This is something very strange I remember reading over a decade ago in an old popular scientific magazine. Basically what it said was that with the success of trading companies in the 17th century and the increasing understanding of the nature of the Solar System, plans were drawn up for a Moon program. It continued to talk about how neither oxygen nor the workings of gravity were known yet, so it was assumed you only needed to get a ship up about 30 kilometres and it would float the rest of the way to the Moon. The way this was going to be accomplished was through controlled gunpowder explosions driving large wings on the side of the ship. The plan was to go to the Moon and explore it/trade with the people there, and there were even plans to found a Moon Trading Company. From what I remember it talked about the plans being largely just ideas thrown around by a small group of people, but that they were starting to gain traction and were nearing the point of concrete plans when new scientific discoveries showed the plan to be completely unfeasible.

Obviously, this whole things sounds rather far-fetched, even if it just stuck to being ideas. I have done some research into the matter on the internet before, but have never been able to find anything mentioning it. So I wonder if anyone here has even the faintest clue what the magazine may have been talking about and whether there were actually ideas to go to the Moon in the 17th century.

I was thinking about this in the shower...it seems to me that a lot of technology is required to shower daily. You need water, hot water, running water, an available shower with the appropriate shower equipment installed or available, lots of things. In my country, showering is the main way that people clean their bodies. Every bathtub has a shower in it, pretty much, and there are showers that don't even need a bathtub...basically everyone has access to a shower. It can't have always been like this. How did this come to be so ubiquitous, and when?

Was it deemed of as enough of a failure for not securing one or two of five beaches to call off the operation and extract the men?

Eisenhower's prepared speech says he would've recalled the invasion if he deemed they failed to "gain a satisfactory foothold". What was the cutoff point for a satisfactory foothold?

From my understanding, aircraft carrier based naval warfare was a significant feature of WW2 in the Pacific. Were carriers also utilized in the war against Germany and Italy?

During all of my schooling the Aerican Revolutionary War is always taught from the perspective of those that supported the Revolution. I was wondering if any of you would be able to provide some interesting reads from the side of the Loyalists.

Specifically mentioning after the Great Fire to give the best chances.

Reading about how fast Islam spread, I've always wondered how much the lives of people in places like Alexandria, Damascus, Carthage, etc. changed after being taken over by the Umayyads. Of course under Islamic rule the religion would come into view, jizya would have to be paid, etc. But did the Caliphate itself develop its own civilization and culture in the same way that the Byzantines before and Abbasids after had their own secular customs and traditions? Or would the people in say, Alexandria, just carry on their lives, except with some mosques in the area, as if nothing had really changed?

Suppose I live in the Confederacy. I'm planning to travel (business or pleasure), and I say to myself, "Well, I've been to Richmond and Atlanta. How about New York City?!" What would have happened had he tried to cross a border and visit New York? Would he have been allowed to do so? Let's say he makes to to New York (or any Union city). Would he have been arrested just for being there?

1. Were there any plans regarding an invasion of Thailand? I know that with the Burma Campaign wrapping up, Operation Zipper/Mailfist/Tiderace were with regards to Southeast Asia, but what about Thailand?

2. How good were the Chinese forces in 1945? They won some battles against the Japanese, such as West Hubei and 2nd Guangxi. Is this due to Allied help/training or the Japanese being exhausted due to the veteran units sent to the Pacific, as well as losses from Operation Ichi-Go a year earlier?

I'm interested if we can use the story as a glimpse into the scientific culture of the 1860s and how the community at the time viewed the possibility of space travel.

Was Verne trying to base his novel in accurate physics/chemistry/astronomy of the time, or did he intentionally diverge from what was already known for the sake of the plot? In what ways was he, and the science he used as a foundation, later found to be accurate? Was the book popularly received as pure fantasy, or was there a hint of "someday this will be a reality"?

Thanks in advance.

To provide a little more detail than I could fit in the title:

To start off, I am aware of the tyrants, but that was a very different institution and they were not conceptualized as "kings"--in fact you could say the very definition of "tyrant" was non-regal one man rule. I also know there are a couple exceptions like Macedon, but they are really just barbarians anyway.

My question really came about with a comparison to Rome. In Roman mytho-history, there is a very clear narrative of heroic foundation followed by kingly rule, then overthrow of the kings followed by oligarchic rule with some institutional survivals. The Greeks cities as well follow many of these parts--they posses narratives of heroic foundations and kingly rule, and in historical times oligarchic rule with some institutional survivals, but none have a story of the overthrow of a king. I would love to be wrong on this point, but I have scoured Fowler, Gantz and other sources and found nothing. Just a general acknowledgement that, say, Thebes was once ruled by kings, and now it isn't, and no explanation of how one became the other.

So my question is twofold:

1. What happened to the titulature and institution of wanax and basileus? I assume something involving the social churn of end of the Mycenean period, but they seem to have left a very strong memory (and their appearance in Homer is striking, particularly if you follow Finley's argument that Homer is a description of Dark Age society).

2. Why do no Greek authors record the end of kingly rule? Why does this not become embedded into the common heritage of Greek poleis? It's maddening.

Is it a modern 20th century thing with the advent of rock music, or is there a historical precedent for it in classical music?

Movies like "Braveheart", "300" or even "Game of thrones" always show us two armies built up on two sides charging at each other. Were people really that less afraid to die that they'd just mindlessly storm ahead? What would the most realistic course of such battles look like?

Part of the Roman empire did extend into Africa, and I assume some Africans migrated to Italy or Spain or what have you. Was there a racist attitude towards black people? How were they perceived by most Romans?

The Vikings landed on what is now Canada ~500 years before Columbus but why didn't they return home and spread the word about this new land they discovered?