I just spent some time in Istanbul, a city with a rich history and several layers of city built upon another. How can it even happen? Why not destroying the old before building the new?

I have heard two totally conflicting versions:

1. The KMT were committed to the fight against Japan, while the CCP held back its forces. When the Japanese withdrew the KMT was depleted by constant fighting, while the CCP was fresh. This was a major factor in the eventual CCP victory.

2. The KMT avoided combat with the Japanese while the CCP engaged in a guerrilla campaign. As a result, the public came to see the CCP as more effective force fighting Japanese occupation, and for that reason supported it over the KMT in the aftermath of the WW2.

That is a difficult question to estimate, so it would be useful to shed light on:

How many books were in a 'large' library in AD 1000?
How many such libraries were there?
What percentage of the population was literate?

Title says it all pretty much.

Is there an official birth/death record. What else is documented about his life outside of biblical texts?

How popular was the practice of witchcraft, satanism and magic since the founding of christianity up to around nineteenth century (when it wasn't really prosecuted anymor)? How big of a cult was it?

I've come to realize that the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are extremely revered in American culture and hailed as a significant advancement in philosophy and law.

In my own (Dutch) background the story is widely different, the texts are placed in a context of Locke, Montesquieu, and and other Enlightenment thinkers and the American applications of their theories, while significant for being an early place they're put into practice, weren't of much philosophical significance.

What's the truth? Probably somewhere in the middle, but how much original thoughts did the Founding Fathers actually have, and how hard was it to come up with the American Constitution?

Following the War, Britain made it an objective to give India independence, however it was much harder for the African colonies and included armed resistance? (Kenya, Rhodesia,etc..)

I am currently doing a presentation on the New Deals by FDR. However I'm having difficulty identifying discrete the New Deals. I can only really identify that the first New Deal during the first hundred days were focused on alleiviating the suffering of the unemployed, banking and fiscal reform and agricultural reform. The second New Deal I can see focuses on social and labour reform in urban areas.

When evaluating how seperate and individual these New Deals, could I compare and contrast the successes and failures of the New Deals? I am struggling to find any more elements to compare and contrast. Any Help would be appreciated :)

For example, a city like Carthage. After the Third Punic War, it's claimed that the Romans razed the city. But yet, Carthage was then occupied and became an important city in the Roman Empire. Does raze not mean that a city is completely destroyed?

Which brings me to this: how exactly did ancient armies go about razing cities? Did they literally burn down or demolish every building, or just the town centre or important buildings? I know ancient cities were small by today's standards, but it just seems like a massive task to go about destroying an entire city. And that would sort of negate any subsequent occupation of the city, wouldn't it?

Well, as I wrote in the title, I'm analazying the participation of USA in WW2 in the militar ambit. As of now, I have read "History of International Relations" by Charles Zorgbibe and have quite a good understandment of the matter. This is not an essay, so I'm not trying to answer a specific question nor have a defined thesis. What I want to find is more resources from which I could learn about that topic in specific. Thank you very much beforehand.

When you ask this question in relation to today's disputes, the universal answer is almost always arbitration. But it seems like this never completely seals the deal; one group seems to renege on the agreement at some point later on using the argument that the agreement was illegitimate since they really do own those territories so there's no legitimate way they could have been given away. See: Israel-Palestine.

So my question is do we, historically, have examples of groups settling territorial disputes in a way that both parties are satisfied and stay that way long term, or do grudges always continue and later erupt?

I was reading a bit about Italian republicanism on this very subreddit (mostly about Venice specifically), and I read a lot of answers about how we might not consider them republics today. For example one commenter said that at one point there may have been only up to 40 electors choosing the Doge! And further to be an elector you had to be in the "Golden Book" (or something to that effect) which only contained a set number of families based on noble titles.

But then the situation is similar to the HRE and its prince-electors, right? So why don't we consider the HRE to be a republic similar to Venice?

I thought about it, and I think it might be because Venice was more than happy to refer to itself as a republic, while the HRE would have rather not considered itself a republic (perhaps on account of the extra authority gleaned from being chosen by God rather than people). Anyway, I was pretty curious about it.

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

The Qing banned the import of British goods, so the British sold them opium. This unfortunate course of events led to the Opium wars. But why did the Qing ban British goods?

Were they inferior? Did the locals in Canton feel that way, or are these the words of the Emperor? Did the Qing government have other motives? Is it because the British hadn't accepted China's standard tributary bilateral trade system? Did the Qing know about British colonialism in India? Of the technological items, did the Chinese not understand them?

It just seems counterintuitive that a country with such inferior goods could then go on to dominate another 100 times its size on the other's home turf.

I remember being a kid and reading Harry Potter and started noticing that they had a character called "Mad-Eye" Moody and they would call people mad when they thought they were going crazy. This was new way to use this word for me and I always thought it was weird.

When (at least in the US) did mad become angry?

I read a fact card saying:

A myth in Germany states that "German almost became official language of the USA". Actually there was a petition on having the laws written in German beside English, which was rejected by 1 vote

How true is this? If it was that close I assume there where large parts of the country speaking German. How did it vanish ( WW2 stuff?)

Did European powers not see the advantages of being able to levy larger armies before Napoleon did it? Or were things just too decentralized for mass conscription to be feasible? Were European armies in the 18th century before the revolution all just fairly small by modern standards?

Considering that dozens of consistently changing positions in the US Senate and congress, has anyone one of their holders ever turned against the US through things like foreign bribes or outright betrayal? Whats the closest instance?

Nationalism plays a crucial role in the transition from empire to nation-state, but surely it was only a minor role in the collapse of an entire empire?

Thanks for anyone who can help.

Misery, poverty, economic crisis and even famine raged up and down europe from greece to germany, excellent fertilizer for communist ideals, What was to be done about this?