If I were to vote around 200-100 BCE for a consul in Rome, how many candidates would I have to choose from? How much time would be given for campaigning before and how much money/resources would be necessary to have a decent shot of securing consulship? Thanks!

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I realize this may be a tricky question because America's black slaveowners fall into two groups, the people who only owned one or two slaves and were sometimes even married to them, and the very wealthy, like William Ellison and C. Richards.

It seems that initially, the Catholic Church - and principally the Jesuits - were able to amass a substantial following of over 100,000 Christian converts in Japan, and of many different walks of life - from peasant to samurai. While I know that by the early 17th century the authorities viewed the new religion as a threat and moved to stamp it out, it seems that they didn't really care all that much early on.

Anyways though, my question is what motivations were there for Japanese converts to join the Church at that point? What did the Japanese authorities initially take such a "fine, whatever" view of things before shifting on it?

I stumbled upon this unsourced statement in the Wikipedia article on smallpox. Can anyone elaborate?

I'm Malaysian and in our history textbooks, the Ottoman sultan's call for a jihad was one of the main reasons for local insurrections against the British.

What was the global response to the call for jihad? Was it merely a symbolic action on the sultan's part? If there were responses, how effective were they?

I've been hankered for a long time to write a historical fiction story around Lepanto (such interesting characters involved!). I studied history at uni (my area was War and Imperialism) and I know the general histories of the Ottoman and Spanish empires (and the Holy League in general). I have a decent understanding of the military strategies involved in the battle, etc.

I was wondering if anyone could answer (or point to some good sources) for daily life in late 16th century Spain and Anatolia. I would also love to know some of the finer points of the military tactics involved, for example: what would the soldiers wear into combat? How did the ships communicate? How were the forces organized, etc?

Any help you can give is greatly appreciated!! I'm surprised, but I've struggled to find sources that go into any kind of depth.

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I think about how every solider is treated like they're Captain American in the modern United States regardless of whether or not you agree with the conflict they're fighting in. I wonder if the common English citizen felt that way about English soldiers when they were off invading India, fighting in the Opium Wars, the Anglo-Zulu War, and the Boer Wars.

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Now and then, we like to host 'Floating Features', periodic threads intended to allow for more open discussion that allows a multitude of possible answers from people of all sorts of backgrounds and levels of expertise.

The question of the most accurate historical fiction comes up quite often on AskHistorians.

This is not that thread.

Tell me, AskHistorians, what are your (not at all) guilty pleasures: your favorite books, TV shows, movies, webcomics about the past that clearly have all the cares in the world for maintaining historical accuracy? Does your love of history or a particular topic spring from one of these works? Do you find yourself recommending it to non-historians? Why or why not? Tell us what is so wonderfully inaccurate about it!

Dish!

Iran, Mesopotamia, Canaan and Egypt are all referred to as Ancient Near Eastern civilizations. Why the change?

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I remember being taught in school that the reasons why these two Abrahamic religions applied dietary laws was due. For example, pigs were prohibited because they eat important plants and carried parasites.

But, I felt like this was too easy of an answer to explain the origins of dietary laws in these two religions. Islam has a rule for slaughtering animals, but I can't see why any environmental reasons why this is necessary. Kosher rules in Judaism prohibit shellfish and the eating of milk and dairy together, and again, I don't think this theory applies.

Is there any evidence to support what I was told? Are there alternate theories for the origins of these dietary laws?

I was thinking about uniforms, as I commonly do, and wondered when the Prussians stopped using Prussian Blue uniforms as they and the British stopped using their colorful uniforms before the First World War yet France continued their glorious blue uniforms into the First World War. When did Prussia stop their Prussian Blue uniforms?