I've noticed that when it comes to the conquests of the Mongols, Berbers, and Ottoman Empire, there seems to be a stop west of the Aegean sea. I've heard that sicily and Italy has been invaded a few times, and Russia is questionably European so WW2, but I can't think of any ancient or modern superpower sacking France or England that wasn't bordering those countries. Is there a reason why for this?

It seems that every picture of Berlin in 1945 shows a scene of complete and utter destruction. How did civilians lead their daily lives during this time? Did people carry on doing their jobs/going to school or was "normal" life essentially put on hold?

I was reading about Vinland and the Norse Colonisation of Greenland, when I began to wonder: If the "Vikings" could make it to America, however briefly, and get to places like Byzantium in the East, did they go any further? I understand this is rather difficult, as sometimes the existence of artefacts of a particular culture in a region might just denote a sophisticated trade route, and Artefacts from Point A could reach Point C through Point B, without anyone from Point A actually seeing Point C. So my question is what is the furthest distance that we know of that a Norseman travelled from Scandinavia in the Viking Age, through written accounts preferably?

I'm aware that Viking suggests raiding. What I mean by Viking is simply anyone from Scandinavia pre-1100, including traders and explorers, although there was a lot of overlap between raiding, trading and exploring.

Little shower questions

The motto of the CSA was 'Deo Vindice' and the idea of God's Providence protecting the south shows up a lot on diaries and letters, but did any Confederates decide that defeat was the result of divine judgment?

I searched on /r/AskHistorians and Google, but couldn't really find anything on this, so hopefully this question is good to go.

I love steak and beef roasts (as do many other people), and medium rare, more or less, is the preferred temperature, or doneness, that many people including myself eat their beef (or tuna, or deer, or duck, and so forth).

However, where did that line of cooking and thinking come from? I guess intuitively it tastes better and it's more tender, but that can be subjective and depending on each individual's own tastes and palate. I also consider back in the day, where perhaps there was a knowledge of cooking raw meats killed off bacteria, and to make sure food-brone sickness were to be keep to a minimum via cooking with fire, so we simply decided before to cook stuff all the way through, until one day someone decided to not cook their cattle roast all the way through, and then slowly and gradually more people started to eat their meats at lower temperatures.

The jist of the question would be if we always liked our foods that way, or if we grew accustomed to it.

Although Germany managed to make 20 A7Vs by the end of the war, when looking at WW1 tank development I keep noticing the occasional image of captured tanks with the Iron cross on the side, being used in some basic function like knocking down trees or being tested in some other way.

I can't find any sources or good information and wondered to what extent did Germany do with these captured tanks over the course of the war, were they used in combat or saw any kind of action?

I mean the model of a league with a fixed number of teams who get neither relegated nor promoted, while player entry is mediated by a draft system.

How did this come to be? Why didn't American sports end up like European association football?

I recently heard someone talk about how we have really had six world wars, not two. According to this person, the thirty years war, the war of the Spanish succession, the seven years war, and the Napoleonic wars should all be considered world wars. Is there any merit to this idea? By what criteria were these wars similar to the world wars, and in what ways weren't they?

[deleted]

I've seen a few myths from first nationd that have dogs, but did they ever adopt cats?

It seems as if they are identical and just divided by different eras. Am I wrong or are there some differences in their philosophies?

Foreword: I'm kind obsessed with naming convention, especially after being introduced to CK2 (and flipping table when my Zoroastrian Persian relatives names his firstborn Muhammad). After researching a bit, I realized that early Roman martyrs would be indifferently named after their praenomen, nomen, or cognomen/agnomen. And so I wonder I much has that participated in the slow abandonment of the trianomia to the nomen+cognomen structure with increasingly individual cognomen? And how the Christian faith has influenced in those first centuries the naming process of Roman people?

I suppose this question could extend to other languages that weren't replaced with Arabic, such as Urdu, but I felt Egypt and Persia would be a more direct comparison to ask about

This text is something I found from a yahoo answers:

In WW2 Jewish elders (always male) were placed in charge of the other Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps. They were called "Judenrats" (Jewish counsilmen).

It was the Judenrats' job to do head counts and make sure orders by the SS of the prisoners were carried out. These orders cold include personally beating other prisoners and worse. But these Jewish counsilmen often were assigned the ghastly duty of choosing which of their fellow Jews would be executed. If they refused to choose, one of the SS soldiers would simply kill everyone.

Often a Judenrat would choose the eldest first, then those who were ill or handicapped. And on it went, with him generally sparing the youngest for last.

Occasionally a woman would become pregnant, defying all odds (starving women generally can't carry children, let alone give birth). If the Judenrat discovered her pregnancy prior to soldiers finding out, the rumor was he often performed an expedient form of murder to ensure the mother's life was spared. The mother would deliver her child and he would slit the child's throat immediately.

The Judenrats' rationale was that the crying of the baby would cause both the mother AND the child to be slaughtered by the SS. And so these men chose murdering babies for the long-term goal of saving as many Jews as possible. The newborn children unwittingly became a casualty in the war for ethnic survival. This was a choice. It could be argued as morally right or morally wrong. But the one thing that seemed true is the voluntary killings were likely born of an impulse toward life expediency; an attempt at the survival of the group over the individual.

Whether there was Homer really? Or the writer Homer was just a legend from the people, and the Iliad was written by another person? Please answer me this question.

It isn't like the only tribe that migrated to England were the Angles so why was it that the name of the country came from them?

This is probably dragging up a much-rehashed topic, but I get into arguments about this what seems like all the time, and am beginning to suspect that I may be in the wrong.

I was taught all through secondary school that one should always refer to Germans as just that, rather than Nazis, for to distinguish between Germans and Nazis ignores the total domination of the Nazi party over the entirety of German state and society, especially in the period 1938-1945.

Furthermore, I have heard it expressed that it is good and proper to say "German" instead of "Nazi" wherever possible because otherwise the Germans of today will think that they are somehow not responsible in full for the crimes of their ancestors. This attitude is potentially problematic.

However, it's come to my attention that this attitude towards issues of German complicity is considered rather too inclusive by the standards of current popular opinion.

What's the current scholarly consensus on the correct nomenclature to use? I have my own opinions on the subject, but would like to hear from other points of view.

Did any people 'come out'? Did they live as another gender than they were assigned at birth? How often did this happen? Do we have records of this? Would these people have been shunned, accepted, or just seen as village idiots? Also: do we have any records of anybody living as or feeling as neither male nor female, aside from the intersexed? Considering at least 0.7% of people today do not identify as their assigned gender, this must have all happened often.

They got more than half way there, why didn't they make contact with Native Americans?

I've heard theories saying his name translates into something holy and that Christopher Columbus is a mythical figure centered around a random missionary in Anerica that spread religion for the church. It is proven that his mission was a holy one funded by the church to spread Christianity. But is there actual factual proof of him living. Know one truly knows where he was born or where he died. His remains are debated for who has the actual right and correct remains. But it just seems fishy because there are no historical records. Could he just be the church's Uncle Sam that was a figure for an ideology so maybe missionaries were called Columbus for popularity and propaganda purposes?

Okay, so I know that Vulgar Latin was spoken by probably everyone and Classical Latin was written by the small educated class, but how did for example if rules or news was to be spread all around the empire, how did the soldiers or whoever administered it communicate with the peasants? Sorry if this comes off as stupid or obvious but if "Vulgar Latin" wasn't standardized and most likely varied from place to place and if only Classical Latin was used for writing, how did those people potentially memorize all the rules, grammar structure, vocab, etc of the Latin they were speaking? How did they talk to each other and understand each other each time if the very language they spoke was not set in stone, apparently rarely written down and varied in each part due to the native tongues of the people messing up the language, etc?

EDIT: Considering how apparently some texts/graffiti have apparently found, is it possible that some people did know how to write something akin to it but it was just never standardized and made official like it is today?