help for a story I'm writing. The story is fiction, but I want to be reasonably accurate in how I present the issues with dating manuscripts in the 1920s. I only know a little bit about that: mostly that radiocarbon dating won't work because it wasn't invented until the 1940s.

I'm not planning to go into GREAT detail in describing how the archaeologist sorts out the ancient manuscripts from the modern, but I don't want to be an idiot about it, either.

To give you the background so you understand the problem as set forth in the story: the archaeologist goes on an expedition to West Africa in search of ancient manuscripts and artifacts. He finds a (fictional) city that was built around an important silver mine circa 500 BC.

As the city grew rich it supported a guild of scholars who made and copied manuscripts from all over the ancient world, in Greek, in Egyptian, in Roman (and some manuscripts from totally unknown sources ... this is a work of fiction). It wasn't the library of Alexandria, but it produced a lot of manuscripts. Later, during the Caliphate, Arab scholars copied the manuscripts and so there was an additional trove of ancient manuscripts.

When the Arabs got into burning ancient manuscripts later, the manuscripts were hidden by the city's apothecaries and medicine men, because an unfortunate belief grew up that the manuscripts had magical powers, and that by including a portion of a manuscript in a potion or poultice, it increased its magical power.

Fortunately, it was believed that even the tiniest portion of the manuscript had the magic of the whole manuscript, so very, very tiny pieces were used and not as many manuscripts were destroyed as would have been otherwise.

Even more fortunately, most apothecaries quickly realized that their illiterate customers couldn't tell an ancient manuscript from a modern one, so they took parchments and made their own ancient manuscripts, which was in fact the vast majority of the manuscripts used in potions by apothecaries by the time our archaeologist gets there.

Also fortunately, the manuscripts are stored deep in the old silver mine, where the cool, dry air preserves them. And some troves of manuscripts get lost down there.

Now, how does our archaeologist sort out the good manuscripts from the bad? Even some of the modern "fake" manuscripts might have historical value, as some might have been copied from Arabic copies of unknown ancient documents of real value.

How would our archaeologist have sorted this out? Any help will be appreciated.

I'm not quite sure if this is the right place but if it's not it'd be a great help to point me in the correct direction.

It seemed to make sense that primitive human beings would be far more mobile than we are today and thus posture would be much better. We often slouch in chairs today whereas it would make sense if most primitive humans squatted which is much more conducive to good mobility and a strong posture.

This one really confuses me, because I can't figure out how you'd be able to tell what note to start on. Did it just not matter? How did they decide how to tune their instruments? I can imagine that in ancient Greece they just tuned all the lyres to the flute, but what if there were two flutes? Would they be in key? And what about the 1700s? It seems that by then they were pretty serious about which note was which.

Hey all!

My grandparents recently passed within the past year and we found an interesting piece of paper in their bible. This bible has been passed down within our family for years, with all my relatives names listed. After the passing of a relative their name/birth/death is written within the Bible. The earliest entry has a birth date of 1803.

Within the pages we found what looks like a copy of the Declaration of Independence. It appears to be rather old and the texture does not feel like normal paper. My 92 year old great aunt also informed me we are related to Josiah Bartlett, a signer of the declaration.

Is this something of potential importance, or relatively common? Thanks!

Ancient naval battles are interesting to me but I don't know much. Were they fought far from the coast? Could the average sailor swim? Was it a common practice pull sailors out of the ocean?

In what measure did medieval Italians (the people, the patricians and the aristocracy) see themselves as Romans, or much like the Byzantine Empire and HRE see themselves as the direct continuation of the Roman Empire? Did this feelings vary between different groups of Italians such as those from Urbino, Roma and Venezia?

Edit - I meant in Europe specifically, but if someone has an interesting point about the topic elsewhere, please add to the discussion.

Hero developed ideas for a steam engine and a windwheel at the beginning of the Empire, but nothing came from them (to my knowledge).

Surely the Romans could see use for these automated engines; and Rome was still on its ascent around his time. Why did they not develop windmills or use his steam engine?

Aside from popular history, is there any solid evidence of this having occurred? What is the current consensus within the field?

Why did the roman testudo, obviously being the quality choice for it's inventors when faced with projectiles, not live to see a renaissance in the middle ages when longbows made an appearance and heavy infantry kept losing strategic value, seeing as they were nothing but slow moving targets for the armorpiercing longbows? Was is because shields could not easily be built to withstand such shots?

Could the reason primarily be the fact that the modern German state came to be in 1871, which is significantly later compared to the British or Dutch?

In other words. Why and when did someone have the feeling that something was too much even for a war ?

I know that the official government position was pro-British and the Irish Republican Army was designated as a terror group, I suspect that was informed by the importance of the "special relationship" (especially the close personal relationship between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) and the IRA's connections to the PLO, the ANC, Libya and the Soviets.

At the same time, the United States has a huge and influential Irish diaspora and it is alleged that prominent Irish American politicians on both sides of the partisan divide like Tip O'Neil (Democrat) and Peter King (Republican) more or less openly supported the IRA and much of the funding on the republican side came via organisations like NORAID in the United States.

Is there any polling data on the topic from the era?

This being the view:

"If anyone asserts the fabulous pre-existence of souls, and shall assert the monstrous restoration which follows from it: let him be anathema."