Wiki gives us one small line that begs to be expanded. Working on getting a copy of the source, "Rhineland radicals" by Sperber.

"The economic, social and cultural dislocation of ordinary people, the economic hardship of an economy in transition, and the pressures of meteorological disasters all contributed to growing problems in Central Europe."

How long will I be in basic?

I read this in an article which I can't find now and was wondering how accurate it was.

Just a mass of people fighting each other? How did they choose who to fight? There must have been a lot of mistakes where soldiers would kill their comrades if that's the case.

Edit: WERE*

Heavy cavalry had, at least as a rule, bigger horses and sometimes wore a cuirass; but was it a significant advantage in cavalry versus cavalry combat?

On a related note, I would also like to find out more about what Spandau prison was like before, during the Nazi era.

This might be a somewhat cliche focus for all you learned guys and gals reading this. But I've always been interested in the peoples who came over to the Americas. Something about the hardship they endured and rugged nature of the people who first moved across intrigues me. An example of the sort of thing that kinda sets off my wondering is the movie Pathfinder. I know it's fiction and such, but it always gets me thinking about what these people must have been like. Even looking at the Yukon and Alaska and the Northwest Territory now, northern North America is not an incredibly hospitable place that many people think about in any terms beyond adventure.

So what I'm asking for is an idea of what the earliest people who came over were like. Perhaps who they descended from (I'm vaguely aware they're of Asian descent), cultures that spurred from them, perhaps the history of specific people or important events. I've never heard of any big North American empires, but I'm not a historian either. Basically the more informative and in-depth (so, long) your answer the better (though, don't not post an answer if you think it's shorter than I'd like).

The Icelandic plate consists of a lot of arctic fish, spices, and milk. The fish in Iceland are much bigger than the same species of fish elsewhere in Europe due to the cold waters, so I can only assume that the Icelandic people were even more well-fed during this time.

Am I right in this assumption? Is there any information on this? Thanks!

This HistoryExtra article popped up on my feed, quoting a Rupert Matthews. Basically, it said that any man who had land and funds was a knight, and expected to show up on a battlefield with armed men. They were also expected to collect taxes on their land, keep roads and bridges in repair, and maintain law and order.

According to the article, if a knight died with no male offspring of age, the widow or daughter of the house was expected to fulfill that duty. It says that such female knights were called "lady" in England, but other countries called them "knight," and that by 1358 women were being admitted to the chivalric orders.

To my disappointment, the article doesn't really address the warfaring side of Dame Knights, or provide any examples. Were there Dame Knights with chivalric orders? How common (or uncommon) was it? I mean, I've heard about warrior queens, but I thought such women were pretty rare, and I definitely thought that the "freedom" to fight as a woman, undisguised, in battle tended to be a privilege of royalty that everyone had to obey. I know there's always been instances of female commoners dressing up like boys and fighting in battle, but for a noblewoman to be acknowledged as a knight is new to me. Was it a purely ceremonial role? Did they just manage lands and property and send a representative into battle?

I'm really interested in the period before European arrival, but as I imagine that's a bit more difficult to source for English-language historians, I'd also be interested in the early period of European arrival in the area (before they were actually conquered by Portugal, Britain, etc).

In response to a comment now deleted, I realise that "the interior" is not very clear. I mean the tribal groups inland, in what is now Kenya and Tanzania. The ones that might have some contact with the Swahili city-states. Not all the way into the central African jungle.

I always thought witchcraft was derived from pagan traditions. If the pilgrims were Christian, where did they think the pagans would have come from?

This is question was inspired by a similar one in /r/history that did not get a satisfying answer.

And an immediate followup - how does the House decide whether or not to seat someone?

Most of what I read (or hear) about World War I emphasizes the incredible casualties, both in absolute numbers and in relative numbers. The tone often seems to suggest that if a soldier spent enough time at the front line, it was only a matter of time before he was killed. Do we know of anyone who survived all four years of front-line warfare? (If this was actually pretty common, that's what I'm curious about.)

I understand that nobody spent the entire war right on the front line and that there were rotations onto and off the line. But within the framework of that regular rotation schedule, did anyone survive all four years of combat on the Western Front?

From what I understand during the first world war many generals stuck to what could be called the "old way of waging war" with men charging in lines and the use of cavalry with few motorized vehicles/tanks. And when Germany began the second world war they changed that by starting to use fast warfare with lots of motorized infantry and tanks which caught a lot of nations off guard. I am no history genius but I've been thinking about this lately and was wondering how much of this true. Thanks :)

I've seen in movies, and in a ballet some really extreme precision ballroom dancing. At least in the movies there could be fifty people all dancing perfectly, switching partners and using a large variety of moves. Obviously that is through the magic of Hollywood and a ballet troop, but how intense were these dances actually?

At a ball would almost most attendees dance? And would they all dance fairly well, or would people be screwing up and getting run over by other dancers? If I could really tear it up on the dance floor in Paris and I took a trip to Vienna or St. Petersberg how would I fare, would I need lots of practice for new dances?

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