I have seen this quoted a couple of times around the interwebs and in the movie "The American Ruling Class," but frankly it sounds a little too convenient to me. The oldest reference I am finding is from a book called "Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America," but I do not have access to that book to view the citation. Was hoping one of the pro's here had a better Library than my own.

So, in medieval warfare, I know that most sieges ended because the enemy was circled and starved them out, but was this the case all the time? How would an attacking force attack an enemy castle directly?

Moreover, what would be the difference in use of a siege tower versus a catapult or trebuchet.

Gregory of Nyssa (335 – c. 395) has a passage describing these discussions in Constantinople.

The whole city is full of it, the squares, the market places, the cross-roads, the alleyways; old-clothes men, money changers, food sellers: they are all busy arguing. If you ask someone to give you change, he philosophizes about the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you inquire about the price of a loaf of bread, you are told by way of reply that the Father is greater and the Son inferior; if you ask “Is my bath ready?” the attendant answers that the Son was made out of nothing

To what extent can this be taken to be the case across the Empire? Are there any other reports of this kind of popular discussion? How did it vary? Why were these seemingly obscure discussions important to common people?

It couldn't be cocaine or snuff because these were both new world plants that would not have made it to China by the 13th century, right? Is this just a gaffe on the part of the producers or is there some other kind of drug that Mongol emperors might have taken nasally?

Topics like the early CIA operations like Mongoose, Bay of Pigs, SOG in Vietnam, etc. I'm struggling to find books on these subjects. Any help wood would be great.

In my reading of history, people from prominent families in New York, Boston, and other areas of the country figure very prominently from the American revolution to about the 1920s. For example, the Lodge, Shaw, Adams, and Peabody families (to name a few).

After that point, it seems far more rare to see influential players who come from these families. Did they die out? Did wealth spread so thinly through the generations that they lost their influence? Did the Great Depression remove their significance?

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So, in the English series, Downton Abbey, it's stated that many aristocratic families went bankrupt in England, because they were too shortsighted to modernize their estates/holdings. Was this a common thing?

I just read an article on Cracked.com (this highly trustworthy and well-researched comedy site that specializes in clickbait articles) about archaeologists discovering tobacco in a large number of Egyptian mummies, which they are unable to dismiss as contamination because there are so many cases. This suggests that tobacco existed in the ancient world before the Columbian Exchange. So maybe prehistoric humans brought tobacco back to Asia across the Bering land bridge. And then it went extinct, but not before the ancient Egyptians had a taste of it. If this hypothesis is true, we should be finding tobacco in archaeological sites across Eurasia, like say in the tomb of a Chinese king. Is there any evidence?

Did he burn it down or seek any revenge on the school?

Let's say that either the Democratic or Republican party, at some point in the future, stops existing in its current form (for whatever reason). Has there been, in American history, anything that would be similar to that? Where a political party of that size just imploded? What happened? Were there other parties vying to fill the political vacuum? How did one of the parties eventually end up filling that vacuum? How long did that void last? If the party imploded into multiple factions did one of the factions end up filling the vacuum, or was it some third party that was previously on the fringes?

Note: I'm not trying to get anybody talking about modern politics, I just used Democrat and Republican because I'm wondering if a party of that scale (where there were basically no feasible alternatives) has ever collapsed.

From what I understand, most countries in Europe had a monarchy. Today they are all democracies, but the UK still has a monarch. Why is that? How was the UK different? What happened to the other countries?

Hi, historian friends!

I've been reading many historical texts related to the Scientific Revolution. I know that we are deeply indebted to surviving letters written by crucial figures (Galileo is an example that comes to mind) to understand how they lived, thought, and advanced their ideas. I'm aware that modern postal services didn't really exist, but I'm not really sure beyond that how correspondence worked at that time.

• How do we have these letters at all? Would it be a question of relying on all of these persons' correspondents to preserve their letters, and later for them all to be collected for historians?
• How were they sent and received?
• Was it known that they would be read in route?
• Were letters with sensitive content subject to being transmitted by special means?
• What form did these letters take? (Were they rolled up pieces of paper? Placed in envelopes of some sort?)
  • How were letters formatted? I know some of Newton's letters had titles, for example. Was he just writing out papers and sending them as letters?
• What form did addresses consist of?
• What happened to letters which got lost, or whose intended recipients had died or moved? Were they returned?
• Where are these letters now, generally speaking, if they survive?

I know that's an awful lot, so I'd also accept a respected historical text on the subject that could fill in things. And thanks a lot in advance for your time!

(This is a repost from a couple of days ago, as that submission attracted no votes or comments. Hoping this is timed better for a good response.)

And for what religious or cultural reasons - if any?

Was it leadership style? Unwillingness in France to fight another major war? The failure of the Maginot line?

It seems like a fairly common outcome for a democracy to at some point have a coup, so why hasn't the US? Or is that what the US civil war started as, an attempted coup that became a war? I remember reading somewhere that after the election of 1800 when Jefferson was about to take over, there were many who feared it might turn bloody and breathed a sigh of relief when it was peaceful. Sorry if this is off base, I'm not nearly as knowledgeable about the relationships between a country's military and it's civilian government.