Just a century before WW1 the French under Napoleon was still fighting Great Britain how did they become allies so quickly?

So yeah as the title states, why did they chose Decentralization?

In the U.S. I was taught that we won the cold war. This was because of the large increase in military defense spending by the U.S. government and while the Soviets tried to keep up they eventually went bankrupt leading to their downfall and the "fall of communism". Was this really the main factor? We're there more important factors that I wasn't taught? Or were there smaller, but also important factors leading to the fall of the Soviet Union?

Why didn't the Ottomans colonize the Americas?

Today we can read and write (and, if one so wished, presumably speak) the language of Old English, that is the Germanic language spoken and written in post-Roman Britain before 1066.

But was this knowledge forgotten at some point? Was there a time period when the old manuscripts in OE would be kept as ancient artifacts, but the meaning of the words was lost?

If so: by whom and how was the OE language re-discovered? If not: who kept alive the memory of the language, and how far back in time should I go if I want to find a monk/scholar/scribe that can fluently write and speak Old English?

Many thanks!

I was a good student growing up, but history was never my best subject. I memorized (and subsequently forgot) my way through history classes in high school and managed to avoid the subject in college, because I worried that it would pull down my GPA. The joke is on me, because now I’m interested in history without a survey-level knowledge of the subject matter.

There are so many lacunae in my knowledge, and I'd appreciate your book recommendations to fill them. I'm working on a DIY history education by reading broadly in history, but I don't have enough context to know which events I should start with. What topics you would expect an undergraduate history to student to know about, before they enrolled in an upper-division course? Additionally, I’d love to know the book you’d most recommend as background knowledge for each topic.

To give a sense of the type of book I’m after: I loved Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century,” but I also found it a little difficult to get through. In contrast, I enjoyed the sweeping nature of Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern” but felt that it didn’t go quite enough in-depth. "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" is squarely in the Goldilocks zone for me.

Not to get political, but it's often used online to criticize fiat currency and entitlement spending. Surely he couldn't have imagined fiat currency or things like Medicare, so what was the issue in his day?

There are so many similarities between the Armenian language and Iranian languages, and only during the 1850s or so was it ascertained that they're two different subsets of the IE languages.

Today, we believe that ancient Iranian tribes lived in Southern Ukraine and named the Dniper and Dniester rivers, since the etymology of those rivers are actually Iranian.

We know that the Alani and Roxalani were Iranian tribes who migrated to the Western parts of the Roman Empire, and even settled in Lisbon, Portugal. There is a church there called "Alanquer" which means "Alan Church" or "Church of the Alans."

Finally, there were Sarmatians in the Roman Empire, and they were an Iranian speaking people.

However, what is the certainty that these 3 cases of history were NOT Armenians? After all, Armenia is actually physically closer to the Roman Empire than the Iranian speaking lands.

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A lot of places make it seem that there was some linear hierarchy in medieval times.

For example: Serf -> Squire -> Knight -> Baron -> Count -> Duke -> Grand Duke -> Regent

This was just one that I saw someone post. Is there an actual concrete answer for these things?

Let's say you're Britain.

The year is 1915.

Every day, your people are bombed from above by invisible, unassailable zeppelins.

Every day, your people are bombed from below by invisible, unassailable submarines.

How quickly are you able to produce, test, and manufacture designs for cutting-edge technology which might be able to counter these threats and others like them? Is it a matter of throwing things at a wall until something sticks, or is the process more streamlined?

Is most of that prototypical technology already there by 1914, and it's just a matter of getting designs mass-produced?

How quickly are new solutions found which put old ones out of business even though they might have only come around a year or two earlier themselves? Did this happen during the Great War?

I imagine they couldn't build heating ovens and have proper equipment, but maybe it's just easier than I think.

edit: I didn't flair this, just because I wrote oven doesn't mean it's about cooking

In European and American dining it's traditional to have a small course, followed by a main dish, then a sweet dessert. When and how did this convention arise and why has it become so dominant that basically every restaurant menu in the US is divided this way?

Was there ever an instance of a tower being too short/tall come the assault and being unusable?

I have a really strong desire to become a history professor. When I think of what I love the only thing that has stuck out is history. I can do technical work such as science or programming but I feel like I would enjoy history most.

I want to become a history professor. What is this path like. Is this feasible? Is it a good job? What do you guys think?

I've heard of the naval practice of effectively kidnapping members of the public and forcing them to become sailors in the 17th and 18th centuries, but was it a common thing? Was there anything someone could do to get out of it? Was it really as brutal as being knocked out and waking up aboard a ship at sea? Did people protest against the practice? When and why did it stop?

Sorry that this is a thousand questions in one but I just find the whole thing unreal.

It's always struck me odd that the "day" starts in the middle of the night, rather than at, say, dawn (or thereabouts). Where does this tradition come from?