In the Iranian academia there are still bitter feelings about what the Arabs did after the Islamic invasion of the Iranian plateau. My question is how brutal was it really?

It's possible that we just had a unique education experience. And yes, I've been listening to a lot of Hamilton.

Here I'm referring to Polybius's formulation in which governments go through the progression kingship>monarchy>aristocracy>oligarchy>democracy>mob rule, but I'm interested in other versions as well.

And if it does not (or even if it does), why and how did they come up with it?

Around Thanksgiving I picked up Pacific Crucible and am now into Broken Sword. Those are about Pearl and Midway respectively and I LOVED LOVED LOVED those books. But I am interested in learning more about the rest of that theater, especially sub ops.

AskHistorians: What can you recommend?

I just read a TIL about George HW Bush being shot down with 8 other pilots and the other pilots being beheaded and eaten. Are there credible sources for cannibalism by the Japanese in WWII? There was mention of ritual cannibalism, such as officers eating the livers of recent victims of execution. Is there a cultural precedent for this kind of behavior in Japan or are these stories just the kids of stories we tell ourselves about the other during war time?

Genotype: Your genetics (Genes for blue eyes)

Phenotype: How those genetics are expressed (Actually having blue eyes)

Both the british and the dutch imported indentured laborers from India to their Guyanese colonies in the 19th century (after the abolition of slavery). This has lead to the largest ethnic group in Guyana and Suriname being Indo-Guyanese and Hindoestanis respectively. Why didn't France do something similar?

Was there some seminal piece of legislation that ticked off those in favor of looser regulations? Does it have to do with the NRA becoming a powerful lobby? Is it related to inner-city crime?

Noblemen could have married for the first time in their 20s or 30s but a noblewoman would be considered unnameable at that age. With the amount of women that died in childbirth and other complications, wouldn't it have made more sense for them to marry at a more suitable age?

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With the Nazi party stimulating having blonde hair and blue eyes, how were they able to get away with it by not having it themselves? No-one from the top of the Nazi party (Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Eichmann, Hess, Himmler, Speer) had blonde hair, I'm unsure whether they had blue eyes.

In particular, how are primary and secondary school students educated in history? I would imagine Marxist historiography has some currency, but like socialism, it has acquired some peculiarly Chinese characteristics.

So after watching a cold-war era documentary about spies and seeing a few fairly high profile cases where a spy in the West would be passed off to Soviet Authorities after being caught and the rare person who legitimately defected to the U.S.S.R. from the west, I got to wondering: did any of these defectors live to watch communism fall? Were they given a fake name and hid out in Russia so they wouldn't be prosecuted by Western Authorities? Did any of them express disappointment or relief at the fall of the U.S.S.R.?

I mean, 7 Samurai was released only a few years after WW2 and it's almost surreal that this movie was essentially made by the same generation of people growing up with the culture participating in such atrocities.

I mean, ritualistic cannibalism, extreme incidents of human experiments, kamikaze tactics, genocide, mass rape. Surely stuff like cannibalism had no part in Japanese culture before WW2?