Just visited Notre Dame in Paris. Now I wonder. Were these cathedrals open to everyone in the middle ages? Could every poor person enter, stay dry and warm during mass? Or was this andere upper Class privilege?

They had same and some say even better resources than the US so why such a huge disparity in wealth?

Was his fall due to military factors like tactics or strategy? Did political issues lead to his failure? And finally, would you consider the collapse of his empire inevitable?

[deleted]

I recently came across a letter that President Truman had wrote to Henry Stimson when Stimson was resigning from the Secretary of War position dated September 19, 1945. In that letter Truman stated

No one saw more clearly than you how the shape of things to come was foreshadowed in the Japanese aggression in Manchuria. Historians will speculate whether the holocaust which spread over the whole world within a decade could not have been prevented had your advice as Secretary of State been followed.

I'm not too familiar with the historiography on the run up to the Holocaust, but was Truman on the right track anticipating this scholarly debate or was Stimson's contribution not important enough to consider?

Edit: I would post a scan of the letter but it's from the Truman library archives and I'm not sure if that's allowed.

I've found a lot of info on how public opinion moved in response to Sputnik, the mental impact, etc.

What I'm wondering is, did the US public (and/or the US gov) know about Sputnik beforehand? Or was the announcement something like, "The USSR has a satellite in space! It'll be flying over us every 98 minutes for the next few weeks." Were people freaked out in real-time? Would they have been shocked and frightened AS they learned about it?

Or were they more or less aware that something like this was inevitable?

Thanks!

Hey /r/AskHistorians!

I’m helping out a model UN club, and a group of these awesome high school students are working on a committee imagining themselves to involved in the Partition of Babylon. The document they’ve been given simply states that one of the possible people to take over, Arrhidaeus, had a learning disability. The students are a little unsure of what supposed learning disability Arrhidaeus is said to have had, and are stuck thinking that this was perhaps a bias since there are so many myths surrounding Alexander the Great. My history of this time period is rusty, so I thought I would ask the wonderful people here!

So my question is: What learning disability did Alexander the Great’s brother Arrhidaeus have that made it a risk for him to rule?

As requested I did look at the rules and FAQ before posting, so apologies if this question has been answered.

Any primary sources you could link me to would also be fantastic!

I may be completely off track, but I want know. It seems to me that musicians and performers must've stemmed from people like jesters who were called to entertain royalty. So how did a job like that become what it is today where the performer them self is considered royalty (in popular media sense). Why do we flock to performers?

Prompted by the question on historical fiction...

I've just finished reading "The Devil's Queen," a historical fiction about Catherine de Medici. In it, the Duke d'Anjou presents Catherine de Medici with a letter he says is from Henry of Navarre to a commander in the field, ordering that an army attack Paris on August 25, that Catherine & Henry be killed, and that Charles be taken prisoner until he abdicates. He claims he has spies who've seen the army amassing. On this evidence, Catherine determines that the royals/Catholics must strike first and attack Huguenot leadership on the 24th, Bartholomew's Day. Together, she, Henry, and Gaspard de Saulx get Charles to sign off on the assassinations.

In the book, the Duke was a forger and a liar. He created a fake Huguenot plot to spur the massacre to ensure that when his sickly brother died the Huguenots would be too weak to represent a threat to his reign.

A quick look online says there are several theories about exactly how the massacre came to be, and that "the Huguenots were plotting against us" was an excuse given at the time. Is there any evidence, though, that Henry fabricated the Huguenot plot?

Big fan of Tin tin, tomb raider, uncharted, etc and was wondering if all that is make believe or if there is any recorded evidence of such findings. Thanks so much for any helpful response!

I think history is interesting but find it hard to get in to nonfiction history books or lectures. Would relying on historical fiction to get my understanding of major historical stuff lead me to a very flawed understanding of what really happened? Consequently would that lead me to draw terribly flawed conclusions about what things mean when I compare current events to what I understand about history?

In case the title is not clear enough. I recently realized that the politicians use a lot of other people to write their words for them so there are not many "original" inspirational quotes nowadays. Who is the earliest known example of that?

Or do we know that any majorly popular inspirational quote from the history is actually thought and written by someone else?

I've always found it odd that people make a huge deal of big of a threat the Bistmark was considering it was just one ship. Did the British really consider it to be threat to their naval dominance or is it more of wartime posturing?

I've seen in numerous sources that salt used to be very expensive, even worth more than its weight in gold, and a big part of trade all over the world for much of history. But then I look at Diocletian's Edict of Maximum Prices, a very useful resource for prices in the late Roman empire. It tells us that a modius (8 liters) of salt was worth 100 DC. An ordinary worker would make 25 DC per day, so that's 2 liters of salt, which is about 4 kg.

Granted, that's a lot more expensive than today, when a worker's daily wage could easily buy you 100 kg of salt (probably 1000 if you buy in bulk). But still, 4 kg per day, that's hardly "worth more than its weight in gold", right? In fact, in the list of grains mentioned in the edict, a lot of them have about the same price - wheat, for example, is also 100 DC per modius. And since the density of wheat is several times lower, salt wasn't even worth its weight in wheat.

So how does this add up? Why did people even bother trading in salt if it was that cheap? Or was is just unusually cheap in 301?

[deleted]

As this was 'Pre-Israel' then I do know that there Palestinian Jews fought alongside the allies within the Jewish Brigade and other regular units and that it was supported by the Yishuv, but did the Palestinian Muslims also fight alongside the allies?

So what made society disagree, well even hate homosexuality?

Something I have always found interesting about the USSR is how a ''revolution of the proletariat'' (i.e. the people) so quickly and violently shifted to be centralized basically in the one figure of Stalin.

My understanding from reading on it is that there actually were elections in the beginning and all kinds of different party branches.

I can't really figure out how a system that was founded to put its power in the hands of the workers, in a matter of a few years became a dictatorship.

In comparison to the colonies of other nations, the Ex-British colonies seem to be relatively more stable. Most seem to be largely stable democracies. Is there any reasons for this. Was it a difference in British colonial policy? Or is it to do with the period after Decolonisation. (This question is directed towards Africa)