I've recently read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. In the story it is evident that the people of Umuofia have metal tools and I was wondering, for how long had African horticulturalist societies worked metal. I understand that Africans had been trading with cultures who made metal for a very long time. At what point did Africans begin to make metal and was this trade widespread by the 15th century AD. Another question is regarding the firearms they possessed, would they have had rifles, repeaters and revolvers or would they have been simpler muskets.

I was reading up on the longest-surviving dynasties, and they're almost all in Asia. The Yamato in Japan, the Hồng Bàng in Vietnam, the Gojoseon in Korea, the Zhou in China. By contrast, it seems like most European dynasties were comparatively around for the blink of an eye. The only exception might be the Habsburgs, but even they didn't maintain a continuous, territorial core for their entire reign.

The Balkans confuse me and I can't seem find a truly objective and unbiased history about them.

So Wikipedia notes that:

The story of Hamlet ultimately derives from the legend of Amleth, preserved by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum, as subsequently retold by 16th-century scholar François de Belleforest. Shakespeare may also have drawn on an earlier (hypothetical) Elizabethan play known today as the Ur-Hamlet, though some scholars believe he himself wrote the Ur-Hamlet, later revising it to create the version of Hamlet we now have.

Seems interesting, and made me wonder a few things:

• Was the story one that already would have been known, even excluding this possible "Ur-Hamlet"?
• How widespread was this practice at the time. Was it commonly practice for playwrights to take existing stories and just put their own twist on it? Are there any other works of Shakespeare that have similar origins?
• If it was common, would playwrights ever try to compete against each other, a la the "Twin Films" phenomenon seen in modern Hollywood, with one pushing out a very similar production at the same time or just after? (And for that matter, was this a thing even for original productions...?)

i heard that some families were so poor they couldn't bury their dead, so instead they put them in the sewers

is this true?

if no, why did they not, was it European Invaders?

I am thinking of things like America's abolitionist, woman's suffrage, and civil rights movements that tried to achieve equal rights for a marginalized segment of society.

I'd really appreciate some arguments explaining this, as well as possibly some counter arguments.

I know this is a bit of a speculative question but about how long would any evidence of a pre-industrialized society last? Had mankind died out from the Black Death how long would there have been evidence that humankind had even been on the planet?

With Serbs, Croats, Albanians etc, how did all these form in a relatively small area? Had they always been sovereign kingdoms in medieval times? Are they actually different ethnic groups or is it more of a political distinction?

Recently started reading Conn Iggulden's Emperor series again. It's more fiction than not, but it does describe JC's time as a tribune I believe. A sort of prosecutor for the people if I'm not mistaken.

Do we have any transcripts etc. of his perorations? It is said he was an extremely eloquent man. How truthful is this statement?

I was talking with an elderly Metis man this summer who described the military tactics the Metis used during our annual buffalo hunts when dealing with expected attacks from the Sioux, our enemies at the time. His grandfather had been at the battle of graan kwatoo during a hunt in the early 1800's and described the inner guard, outer guard, reloading teams (of younger people and women mostly) and also something that interested me, the suicide squad.

The camp (of perhaps a thousand people or more) would circle, dig shallow entrenchments behind their carts, and then hold off the attackers. The suicide squad's job was to wait for the moment when the circling riders turned en masse and made a decided charge at one point, at which point the squad charged them directly and fought to the death as a way of slowing the charge as much as possible to give the entire defensive setup time to adjust to the point of attack.

This seems like fairly sound tactics, so I assume that it's been used before, and was curious: what are other examples of suicide teams/individuals being deliberately used in standard battle plans in the past?

Firstly I should say that if this question is in the wrong sub I apologise and will delete the thread.

Now to my question, I am looking for good quality books/articles/journals on the French Revolution. Specifically around either the causes of the FR or on what led to the Terror.

I am currently researching the historiography around the FR and am therefore looking for pieces of work that have been influential in the area of study and also for works that put forth opposing arguments.

Hopefully a kind redditor can point me in the right direction as I begin my reading!

Looking at the wikipedia article alone, they carried out a number of assassinations, bombings, sabotage of railways, and use of truck bombs.

Basically, how did the "secular" state of Prussia emerge from the monastic state of the Teutonic Order?

Alright, I've been thinking. I'm from the US. When I went to grade school many years ago, we never really explored World War 1 in depth. It was kind of glossed over as a preamble to World War 2. We learned that Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, and that this was the cause, but we never really learned about the reasons for the United States involvement in the war.

I think that is because you can't talk about the reasons that the United States was involved in the first world war without talking about the labor movement in the United States. This labor movement was brutally put down, and the normal narrative of dealing with the threat of the Soviets doesn't really justify it since there was no Soviet Union until after WW1.

I know that, since Texas is the largest buyer of school textbooks in the US, the Texas board of education is infamous for controlling the content textbooks for schools, and the board members are notoriously conservative in their approach to what information is approved. For example, most recently in the news there was a controversy over textbooks that referred to the slaved brought to the US as "workers" and did not distinguish indentured servants from slaves. I think that something similar may be happening in this case, since there is still a lot of the attitudes that have existed since the cold war towards labor movements have been generally suspicious and negative, especially from a conservative viewpoint.

What do you think of this idea? Is it possible that there is a concerted effort to avoid educating Americans about the labor movement in the twentieth century?

I'm sure Al Gore would be on the list but my VP knowledge is severely lacking. I'm looking to learn a thing or two from you guys.

In school we learned a little about this over the last week. We've been taught that we had nothing to do with that situation and, in the last fifty years, have especially had done nothing. I feel this is untrue, but I don't have the words or the knowledge to change views. What did America do?