Hi all. Please could somebody recommend a biography on George Washington? I'm looking for something that provides a good overview of the man's character, career and influence whilst avoiding hagiography as much as possible. Many thanks in advance.

I thought establishing a connection between Tyrol and Milan was a major goal of Habsburg foreign policy, yet the Habsburg-Venetian border remained largely unchanged for 300 years or so. I'd have expected that after the War of the Spanish Succession Habsburg would pounce the moment Venice showed weakness, but apparently this never happened, and I don't understand why.

...since there was never any actual evidence of his death?

I know there are recently leaked documents pointing to the possibility but I assume back in 1945 those were classified so the general population never knew about them.

But did people (of any country) in the mid to late 40s and 50s ever question this possibility, or just believe that he was definitely dead because the Russians said so?

Furthermore, since those now leaked documents do point to the possibility Hitler survived, did any government agency ever attempt any serious investigation to debunk them?

As I understand it, Germanic/Norse people didn't use hammers as weapons, and certainly nothing that looked like a blacksmith's hammer. So why is Mjolnir a hammer rather than, say, a sword, or a spear like Gae Bulg?

The Finnish god Ukko, seems to be a based on Thor (or vice versa). He also carries a hammer, but as I understand it, sometimes he's depicted carrying an axe, which makes a lot more sense. Was Mjolnir originally a stone axe, and something got lost in translation post-stone age?

Germany's name within other languages is usually related to one of three different sources - germanic, teutonic and allemani. (Are there more?)

Does this actually refer to different tribes/cultures settling in the area which is today germany, and how did the prevalence to one of those develop for a specific language? Is it directly related to the contact a specific culture had to a part of germany?

Thanks everyone!

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What power does a king have over the estates/nobles? They control the armies, so why should they ever listen to a king?

For example, the Elector of Brandenburg had som estates around 1600 that had no interest in the expansionist policies of the Elector, so they didn't want to join him in war. What can the Elector do about it?

Mainly looking for examples in the time period 1550-1618 in the HRE, but I would be just as happy to learn about the dilemma in other regions and periods.

I see a lot of people talking about how there were two black Roman emperors one of them being Septimus Severus and the other being Caracalla.

I've tried hard to look for verification on both of these guys but nothing I can find actually points to them being black. They just happen to be from Northern Africa.

So I guess my question is in the title, was there ever a black Emperor?

Was there a concerted effort against Soviet industry and universities? If so could it be compared to the reported Chinese espionage today?

I'm reading "S.P.Q.R." by Mary Beard now, and was surprised by the following passage:

“Barbatus’ Rome was very different from the Rome of the earliest Republic, two hundred years before, and it had ceased to be ordinary. Vast by the standards of the time, the city was home on a reasonable guess to something between 60,000 and 90,000 people. That put it roughly in the same bracket as a handful of the biggest urban centres in the Mediterranean world; Athens at this point had a population of considerably less than half that number, and never in its history had more than 40,000 in the city itself.”

40 000 for the Athens seemed like unusual small number to me, so I tried to check this number at Wikipedia — 250 000 (but only 30 000 citizens). Is Mary Beard mistaken here, or there are different evaluations?

I know there's a lot of weird racial ideology from back then (1850s), if going only by old editorial cartoons and whatnot, depicting the Irish as "white apes" and such. But did the Rudyard Kiplings of the day regard the (Catholic) Irish as being more or less in the same category as the Burmese, vis a vis the Empire? Or did they view the Irish as more or less like the Scottish and Welsh minus the Protestantism?

I'll tell you, the ethno-religious history of the Balkans confuses me less than that of Ireland.

At the personal level, how did these families respond to such a tragic course of events where wives are, to a large extent, forced to have sex with their occupiers to gather sufficient money/supplies for themselves and their family (also, as Drake states, the supplies women got from having sex with German soldiers and occupation officials were in many cases sent to their POW husbands). I can't fathom the mental and emotional toll this would take on the women who went through this during the occupation, and to the husbands whenever they got home. Do we have any idea how this impacted French families? Were the familial consequences of such actions amplified to the national level after liberation? For instance, I imagine that many POW husbands whose wives engaged in prostitution faced a pretty serious masculinity crisis after coming home, and I wouldn't be surprised to see that that carried over into the national consciousness.

If anyone is interested, this question comes from David Drake's very brief overview of the matter (pp. 100-101) in his new history of Occupied Paris, Paris at War, which has so far been fascinating.

First of: judging a person based on the skincolour is totally unacceptable to me, please don't people!

But I do wonder why it is the way it is today. Globally people seem to prefer lighter skins, in India people of the lowest casts have darker skins, but also in Western countries coloured people judge eachother on the darkness of the skin. Is this a cultural thing that spread across the world during a certain period (e.g. Colonialism) or is it almost a human trait (like we prefer symmetrical faces over asymmetrical faces)?

I was watching Shindlers list and other movies relating, and I was wondering why there was no revolution or riot? I mean there were infamous groups and such but I'm talking about organized revolution such as the French Revolution, American Revolution etc. I'd like to be educated, maybe I'm wrong. Thanks!

While other Pan-Nationalist countries in Europe like Germany and Italy solidified their nations despite of religious beliefs or cultural differences, Yugoslavia ended in a series of bloody wars and separation.

So why is that? Why didn't Yugoslavia "work"? Was it because of Communism? Was the idea doomed from the start? I'd really like to know the reasons for the breakup, and the unification in the first place.

I only ask this because I've always placed him high, high on my list of great military strategists (mostly from history lectures I've been subject to), but lurking through this subreddit, I discovered that perhaps another member of that list, Erwin Rommel, wasn't the phenomenal military general I thought he was.
So, have Hannibal's exploits been dramatized in historical accounts, or was he really, and please excuse my colloquial term here, the badass I've heard about?

I'm going through a lot of the sources (treaty of luneville and Amiens) and I'm finding it very difficult to find anything solid to say that napoleon was a peacemaker: just the opposite. Pretty much after the peace of the treaty of Amiens fell a year later, he pretty much goes on an anti Britain expansionist rampage. I see that in the treaties he is restoring a lot of conquered territories to their rightful monarchs or dukedoms, other than that I'm stuck. Please help.

By which I mean how did they brew coffee so it could be drunk. I'm thinking 17th Century England and France when coffee shops started.