I heard this in Stephen Pinker's book "The Blank Slate"

When did humans start naming each other, and what were some of the earliest names?

Your 50s haircare professional is a barber, which are stereotypically male. Nowadays, hairstylists are stereotypically female. When and why did this transition occur?

John Young"

At graduation, my strong first choice was to get into Flight Test. When asked what exactly I wanted to investigate in Flight Test, I told them I wanted to look into the problem of the “burble” that went along with carrier operations. Behind the superstructure of every carrier existed a nasty “burble” of turbulent airflow. The oscillations affected an aircraft’s handling qualities and pilot workload significantly during approach and landing— so much so that the burble had killed a lot of naval aviators. One of my final reports in test pilot school dealt with the problem. I wrote that the “burble” was made much worse when a skipper of a carrier didn’t keep the wind coming down suitably across the landing deck. The problem needed to be reckoned with.

But when I asked for pertinent data on the burble, I was told that burbles were classified information for each ship. Apparently someone didn’t think I needed to be looking into the problem because, instead of getting sent to Flight Test, I got assigned to the last choice on my list, Armament Test. To this day, the burble created at the aft ends of aircraft carriers still plagues the navy.

I was reading on Wikipedia about Akbar and his reign over Mughal and learned of Dīn-i Ilāhī. The Wikipedia page is brief and the religion is very intriguing to me.

Did people willingly convert? Was it a genuine religion or merely an idea on the part of Akbar and his "cabinet"? Did it survive past his reign? Was it influential to India's subsequent religious or political history?

Any information is greatly appreciated!

The Battle of Stalingrad was the turning point of the war on the Eastern Front, but why did the Russians care about it so much? Shouldn't they have cared more about Moscow, their capital? Also, how did the Soviets win at Moscow if Stalingrad was more eastern than Moscow? Wouldn't that mean the Germans pushed through Moscow?

I am a huge history buff, especially American History. I want to start reading more books about history. What would everyone say the top 5 American History books are?

So I recently found out that the Southern states started seceding more-or-less right after Lincoln's election. As I've heard it, the mere fact that Lincoln won the election was enough to push them over the edge.

So why was Lincoln such a boogeyman, and how was the South expressing those concerns before the election? What was the political situation in the U.S. in early 1860?

I've been watching The Last Kingdom, a historical fiction TV show about the conflict between the Danish invaders of England and the surviving Anglo Saxon rulers (particularly King Alfred of Wessex). The series has a lot of great action and actors, but leaves me with some questions.

Since the Normans were scheduled to invade the island in 1066 and impose a more Salic structure, what is the lasting legacy, in terms of culture and tradition, that the Saxons imparted to England between the late 800s and 1066? It doesn't seem very long. Why does it matter that the Danes were expelled?

My boyfriend and I were discussing this. He says it would have been too expensive, I said that I doubted both Night and Maus would have lied.

As an armchair historian, my educated guess is that it has to do largely with British influence and occupation in the Middle East, Far East, and India. But in an imperial society like Britain's was/is, how did a foreign "delicacy" became a staple of the nation doing the colonizing? How did tea become standard in the United Kingdom?

Consequently, in reference to the second question, I happened to be watching Series 2, Episode 2 of BBC's Sherlock and overheard several references to fixing coffee. In the U.S. at least, coffee is the typical drink and social convention. To what degree is coffee a staple in British society? Is it competing or replacing tea to any degree?

In the opening scene of Marco Polo season 2, they have cages full of songbirds, and hand one to a child. After a moment they light something attached to the songbird and let it go- only to light the bottoms of the cages and release all the other birds, strings tied the same way. Within minutes the city is on fire. While this seems like a great idea in theory, I'm not certain about it truly working that well- any evidence that was an actual tactic employee, not just by the Mongols but by anyone and not just Hollywood idealism?

Obviously nowadays we have the comparative method and source analysis to look at the relations between Jewish, Christian, Islamic and so forth texts. Prior to its invention/discovery, and prior to the acceptance of common literary sources for the Bible and so forth, what was the general perspective on the relationship between, say, the Torah and the Old Testament, or between the gospels? Was there an official church position from any of these religions? Were any factors like similarities to Babylonian religious stories known, and how were they viewed?

Follow up questions: Did humans have better memories "back in the day"? My parents generation was forced to memorise long passages during school (Shakespeare etc)... are the techniques they used similar to the ones the ancients would have used? Are the script memorisation techniques used by actors today similar to what was practised historically?

I've been reading a lot about the Barbarian Migrations/Invasions, but most books on the topic seem to go very in-depth with the scholarly arguments without giving an overview, and I'm having trouble putting it all together. Wikipedia breaks it down into two major waves, but I'm looking for something more detailed. Could someone give me a blow-by-blow account of what went down, or recommend a source that does? Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I'm interested in the kinds of defenses and fortifications the Romans would have had in the eastern empire during the between the years 40 B.C. and 9 A.D. I've read of the Romans having a presence in Pannonia, and also having a continued conflict with the Persians(in this case the Parthian Empire). Specifically, I'm wondering what their contact with the peoples at these borders were, how frequently they were forced to defend them, and how they did so. Was their stance offensive, or defensive? Would the Legions have been sent to act preemptively, or hold up at the border to prevent incursion? Did they ever erect fortifications along the lines of the Hadrian or Antonine Walls(or perhaps, for a Greek bent, the supposed Gates of Alexander)? Was it only forts and regular patrols? None of these?

I'm interested as I'm attempting to write a quasi-historical novel set during the time period. One of the characters is both a veteran of the border conflicts, becomes involved in another with a new group of characters as the book progresses. While the events portrayed are not meant to be totally historically accurate(if at all accurate), I'd like my supporting information for the setting, and background, to be as respectful to history as possible. The topic also interests me in-general, I have not read much of incursions into Rome beyond those of the civil wars, the northern rebellions, and the Hunnic invasion much later, so it would be nice to hear if any such concerns/conflicts existed at the time, and how the empire dealt with them at a caligae-on-the-ground level.

Additionally, how effective were those reforms, and how much can we ascribe Greek success to Serbian/Bulgarian assistance, as well as any ways in which the quality of the Ottoman military deteriorated in that period too?

[1900s - Southern Europe - Military Life]