Were Italy's trains regarded as bad by Italians before Mussolini seized control? Were they seen as proverbially unreliable elsewhere in Europe? Who was travelling on these trains anyway?

And I guess the other question - did Mussolini actually make the trains better, and if so, how?

[deleted]

GAME OF THRONES SEASON 6 EPISODE 10 THE WINDS OF WINTER SPOILER ALERT. So there seems to be a lot of confusion and disagreement over two of the last scenes in the final episode. In one Varys is in Dorne getting support from the Sand Snakes and Olenna Tyrell. Then 2 scenes later he is with Daenerys and her fleet with Dornish and Tyrell ships. The timing makes it seem that this is days apart but it must be at least a week or two, but some people are arguing that it is months. I don't think that's the case. Didn't it take Columbus something like 3 to 4 weeks to cross the Atlantic? And that was him traveling uncharted waters with no knowledge of the wind patterns or really any idea of where he was heading. Also just take a look at a map of Westeros and Essos and it's easy to see that the Narrow Sea is named so for one reason....it's very NARROW. In fact I bet it's no more than half the distance between North America and Europe across. Could someone with proper knowledge of these things help confirm or dispel my theory please?

I am visiting Bosnia and Herzegovina and learning more about the Bosnian War. Sarajevo was surrounded and sieged, but why didn't the Serbians just enter and take the city since there was no army, just civilians?

It seems in many ways the average urban Roman is not dissimilar to the average Urban American. The Romsns had grain doles, crowded apartments, vastly opposed political parties. Would it be incorrect to say that life was not so different then?

It was pretty surreal. Her argument was the high death toll is just capitalist propaganda and the death toll was no where near the 40+ million that is commonly agreed upon. I want to know if there's any truth to her claim.

To clarify, I'm talking about Slavic suffixes like -ev.

I am reading some old letters of my grandmother regarding the flight of the German population from Pomerania. Due to family ties, the escape was accompanied by military who at times used their assets to get their families rides in military vehicles and give them information regarding the current front lines and advances. I would like to know, if there were any military operations with the explicit goal to allow the evacuating civilians extra time to flee. Since I have the feeling that Hitler preferred that the refugees threw themselves against the Russians, I was wondering if there were any cases of officers acting on their own without direct orders from the high command.

Follow up question: The letters also describe Ukrainian farm workers begging my family to be allowed to flee with them. I am not sure what kind of Ukrainians those were. They were allowed on the trek but later detained by the police. Why were they detained? What happened to them?

He said that Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus, Eugene, Turenne, and Frederick were the greatest military minds in history, what criteria was he going by to assess their careers thusly? And what do military historians have to make of his list, are most in agreement that they are the greatest generals in history, or was he off the mark? Thanks!

Any time period or location welcome.

It looks like from his birth to his death he was writing at least one thing every year. However there seems to only one noticeable gap between:

The Anniversary of the Lena Massacre (February 1913)

The Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies (March 14, 1917)

Which is a huge four yeargap! Now this obviously coincided with the Russian Revolution and World War One but why would he stop writing just before World War 1 started instead of continuing to write about the war? And during the war wouldn't 'status updates' or something be important? So what was Stalin doing during this time which made it impossible to write when he managed under difficult circumstances before (and after) to publish at least something every year?

I don't mean what happened to those convicted at Nuremberg, I mean what happened to the thousands of ordinary people who bought the Nazi line and believed the party ideology about racial purity and all that? Did they resist? Did they fall in line? Did they quickly abandon their former ideology? Was there any post-ww2 conflict between them and their occupiers?

I'm specifically talking about the Carribean pirates during the Age of Sail here, although I guess answers pertaining to other pirate groups (e.g. Barbary coast pirates or Hanseatic league pirates) are also of interest.

My granddad served with the British Navy (radar operator) on the HMS Suffolk and was in the Arctic for some of it - what would they have been doing? I know they chased the Bismarck but what else? Am I correct in thinking some of this would have been in Nazi occupied/aligned territory? How dangerous was this? Is it likely that he would have had contact with Russians?

Thank you

I was wondering if anyone could direct me to either translations of French/Arabic sources or useful sources originally in English regarding the period leading up to and the beginning of the French Mandate of Syria. Or at least ways to find these sources because I've been trying and so far I've only been able to find relevant sources in Arabic and French.