Early in the Annals, Tacitus mentions the gigantic sum above mentioned being given away as a part of the will and testament of Augustus.

How much would that be in the US dollars of 2016?

Edit: title autocorrected. On my cell phone. "Forty" not "fourth"

I've googled, and established that blacks could indeed settle land according to the Homesteading Act of 1862, but I'm still wondering how so many Germans, Irish, Scandinavians, etc. got there before black Americans. Homesteading seems like the perfect escape for blacks at the time: to go north and get land practically for free. What was the holdup?

Early or middle Ming. Or, if you're a Barry Hughart fan, the Tang.

[deleted]

Why are there so many photos of atrocities and war crimes being committed? Why would armies document the war crimes they are committing? I imagine cameras back in the day being too large to take inconspicuous photos so I assume the guilty are documenting the acts themselves.

I'm talking about rows of dead prisoners in their mass graves, the concentration camps, ghettos, prisoners being blindfolded and shot etc....

Watergate is so engrained in modern American culture that the suffix -gate essentially means scandal. When the Watergate story broke was there a different definitive scandal, or set of scandals, it was compared to. Or was Watergate unique in its entrenchment into American culture?

From what I've read millet was one of the Romans' major crops. However, these days, it's primarily used as animal feed, and is unknown in many European cuisines (mainly used in south-east Europe, and even then not to a great degree). Why did this decline in the popularity of millet as human food happen?

I think it was Prussia, addressed to King Frederick II. I don't know. This is driving me nuts.

More specifically, did they know about his weird relationship with his niece or the fact that he was homeless (even denied entry into art school) for a time?

I feel like some facts about Hitler's life put him in a negative light for a position of leadership. Did he try to suppress this info or were people aware at the time?

basically im wondering if there is a study showing that a factory job at Boeing or GM (for instance) was responsible for x amount of other jobs through the economic impact of that middle class spending?. (im sorry if this is the wrong venue, if it is would you be so kind as to suggest the correct one. )

It appears that the majority of Old Norse literature from the 13th century is Icelandic as opposed to originating from other mainland nordic countries. The population of Iceland, as gleaned from the sagas (e.g., Laxdaela, Njal's, Egil's, Hrafnkel), was comprised mostly of farmers. With most people in Iceland being primarily concerned with farming and self-sustenance, why is it that this tiny island produced some of the most compelling and rich sources of world literature when the richer mainland countries from which the Icelandic people originated contributed far less?

In medieval time, if a village of some feudal was attacked or robbed, how it was reported to the owner. Was there a special man/horseman to bring important information?

I keep hearing about the growth of the Late Roman Bureaucracy and how the Empire became a more centralized state in the wake of the third century crises, but what exactly were they managing? Obviously you've got court bureaucrats managing the Imperial splendor after Diocletian's reforms, and the army grew massively in size, meaning there had to be new government offices to make sure the newly-centralized field army was supplied, but other than that, I'm confused as to how the Roman government grew. After all, the court might be huge, but that's not "big government", just "big retinue," and military growth is essentially a traditional form of expenditure by the fisc...

The only thing I can think of is the Church, but even the old pagan cults were (and correct me if I'm wrong), part of a state religion and often patronized by Emperors. Sure, Constantinius II promised subsidies to African churches that followed Nicene doctrine, but the expansion of state involvement in ecclesiastical politics couldn't have been THAT expensive. Neither, I'm guessing, would it have required all that much administrative expansion, because the state could simply rely on Church bureaucracies...

The other thing I thought of would be Constantine's/Diocletian's separation of military and civil authority, with Praetorian Prefectures, Magister Milatums, and the lot ruling in tandem with Senatorial governors, but I'm really rather hazy on that subject, and, after all, the town councils continued to collect taxes in the form of lump sums... so why all the new bureaucrats?

Essentially, it all boils down to a few questions...

1. How did the Roman government actually expand in the fourth century? Was the new court bureaucracy just for maintaining the Emperor's splendor or was the state actually becoming as centralized as I've read it did?

2. Where did all the new government expenditure go, besides the expansion of the army? Did tax revenues actually increase all that much or were the chronicler's complaints of tax "excesses" really just the results of skimming by the local elites who collected the money? Or were such "excesses" really exaggerations? (I have heard many of these claims WERE exaggerated-- archaeological evidence has apparently shown that Imperial taxes did nothing to stop a fourth century agricultural boom...).

3. This might be a repeat of number one, but I'll ask it a bit more clearly: how and to what extent, considering the continued involvement of local town Councillors in Imperial tax collection and administration, did the Roman government become a centralized state?

Thank you in advance for your responses.

--Severian the Torturer

Also: is there a book (preferably not too dry), about the economics of the Empire and the Imperial government in the fourth and fifth centuries? I've recently been reading Peter Brown's "Through the Eye of the Needle" but that's mainly about early Christian attitudes towards wealth. Everything else I've read so far has mostly talked about local elite power in the briefest of terms before getting on to the real subject of Barbarian invasions and the "Fall" of the Empire. Peter Heather goes so far as to mention town council service being "unpopular", and that the Imperial bureaucracy grew, but he only does this to demonstrate that the reported higher taxes didn't actually cause a decline in agriculture. Then he starts talking about the Huns, which is brilliantly written an thoroughly convinced me that migrations destroyed the Western Empire, but left me with nothing to go on when it came to centralization...

As the very last land of the Roman Empire this siege has intrigued me, sadly the information that I can find doesn't even fill half a page. Would anyone be able to tell me more about this? or perhaps recommend a source that could tell me more? I'd also be very interested to hear about Graitzas Palaiologos, the commander of the garrison who went on to serve as a Venetian general.

Sorry for the awkward phrasing of the question, and I'm not having any luck just Googling it. In discussions of the early Islamic empire's expansion, places including Fustat, Kufa, and Basra are mentioned as amsar (s. misr), usually translated as "garrison towns". There's some looseness in that definition (could you refer to 10 guys in some tents outside town waiting until the tax is handed over as a misr?) and I was wondering if there is a "canonical" list of the amsar, or what a good place would be to start my trip down this research rabbit hole.

I come from the town of Flemington, New Jersey (Charles Lindbergh trial fame)

Our town has been going through a Main Street revitalization for a few years, but now a proposal to revamp main street includes a proposal to knock down the Union Hotel. It has sat empty since the restaurant went out of business in 2008. it is in deteriorated condition, and the upper floors havent been used in decades. The cost of refurbishing the hotel would understandibly be daunting, and questions stemming about who should bear the cost of renovating.

Are there any grants available to assist in such projects? I am extremely passionate about history, and my town, and do not want to see the building knocked down. Unfortunately I don't have a whole lot of details right now about the property.

Kingdom of Heaven, Robin hood, Braveheart, the list goes on and on, the castles always fall, but did that actually happen in real life?

A bit of elaboration: the claim is that the victim would be "married" to a revolutionary guard, who would then rape and murder her.

Also what did other families do for entertainment in the time Queen Victoria reigned the UK?