The Netherlands seems like a very similar country to Britain, so why is it that it seems they were so oppressive as colonialists relative to the English? Thinking mostly Indonesia vs Malaysia, and British South Africa vs Apartheid South Africa. Is it related to the Netherlands having more continental threats?

If 1 day ride was x miles, was 1 week ride 7x the distance or did they ride 1 day and rest the next?

Compared to Roman times did the distance change greatly?

For example, Henry VIII had hundreds of people killed for treason, most famously some of his wives and ministers. Likewise, his daughter Mary also had hundreds of protestants burned at stake for heresy.

Were the monarchs able to accuse anybody of crimes and expect them to be executed? Or did they had trials? If so, how much could they influence them?

Hergé was not French, he was Francophone Belgian, and it was Belgian authorities that attacked him as a collaborator. Oops... srry.

This is something I had previously taken for granted as an established fact about Hallowe'en: that it was on the same date as a Celtic pagan festival called Samhain and that a lot of our modern Hallowe'en traditions (like jack o' lanterns, costumes, trick or treating etc.) were inherited from this older holiday. This seemed to make perfect sense until I found out that most of these traditions are either modern or medieval in origin. Which made me wonder, what (if anything) do we actually know about Samhain and does it have any connection at all to the modern holiday of Hallowe'en?

As I hope we're all aware, there was (and is!) a great deal of pseudoscience utilized in service of white supremacist narratives. This kind of thought experienced a flourishing in the United States in particular during the 19th century due in large part to the growing controversy over chattel slavery. Many modern racist ideas draw their framework and reasoning from ideas popularized at this time.

I was thinking about the slave-owner Calvin Candie from Django Unchained. A large and interesting part of his character deals with how he clings to racist pseudoscience in order to justify his atrocities to himself. He considers himself an intelligent and sophisticated man, and so requires a fig leaf of pseudoscientific legitimacy to lull his atrophied conscience to sleep.

Of course it was all ludicrous and not based on actual observable facts. Which begs the question: where did it all come from? Where did the men Candie is based on get all of this racist psuedoscientific information from? Were there think tanks generating this kind of stuff? Did people actually hold massively slanted experiments to try to prove racist ideology true? Were there prominent figures producing a lot of work in this field? Were archaeological findings twisted to fit the racist narrative? Where and how did they manufacture this erroneous proof?

What did the treaty of Versailles do to the Middle East compared to the Sykes-picot agreement? I hear that they both partitioned the Middle East and gave it to France and Brittan, but how could both treaties do that? When one searches google for "what did the treaty of Versailles do to the middle east" you get " The two countries decided to divide the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire between them" but when you replace treaty of Versailles with Sykes-picot agreement you get basically the same thing, so my question is what did they do different? did anything happen during the time of the treaty and the agreement to allow for the middle east to get partitioned for a second time? what am i not understanding about the two agreements? I know the Sykes picot agreement happened in 1916 and the treaty in 1919 but did one of the them divide the middle east in a different way compared to the other, or is google getting them mixed up with an end, post WWI, result?

Is it?

Christopher Hitchens, among others, has claimed that Joseph Goebbels was excommunicated from the Catholic Church, not for his NSDAP activities, but for his interfaith marriage with a Protestant woman.

However, in several Catholic publications, I read that many Nazis, including Goebbels, were excommunicated from the Catholic Church for their various crimes against the church and humanity during the NSDAP regime.

Was Joseph Goebbels excommunicated from the Catholic Church? Was it for marrying a Protestant?

I'm currently researching alternate attendance in the Tokugawa period and essentially I have been trying to establish the meaning of article 9 in the 1615 Buke Shohatto.

There seems to be conflicting views on whether the correct interpretation of the article concerns the daimyo's travel to Kyoto or to Edo and, more broadly, whether or not this article should be viewed as evidence for the initial codification of alternate attendance.

Unfortunately I am not able to read Japanese so I am reliant on translations of the text which differ in their interpretations...

Thanks in advance

I'm wondering if, at the Last Supper, when Jesus said "take and eat, this is my body; take and drink, this is my blood," was that an idea his disciples would have somehow recognized from another tradition? Was it something completely new and revolutionary for a Jewish person in that geographic region to say? Is there somewhere that Jesus (or the authors of the gospels) might have gotten the idea from?

I understand that sources like Plutarch emphasise the uniqueness of Sparta in its educational and social organisation, with them supposedly being geared towards creating a professional class of soldiers. But in practice during the archaic period (8th to early 5th century) did Sparta actually engage in more aggressive wars or warmongering than other Archaic Greek city-states? and do we know whether Spartan society was actually designed to create the perfect soldier class for warfare, or were they concerned with other end goals such as controlling internal conflict or some idea of eugenics and physical health?