I have always been told that Heian-Kyo was built with references to the then Tang Dynasty's capital Chang'an, though I often did not see any supporting evidences following such claims. Looking at maps found online, they do share some resemblance in the squares and grids dividing the city, but that sort of layout is not exactly outlandish.

If such modelling did exist, was it an isolated incident only unique to Heian-Kyo, or was it something common during that period of time?

The vast difference in size and strength would surely result in them being killed?

Or perhaps swordsmanship would balance out the fight?

What was really expected of these young boys when it came to close quarter fighting?

Alternatively, am I misunderstanding the argument? It was mentioned while my professor discussed marriage among peasants in Reformation Europe.

So I was reading How Rome Fell by Adrian Goldsworthy when I came across this line, “Pertinax’s son, who had been too young and unimportant to be worth killing in 194, died now, because he could not resist making a pun referring to the murder of Geta.” (Goldsworthy 71) and stopped. Two questions really. First and obviously did this actually happened. And two what was the dreaded pun that earned Pertinax’s son his PUNishment.

In the 1500s the Spanish Tercios were some of the best organized, equipped, and disciplined soldiers in all of Europe. Truly a modern and capable fighting unit.

However they seemed to face a lot of struggles in the Thirty Years War, especially against Sweden. They seemed to lose relevance after that, until by the early 1700s they weren’t that formidable anymore.

What caused this gradual decline of the Tercio? Why couldn’t they modernize and keep with the times?

To clarify - I recognize the type of aircraft may affect the difficulty of return as well as the theatre. I'm mostly interested in the most unlikely of returns becoming successful, whether, however unlikely, that of a Japenese pilot somehow returning after being shot over Midway only to see their home carrier in flames, or that of a bomber pilot shot down carrying out Operation Chastise over German industrial heartland making it back across the Channel. A reconnaisance pilot going a few kilometers too far, or a close air support pilot landing in a forest just behind a frontline. What are their stories?

I can't quite find any successful return stories but I'm sure there must be some really interesting cases of avoiding enemies across hundreds of kilometers of land, and sometimes perhaps water that make for an interesting answer.

I'm writing this story that takes place in a world very inspired by the Roman Empire, and there's supposed to be a child of a father who's been out at war for a few years. Could something like that feasibly happen in Roman times? What would happen to the mother, or the kids?

It seems to me that, water purification not being what it is now until relatively recently, and ale, wine, mead, etc. being common drinks, is it unfair to look at historical decisions as being made largely by an upper / ruling class that was subsisting quite a bit on alcohol? Does this come into historical considerations at all?

I was just watching a series on Netflix which mentioned the Weißensee Cemetery in Berlin, a massive Jewish cemetery established in the late 1800s, and containing over 100,000 graves.

This is a huge plot (over 100 acres), and in prime position in Berlin. Why didn’t the Nazis destroy and repurpose this land, considering the other atrocities they committed?

i tested positive for covid this morning, and i’ve been thinking a lot about previous pandemics in my self isolation, how did they ever kill the viruses off?? especially the ones centuries ago when they thought it was a curse from god. like so many people lived so packed together and in such bad conditions, it’s insane that they managed to recover from things like the black death at all! like didn’t that virus in particular only last in england about 2 or 3 years? how is it that covid is probably going to last longer when we have far better knowledge of how to treat it?

I suppose I am wondering if the outcome/response to the Hiroshima/Nagasaki atomic bombings would have been the same had they been dropped in a remote nearby location instead. Would Japan have recognised the potential of the bombs and responded the same way?

I don't know if this is a question for HistoryWhatIf, but I am mostly wondering if it was considered essential to drop the bombs on those cities as opposed to less populated area.

In greeting/conversation, what title would Caesar's men and others have used for him? ? For example, Marc Antony would've been "General Antony" or the Latin equivalent of the time, I assume? So what would Caesar's respective title have been during his time in Gaul and prior?

So, I have read about this story on multiple occasions in a day-to-day-calendar called "Things not listed in encyclopedias" that's actually aimed at children, which I read while breakfast. However, no sources are given. Once, a German comedian told it too.

The story goes like this:

When Max Planck discovered the effects of quantum physics for which he later got a Nobel price, he traveled through Germany and gave public speeches about it. Cars were new back then and so -- lacking a driver license and a car -- he got a driver, who would sit in the audience, listening to his talk over and over again, until he knew everything by heart.

They figured out that nobody knew how Planck actually looked like, and started to play a joke where the driver would give the speech, while Planck himself would sit in the audience with the driver's cap.

The driver knew most things by heart and also most answers to the most common questions.

Once, when giving a talk in Munich, the driver was presented a question he never heard before and said "I would've never thought that someone from the University in Munich would ask such a trivial question. My driver can answer this."

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Does this story have any authenticity?

I find these concepts easy to grasp at an extremely superficial level, and then as follow-up questions are asked it becomes increasingly difficult to summarize and explain them.

There must be a textbook, monograph, book chapter, or journal article by a medieval historian that provides the best and clearest description of Feudalism and Manorialism.

Where should one go for this?

Just something that's always cropped up in my various readings is the fact that romanian is a romance language with some routes in Latin. Now I know about the 4th crusade that conquered the region and gave it the name Romania. However what's always puzzled me is that they were only there for one or two hundred years. Was that really enough time to ingrain latin into the local dialect so much or was there some other reason.

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Thanks

Lamarck is best known as the butt of biology class jokes for his theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics. Often his ideas are dismissed as obviously wrong based on the observation that animals that lost a leg in life still have offspring with four appendages. Lamarck would have observed this as well, so what were his actual views on evolution?