Frederick William IV famously refused the Frankfurt Parliament’s offer to reign as German emperor, despite the fact that he was pro-unification. Wilhelm I, the man who would later become the first German emperor, likewise opposed Bismarck’s plans to orchestrate wars with Austria and France to achieve unification—for example, he acceded to French demands and withdrew a Hohenzollern prince from the Spanish throne.

Why were the Prussian monarchs against a German pan-nationalist movement that would bring more land and glory to Prussia?

Specifically, I was wondering what sort of role individuals with disAbilities had within Greek society? Would having a mobility, sensory, or intellectual impairment have a significant impact on social class or daily living? How would society treat them? I have always been curious about disAbility history but I know little to nothing about how ancient cultures treated people with disAbilities. I would surmise there could have been a significant number disabled individuals in the population due to war, the olympics, and other medical issues being prevalent.

Did ancient cultures have any intriguing visions of the future in this vein? I understand perceptions of time were different in different cultures and times, but are there examples of humans imagining a technologically advanced or “enlightened” (etc.) point in the future?

If not, why is this specifically a product of modern thinking?

Hello,

been reading a memoir of Hemingway about his life in Paris as a young writer. A repeating motif is that of dining out, drinking lots of wine and rum, always staying in a café/restaurant, spending money on trips and lots of "pension" apartments. Hemingway himself recalls in the book that they didn't have much money. Was life really that cheap back then, or did these writers/artists really make enough money to live so comfortably?

Portative Organs were very popular instruments for thousands of years, apparently one was found in the ruins of Pompeii, however it seems that at some point in the Middle Ages they fell out of use and they haven't been revived despite the fact that we could make far superior versions of that instrument with out modern technology

What happened?, why did people stop using this instrument entirely?

Hi,

First time posting here, thanks in advance for any answers.

I am in the process of doing some family history research, and was wondering about the assignment of individuals to military regiments in the UK during the first and second world wars. Would men only ever be assigned to regiments which were based in the county/vicinity of where they lived? Or would it ever happen that they could be assigned to regiments in other parts of the country? My family are all from the Birmingham area, and I have identified military records which seem to completely match up, except for when I have looked further into the regiment, they seem to have been founded in other parts of the UK.

Any answers appreciated. Thank you!

On paper the treaty gave Germany massive amounts of land, industry, and resources. But the people who lived in these areas had been fighting a brutal war against Germany for four years and presumably did not simply accept the agreement without any resistance.

Did Germany really gain anything from Brest-Litovsk? Was occupying these vast territories a quagmire similar to American involvement in Vietnam?

It's easy to criticize conquerors who went to war for personal fame, glory, and spoils. But for all of Caesar's, Alexander the Great's, and Richard the Lionheart's faults, you do have to give them some credit for putting their own lives on the line to accomplish their goals. Each could easily have died in combat. They always had skin in the game, even if the game wasn't particularly moral.

So I'm curious how we evolved from the standard of the heroic general/monarch/emperor leading from the front, often at the head of a cavalry charge, to one who either stays behind the lines, directing the battle through messengers, or more recently, delegates battlefield command to subordinates while staying at a safe command post miles away, perhaps sending off telegrams or orders over radio when needed.

When I look at British history it seems to me there are so many strong and influential female regents like Victoria ll., Queen Elizabeth l., Elizabeth Woodville and so on. You could even list Boudicca if you wanted to go so far back.

When I look at my own country‘s history (Germany) there are virtually no important female regents until Angela Merkel (With the possible exception of Maria Theresia of Austria).Is there anything particularly feminist about British culture which made this possible or is this just some coincidence? I‘d be grateful for all responses.

Darwin developed the theory of evolution in 1859 in "On The Origin of Species." However, for most of human history, many people must have found fossils before knowing about evolution. What did people before 1859 think fossils came from?

Ok, so, from what I understand there were plenty similarities between American and Brazilian slavery history, but the post-slavery treatment of the afro-descendent community by the non-black elite was very different. I know both societies were racist 'differently' but what I'm asking is why segregation in Brazil wasn't a more 'by-the-law' thing.

I appreciate any and all replies and corrections if I'm misunderstanding anything here.

So, I have been assigned to a paper on Jamal Afghani and I have found so little information on him. Plus most of the info I've come across are contradicting to the other. Please, I need help in knowing who Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani was and in what way was he able to influence foreign policy with his ideology. Any books I can read? I hope I get a few answers. Thank you very much!

Everywhere I look, when it talks about the plays or wars or anything it just lists the modern calendar dates. I can even find lists of the months, but I'd like to find a resource where it would say, for example, Dionysia in 490BC took place during the year of the 3rd Olympiad or the 2nd summer of the Persian war, or whatever it may be.

I can find some mentions that they would in fact reference years according to the Olympiad, but unless something remarkable happened that year they rarely mention both which olympiad it was and what year it took place according to a modern calendar.

Many thanks in advance!

The Napoleonic wars were quite long, I expect initially people would have fought to avoid a foreign invasion, but people regularly enlisted to fight for the ancien regimes.

I am trying to understand why non-aristocrats would have opposed Napoleon's wars particularly toward the middle and the end after he had founded/refounded countries and limited feudalism. This might overlap a bit with what motivated French people to oppose the revolution, I just find it odd that commoners, urbandwellers, and peasants would have been loyal to the feudalistic systems Napoleon overthrew.

I recently read that Freud invented theories about children being sexually fixated on their parents to explain away why so many of his female patients were disclosing CSA. Many of his patients told him they were being sexually abused by their fathers who were upstanding society men so he wrote that the girls were sexually attracted to their fathers to protect the men’s reputations.

Is there any truth to this concept?

A common truth going around now is that in the United States the automobile manufacturers waged a coordinated campaign against mass transit. These claims are usually vague and don't have a lot of evidence to back them up, but claim that it was a lot of propaganda and getting to local politicians.

Are these claims true?

When looking up early theories of matter, I was surprised to see that Ancient Greece and Ancient India came up with the idea of atoms pretty astonishingly early on. But I know that these ideas were probably met with a lot of skepticism and competing philosophies, especially when they would have been such invisible things to ancient people, and they certainly weren't universally believed theories all throughout history. As a modern guy living in an atomic world, this has always been really difficult to wrap my head around, but extremely interesting!

To those people and cultures that didn't believe in atomism, what was the alternative? How did their system of physics work? What were things made out of? And what did they think would we see if we looked through an extremely powerful microscope at an atomless world?

It's obviously embedded in the mythos of the band, 'iconic' etc, but I've heard a few performances from a city block away and it doesn't sound good at all. The stone and concrete of the streets give the sound a terrible quality. We got the vox pop of the people who were on the street right next to it, and the office workers from the neighboring buildings seemed happy to have gotten front row tickets to a free Beatles concert, but how far was it heard and could you make the songs out at all? What was the prevailing reaction at the time? The recordings we have are from dedicated equipment, are there recordings of what it sounded like on street level, or a block away? The policeman said you could hear it down at the police station, was it far?

Hello !

I'm a film student and I intend on making a documentary about the Ainu people, encompassing many aspects, such as their History, Culture, Spirituality, Place in the Japanese Society, Music, Food...

However, since I am French, there are very few ressources in my language regarding the Ainu. I'm willing to import books in English (I'm studying Japanese, but am not ready at all to read any book whatsoever written in Japanese). Are there any good books about Ainu Culture, History or Spirituality ?

To preface this question and try and explain what I'm trying to ask: By "street clutter", I don't only mean trash laying on the street, though that is definitely a type of it. By street clutter, I mean all things that are randomly laying on the streets, that weren't perhaps intended to be there, but are there anyhow.

I am an artist, working on a project set in Rome, the very city, in 50-45 BC. I've drawn streets and city scapes before, and they always have some kind of clutter - I live in Finland, where streets are generally quite tidy, and around here, street clutter consists of random candy/single-package-snack-food wrappers, the occasional lost item of children's clothes, and plantlife, such as fallen leaves in autumn and dropped branches in the spring.

Rome, as I've understood, was a surprisingly tidy city for its time, but looking at reference photos and artists interpretations of what buildings and streets looked like back in the day, they're unnaturally tidy - no city that has people living in it is completely immaculate, pristine and sterile.

Rome of the time naturally did not have plastic wrappers, dropped fast food french fries with seagulls and jackdaws fighting over them, or frequent birch trees both intentionally planted and growing wild around city areas like my familiar modern finnish cities do.

So what kind of street clutter would Rome of the era have had?