Did they want to refrain from enslaving the locals or were they afraid there wouldn't be (enough) indigenous people?

Information about this would be really cool! I love Byzantine and Ottoman history and this is a great event in both.

I have credits to spend on audible and I would like to hear some recommendations on good audiobooks if you guys have some. The ones that I have listened too have been hit or miss, so maybe asking here could give me better results.

I was thinking about historical precedents to the current climate of social and religious discrimination against Muslims in the U.S., and I started to wonder if Irish Catholics in America faced a similar kind of discrimination because of the terrorist activities of the IRA.

The atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in the hopes of making an invasion of Japan unnecessary. Were the projected enormous death tolls actually reasonable, or were they inflated/deflated?

For example, many new players today are surprised to learn that you're less likely to be dealt a flush (5 cards of the same suit) than a straight (5 cards in a row, regardless of suit, eg. 8 9 10 J Q unsuited), and thus a flush beats a straight. It's not intuitively obvious, unless you sit down and work through the math.

Thus I'm curious as to how players originally determined this, especially as it seems that poker was largely developed and popularized on the American frontier, and in seedy gambling houses, where the level of education may not have been very high. Are there any known cases of people playing by the "wrong" rules, eg. valuing a straight above a flush due to a miscalculation?

I'd be interested in any time period and other countries as well. I'd assume it would be more common in the earlier part of the war since this would be when the army was constructing whole units, as opposed to replacing losses in already existing ones.

Basically a pocket knife that folds and has a locking blade doesn't seem that complex, so I wonder what the first one was.

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As I understand it, the Treaty of Verdun partitioned Francia into Western Francia, Middle Francia, and Eastern Francia. The capitals were Paris and Aachen for the first two, and I'm not clear where there was a fixed capital for Eastern Francia.

Aachen was an important city for a very long time, although Middle Francia itself faded in importance within a relatively short amount of time.

There were periods when the Kingdom of France based in Paris were not as strong as other regional powers: the Duchy of Aquitaine, Brittany, Normandy, were quite strong.

Were attempts to usurp Paris as the historic capital of Western Francia?

The Kingdom of France dates to the 9th Century, and unified Frankia to the 5th Century, but at least through the Middle Ages, it seems that "France" remained a rather decentralized concept, and it isn't until the "Ancien Regime", or perhaps even the post-Revolutionary period, that the France can truly be seen as unified in the sense of identity.

Obviously, national identity in of itself is often viewed through the prism of the 19th century, but that isn't what I'm asking about. More about how, between the Treaty of Verdun and ~the end of the 15th Century, France was conceptualized, especially by those who lived within its boundaries.

I'm writing a paper on the God Quetzalcoatl, how he was interpreted by the Olmec, Teotihuacan, Mayans, and Aztec, and then how he was represented in their art.

But finding reliable sources is actually kind of difficult. I wouldn't be asking for help if half the sites I went to weren't these weird conspiracy theorist sites. And on top of that, the sites that do seem legit tend to provide different stories.

Any ideas whatsoever?

Dostler was convicted of the murder of 15 US servicemen who were captured during their mission to blow up a tunnel. Dostler was executed by firing squad. However, war criminals were, I thought, executed by hanging, in spite of any request; for example Goring asked to be shot, and his request was denied. So why was Dostler shot?

I know hard data is hard to come by, but I'm interested in a few educated guesses or hypotheses.

"For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth."

For example, "zounds!" (God's wounds), "gadzooks!" (God's hooks), "'sblood" (God's blood), etc.

This time period can be very confusing, I understand it's a long timespan involving a lot of diverse regions and cultures, but there's still normally some common ideas presented when you try to seek information about it. At times it seems the fief is a very primitive structure with limited activities. In other moments you are presented with information that makes you question that.

Usually you find that serfs had to pay a percentage of their produce to their lord and work on his property occasionally. There is also information you find around on the internet about several taxes and fines the peasantry occasionally had to pay. Sometimes the information makes it seem like each fief has a considerably self-sustaining economy that functioned on bartering, so were the fines paid with further agricultural produce or with actual coin? If so how did the peasantry obtain coin if they were bound to the land and were limited to work in their land? The examples you find on the internet usually come down to agriculture, but obviously there were other enterprises, as wood, leather, milk, meat, iron and other materials had to come from somewhere. Obviously someone had to make clothing, shoes and the weapons the nobility used in battles and other more elaborate crafts as well. Were the serfs responsible for that as well or was it other ranks of peasantry outside the fief? Did they have to pay a share of what they produced as well? If so did they sell the surplus for actual coin or just exchanged for other goods?