What books can someone here reccommend for a good unbiased review of WW1's major events and its overall effects?

I'm aware of the Great War series on youtube but it still hasn't concluded and is expected to go on till 2018.

I commonly use "Jesus Christ" as an interjection, but when I play D&D my DM playfully scolds me for using a swear that doesn't make sense in game. But "Saint Cuthbert" doesnt have the same weight. So I was wondering if the real life historical figure had a first name I could throw in there.

I'm coming at this from a Game of Thrones perspective (halfway through series 5 now so no spoilers please!)

It's actually incredibly frustrating to me when people excuse content by saying 'well it's based on Europe in the middle ages so showing rape of young teenagers is accurate'. No? Very few children were forced into marriages, particularly those that were consummated that early. Or when people excuse the portrayal of ethnic minorities (I feel that the Dothraki are portrayed as dark skinned sex and fighting obsessed clanspeople who are also slavers in a pretty racist way) by saying 'well that kind of reflects where world civilizations in similar geographies were 600 years ago' but don't point out that muslim armies (the 'eastern' civilisations that I assume the dothraki etc. are based on) apparently rarely raped women because Islam forbade it.

Perhaps this is a bit of a rant.

But I also see the point that GoT does portray violence (as opposed to glorious deaths) well, and might interest people to research more (lots of questions here)...

I don't know. On balance, how do people feel about the stereotypes being emphasised as much as small details of accuracy being corrected?

A theme I've seen pop up in the history of many African nations is that, after decolonization, a dictator eventually takes control of the country and keeps the country poor through bad leadership. One example of this being the dictator giving most of the industries to his cronies, who then run them purely for their own gain. Why did this happen for so many countries? Also, please correct me if this view is wrong/overly-simplistic.

I know that this question is incredibly difficult to pinpoint so (if this is allowed), I'm entirely open to personal opinions with evidence with citations.

I'd love to hear what a community of historians thinks caused Rome's transition from a republic to an autocracy with the outward facade of a republic to an outright empire.

For the full quote:

"the Russians were so thoroughly stood down, and we knew it. They didn't make any move. They did not increase their alert; they did not increase any flights, or their air defense posture. They didn't do a thing, they froze in place. We were never further from nuclear war than at the time of Cuba, never further."

Source is listed as: Kohn, R. H.; Harahan, J. P. (1988). "U.S. Strategic Air Power, 1948-1962: Excerpts from an Interview with Generals Curtis E. LeMay, Leon W. Johnson, David A. Burchinal, and Jack J. Catton". International Security 12 (4): 78–95.

In the middle ages, did soldiers pay for their equipment? Fantasy genres always show armies in uniform, such as the Tyrells and Lannisters and Starks in game of thrones, or Gondor in lord of the rings. I know that knights paid for their own equipment, but was this the case with levied infantry, men at arms, and a household guard? Thanks in advance for any information on the topic, it's something I've never found ANYTHING about.

A lot of people think that Ouija boards are a way to speak to the dead but I just learned it wasn't introduced until the late 1800's. Was it based off of something known earlier or just a ploy to sell a board game? And why was spiritualism so popular in the 19th century?

Where did the modern music genres we observe today like rock, pop, hip-hop, techno come from? I was wondering that they sound too different from European classical music so they must have another source of musical tradition.

I was reading about the Popes visit to Auschwitz on yahoo news and went down to the comments (dangerous area, I know). Someone anti gun control posted

"On the morning of November 10, 1938 the following decree appeared in newspapers throughout Germany: "Jews Forbidden to Possess Weapons - By Order of SS Reichsfuhrer Himmler Munich, November 10 [1938]........ Some anti gun control spiel).

Someone else responded "That was the day after a jew assassinated a German official".

Did that happen, was it really a false flag? I cant find details on it.

Thank you

I know that the traditional religion of the region is often animist in nature, but I would assume that over long periods of time, various settlements throughout the Pacific evolved and developed their own unique strands of belief. So basically, what do we know about how these divergent beliefs evolved, and do we know much about the core beliefs of the early peoples from which the various strains branched out from?

[Late Antiquity - Oceania - Mythology]

I know that most commanders were stringent followers of the Napoleonic model of large frontal assaults. After bloodbaths at places like Gettysburg and Chickamauga, did any of them ever take pause and contemplate new tactics in order to reduce casualties?

I was looking through local history and discovered that my hometown of Bloomington, IL used to have a great streetcar system. Now it has nothing of the sort. Bloomington isn't that big so I'm assuming that most medium and all large cities had streetcars and now only a handful of cities do. Even New York, the city with the highest percentage of commuters using public transportation, doesn't have any streetcars. What caused this huge shift in how Americans move around their cities?

From what I understand, Project Orion is the only project that could technically put all of humanity in space considering our actual technology (and was already possible in the 60's).

Was it ever decided to explore space using the nuclear propulsion developed by Project Orion ?