What would make someone want to become an executioner? What was pay like? Did executioners tend to be commoners or minor nobles? What sort of toll would this have on someone, physically, but more so mentally? Was suicide and extreme mental health problems common for executioners and are there any recorder cases?How long/to what age would someone stay in the profession? Was it a full time job?

A few days ago, I walked by a wild growing hedge of blackberries. It was about 10ft wide and higher than me, with long branches interwoven with other blackberries and some other plants growing in it. It would be impossible to walk trough it, even with protective clothing it would be too hard to untangle the branches and form a passage. It was also so dense that I couldn't imagine any animales larger than a cat finding large enough gaps between the branches.

This made me wonder if humans ever used thick hedges, especially thorn hedges, as a wall to defend their settlement. I remember reading in one of Tolkien's books, that one of the larger hobbit towns had an old and dense hedge as wall around it.

If this has been the case, where and when was it done and what plants were commonly used?

If this is more of an anthropological question, I'll repost it to /r/AskSocialScience.

He seems to be accurate and as un biased as he can on his Hardcore History podcast, but I was wondering what some actual experts thought of him.

If this doesn't belong here I apologize.

I'll try to expand this a bit for clarity.

Let's limit the question to before the migrational period. I'm thinking more along the lines of the Gauls sacking Rome, Boudicca, Vercingetorix, Arminius, that sort of era. I know Arminius had quite good organization, but he was trained by Rome, so I'm thinking more along the lines of how the native "barbarians" would have behaved in combat. I also know this is still a fairly long period in question, but I can't think of any way to neatly divide it further.

Maybe more specific questions could be attempted such as:

In battle, is there any indication that they had a command structure, and an ability for leadership to make large scale maneuvers to defeat an opponent, rather than just rely on sheer numbers to grind them away?

Is there any indication that they had the strategic and logistical capacity to wage campaigns over an extended period, and effectively manage supplies to sustain a large force?

I recognize that these could be very difficult questions to answer due to lack of sources, so even if they cannot be answered completely, I would appreciate if anyone attempted it to the best of their ability.

Thank you all.

Apologies if this seems counterfactual; I am not supposing a "what if" Europe did not have writing. Rather, I mean to ask if we only were able to use archaeological evidence how much of Europe's history would we be able piece together?

Hi so I'm asking this question for a history essay but am struggling to find historical sources to use or named historians opinions(both are required) I was wondering if any books with these could be commented or even the sources/interpretations themselves. I'm mainly focusing on late 1400s to early 1600s.

If the Roman sword was used for stabbing, why didnt they use a spear like the hoplites? Does it have something to do with balance?

I regularly see pictures of world leaders meeting during war time. For example there is one of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill meeting in Tehran, 1943. How dangerous was it for them to get to these locations? How did they travel? Was there any attempts to intersect leaders in transit, did any attempt get close to taking a leader down?

Looking at Romania's geographical location you would think it would be a slavic language but even though it's separated from other romance language countries and surrounded by slavic countries how did it stay a romance language without bordering influences completely altering the language?

In the 20th Century the Italians have a mockible reputation comparable to that of the French post World War 1. Italians are believed to have lost every battles they fought against the Allies and the Italian Army was considered so poor in quality that most of the troops that fought during the Italian campaigns were stated to be professional German soldiers, not Italains.

But the greatest shame to Italy (well at least according to popular History) is their war in Ethiopia back in the 1930s. The popular consensus is that the Italian Army was a mechanized force with the latest modern weaponry from tanks to machine guns to gas bombs and even Fighter planes.

That they should have wiped out the Ethopians who were mostly using spears as their prime weapons with only a few using outdated rifles.

However the popular view of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia is that the Italians despite being a modern force were literally losing the war and it took nearly 10 years to even stabilize the region. That the Ethiopians were seen as an inspiring force of a backwards army defeating a modern mechanized force.

Italian soldiers are thought in this campaign as ill-disciplined, poorly motivated, cowardly, and just plain unprofessional. In fact I remember reading in my World History textbook saying that the Italians committed atrocious war crimes such as bombing innocent towns, rounding up women and children and shooting them, plundering whole communities and enslaving the local inhabitants and raping the young girls and women, and even gassing up groups of Ethiopian civilians out of nowhere that were not involved in the rebellion.

In addition Ethiopians are seen in this war as cut out from any form of foreign support. No country not even the US had supply Ethiopia supplies and weapons or any other means of defending herself.

My World History textbook put a specific section show casing how the Italians violated the rules of war in this campagin.

Its not just this war that mentions such stuff-the Italian war in Libya according to popular History seems to repeat the same thing and indeed its shown perfectly in the classic film "The Lion of the Desert" starring Alec Guinness as the rebel of that insurgency, Omar Mukhtar.

I'm curious what was the truth? I find it impossible to believe an army of spearmen can destroy a modern mechanized army. Even if the Italians were cowardly and undisciplined, their modern arms is still more than enough to compensate for their lack of professionalism.

In addition, are the warcrimes as mentioned in my World History book and popular history portrays in the war-are they over-exaggerated and taken out of proportion?I seen claims of genocide in Ethiopia by the Italians!

More specifically, how did people get toys for their kids in the Soviet Union? I'd also like to know more about their toys in general, how they were made and distributed, what kinds of toys were available, gender differences, etc.

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Reading David McCullough's 1776, he offhandedly mentions that George Washington never asked the Continental Congress to supply cavalry. Do we have any other primary sources for this?

I'm simply curious.

I know they had the Varangian Guard but why were there no Orthodox monastic warrior orders?

So I was just looking at some of the most deadly wars on Wikipedia and noticed the Taiping Rebellion. Upon further inspection I learned it was 14 years long and (according to wikipedia) resulted in between 20-30 million deaths. Thus amount seems monumental. The rate of death would have to be insane(about 200 deaths per hour if you take the death toll as 25,000,000). How is this rate of death possible given that the Qing army only fielded 1,100,000 men? Also what was the impact on the local culture and demographics from losing all those men? Sorry if there are a lot of questions but really any insight on the topic would be fascinating, even if it's just scholarly sources that I can look into.

I've been reading a bit about Rasputin and everything I've found covers the things that he did and how the aristocracy and the rest of Russia reacted to it. But I can't seem to find anything on WHY he did it - did he have a scheme of some sorts to gain power and influence or did he just want to be famous and have as much sex as he possibly could? Or did he consider himself a holy man doing Gods work?

Evil genius or just lucking out befriending powerful people?

EDIT: Great replies, thanks!

After the disputes of the fifth century, how were 'Nestorians' viewed in the west? Within the eastern Roman empire, a lot of time was spent on the argument between Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians, but Christians in the post-Roman west largely did not have to deal with that - how did they characterise the Church of the East, and how accurate were their information given the distance between them?