A couple follow up questions:

1.) I'm assuming spoken language first grew because of its utility in communicating danger, the presence of prey or predators, etc. Is that correct?

2.) And if so, did written languages follow this pattern? Or was it used early on primarily as a vehicle for mythology or worship?

3.) Or did spoken/written languages and their development grow together?

As far as my primary question goes, I'm not holding my breath for an actual, "Well the earliest records we have are 10 instructionals on gutting a pig and 25 stories about the Volcano Gods." I'm mostly curious about why we have languages when we could have survived (survived, not advanced) without it. Edit: Minus the fact that we have brains that allow it. If you can ignore an enormous fact like that.

Would I be better of asking this in an anthropology sub?

It seems like retaining the emperor was an important part of ending the war, and I wonder when the US took this into consideration.

Need this for a novel I'm writing, and I can't find a straight answer anywhere. Does anyone have an idea?

I can only find English translations online. The wiki page says an early appearance of the bull was in 'Expugnatio Hibernica' (1189) but I can only find English translations of this too.

why did the nazi party have the word "Socialist" in they're name despite being extremely right winged. As far as I know socialist is a left wing expression.

Positive

• Develop the Three Principles of the People (nationalism, democracy & people's livelihood)

• Formed Xingzhonghui in 1994

• Able to gain support from the ordinary people & overseas Chinese

• Raised funds from overseas Chinese

• Organized anti-Qing uprisings

• Secret societies united together as a team (tongemenhui)

• May 4th movement (sense of nationalism)

• Changed in lifestyle and culture

Negative

• Negotiate with Yuan Shikai in favor to overthrow the Qing gov.

• Served as a provincial president in a short-term

• According to the agreement with Yuan, he had to step down and let Yuan Shikai become the president but somehow Yuan wanted to restore the monarchy and agreed to Twenty-One demands

• Failed to strength the people's awareness of democracy and civil rights

• No improvements were made to the people's livelihood

• Continuous chaotic situations (Warlords period & Beiyang government)

I'm looking for books and articles broadly surveying formal (though not necessarily written) 'constitutions' or systems of governance throughout history, for governments but also private societies and businesses, with an emphasis on pros and cons and procedural details which are thought to have played a critical role in successes and failures of the system.

My motivation is to inform the design of future governance procedures (e.g. "this bylaw that you have proposed reminds me of tradition X of Organization A circa 1000 BC, and here's a problem that X caused them: ...; and here's an alternative procedure Y that Organization B used circa 500 BC that seemed to work out better").

Opinionated texts are fine; stuff like Bagehot's book The English Constitution or de Tocqueville's Democracy in America is what I'm after, except that for the most part these focus on just a few systems contemporary at the time of writing (England, America, France), and I'm looking for surveys over many places and many time periods (for example, perhaps a survey would briefly cover the governance procedures of each of ancient China, ancient Sparta, ancient Athens, ancient Republican Rome, medieval guilds, the Hanseatic League, the Ottoman Empire under Suleiman, France under Louis XIV, the French Reign of Terror and what went wrong, the French Consulate, Weimar Germany and how Hitler took power, Soviet Russia and how Stalin took power, the modern UK, and modern US corporations).

With Trump becoming the Republican nominee, I'm wondering if there's any historical precedent for something like this.

You'd probably never see a National Socialist flag or a Hitler picture portrayed anywhere in schools, yet you'd see USSR flags and Stalin pictures all over the place with no issues. Even Mao.

crossposting from /r/nostupidquestions

if Irish is too specific, what about just in general United Kingdom?

Hello reddit! I'm from Croatia and my family has always really loved Tito, and they always say that Yugoslavia was the best thing to happen here, so I never thought about the bad stuff. I can't think of Tito as a dictator, he was really not as bad as Stalin or Hitler.

But was he really good? I know about the Goli otok, I know it was horrible, but people always seem to say that was the only bad thing. Like don't talk bad about Tito and you won't end up there and you will have a great life.

Since today is the anniversary of his death I thought it would be appropriate to ask this

Are there any specific examples of nations describing the events of an event as one thing, but in reality something else occurred?

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This one is pretty self-explanatory. The most noble bloodlines seem to have bred primarily with their own kin in an attempt to keep their bloodline as pure as possible. We know nowadays that such incestuous behavior can lead to issues with a child's immune system, susceptibility to genetic disorders, and far more horrifying birth defects. Was there ever evidence for this in dynasties anywhere in the world?

As an extension, are there any particularly important histoical figures who may have been affected by this?

I have a good memory of reading such a thing in one of the (many) books on D-Day that I have read down the years. As I recall, the British advised the Americans not to undertake a frontal assault because the defences were too strong, and it would be a bloodbath.

Omaha certainly was a bloodbath.

Is my memory correct? Were the Americans advised not to assault Omaha?

I'm asking this because I saw reviews blaming writers for not writing authentic stuff and instead preferring biased stuff. Is there a writer/book which is widely accepted as the standard and also describe the chain of events that led to the fall?

I recently have listened to a podcast (The History of Rome) and a book (Ghosts of Cannae) which have dealt with the Second Punic War. Of course both of them touched on Hannibal's use of war elephants, but they gave very different impressions. The History of Rome suggested that the elephants were very effective in battle and used by Hannibal to destroy or disrupt large parts of the Roman army. Ghosts of Cannae seemed to indicate that the elephants would almost immediately get scared during battle and start trampling Carthaginians and Romans alike making them tactically useless. Both sources seemed to agree that the elephants served a propaganda purpose as the Roman survivors would report facing an army of the biggest animals they ever had seen.

One one hand the Ghost of Cannae gives a more sober and less fanciful assessment of the situation that I am biased to agree with. On the other hand, its hard for me to imagine a man as skilled as Hannibal would not recognize their tactical uselessness. What is the consensus of how effective these war elephants really were?

I thought it was just the sort of thing you'd see in fantasy, but seeing the thread about coloring swords made me question that. Medieval weapons seem like they change hands pretty frequently due to the looting and such after battles, but maybe it's a different story for nobility. So did nobles have family swords, or other weapons, that they'd pass down symbolically, or is it just the sort of thing you'd see in Game of Thrones?