Today it is a common thing for people to have cages or aquariums with small pets that serve no actual use to the owner other than entertainment. I'd like to know if this was practically non-existent until somewhat recently.

Every time I read something about WW2 I get the feeling that the war was much more about stopping Germany's territorial expansion than stopping Hitler's genocide.

In this game i've been playing(m2tw), my early army is composed of militiamen with 150 man units armed solely with spears or bows, only.

By this I mean, I have five 150 man units with spears, and nine 150 man units with bows.

To this end I thought it was odd that no man in those spear units carried a sword or axe just incase, but nope just spears.

Was this an actual common practice during the medieval period or just a part of the limitations of a games programming?

I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask but here we go. The Great War is kind of one of my main interests in history. Seems like since the wars start is coming close to over 100 years you would think that any footage we had would just be collected and open for anyone to see. Wouldn't any of that footage be public domain as well? With all this why are there so many sites that seem to withhold footage asking for £30 for what by now should defiantly be open to the public? and if some one was to even buy these films couldn't they just make them public? Can they even sue for footage taken almost 100 years ago?

Where they that desperate for a larger front with France, or did they assume Britain wouldn't honour the Treaty of London?

From what I have read, 12 million Africans were imported to the New World, but less than 500,000 were imported to the United States. Explanations for this include Latin American and Caribbean slaves having high death rates and low fertility, necessitating more slaves to be imported in order to sustain the slave population. But why was this the case? Why did American slaves have higher fertility rates and lower death rates compared to other slaves in the Americas?

I'm curious about the scope of piracy, both within Honduras and also as compared to other locations in the Caribbean. I know that there was some piracy in the Bay Islands, and on the northern coast (e.g. Trujillo) but I've found information about other places (e.g. Port Royal, Honduras) more difficult to find; even the information about the Bay Islands and Trujillo that I've found has felt a bit thin (e.g. execution of William Walker in Trujillo).

1. Did pirates make up the majority of residents in the Bay Islands, or did they just go there to hide out and/or wait for passing ships and/or just find themselves there due to bad luck (e.g. Charles Vane)?

2. How far into the Honduran mainland did piracy spread? Besides Trujillo, were there any other prominent pirate communities on the mainland? Did they have hideouts farther inland?

3. Were there pirates consistently on all three of the Bay Islands, and also Cayos Cochinos? Were these actually pirate communities, or more like layover spots en route to Jamaica or elsewhere?

4. I've heard that the etymology of the name Roatán stems from "rat people," in reference to its pirate history. Any truth to this?

5. Did Honduran piracy spread west to Belize or Guatemala?

6. Is there even such thing as a Honduran pirate (not legally speaking, but practically speaking)? Or did pirates just stop in all of these communities periodically without having any real home except perhaps the sea? In general, was more time spent on sea vs. land?

7. What relationship did piracy have with the local Garifuna communities in Honduras and elsewhere (e.g. Belize, Guatemala)?

8. Were there more pirates in Trujillo or in the islands?

I'm open to learning anything and everything about Honduran piracy. Thanks for any help you can provide.

Edit: Typos.

Bonus question because I'm in here editing anyway: Would Honduran pirates have spoken Belize Kriol and/or Mayan languages and/or any form of Islander English (i.e. anything sounding vaguely Kriol-y)? What about English, Spanish, French, Dutch? And were there any lingua francas languages that were spoken amongst Honduran pirates, their neighbors, and the wider Caribbean pirate community?

To explain in further detail - do we have any examples of writings (books, memoirs, stories, archives, etc.) that were made, kept, or produced solely for the purpose of future historians to study and help them understand a particular event, place, people, etc.

Let's assume that we're dealing with relatively wealthy individuals in both cases. Would they have dressed very differently? Wore their hair or facial hair in different styles?

And further how exactly did physicians in ancient times work? Did they have explicit knowledge about the body or were they mostly charlatans?

Would be great if anyone could at least answer one question, I'm very curious :)

How far back can we go? Which came first the chicken or the scratch?

Edit: so I started this thread before a 8 hr drive, definitely came back to a wealth of information. I'm glad I wasn't the only one interested in this question. Thanks everyone!

Did the colonies have different laws or different policies? Why did the people feel they belong to one and not another one?

Thank you in advance. I would love to have the time to read up on that period in history but if you have any useful links ill be sure to save them and try to get to them. Thanks

As the title says, I am interested in why these words became so widely used even though "emperor" and "submarine" mean the exact same. It just seems strange to read about, e.g., "German u-boats" and "British submarines".

My first hunch as a layperson would be to suspect that WW1 propaganda played a role. Foreign and "exotic" words probably were a good way of demonising the enemy – and German submarine warfare was of course a big issue.

Yet, if this hunch is correct, I would like to ask the follow-up question of why this does not seem to have occurred in any other instances (that I know of at least). The Japanese emperor is not referred to as Tennō, for instance. Were other Japanese words borrowed for propaganda purposes in WW2?

Apart from that, do we know why, other than by chance, we sometimes use the native title of a monarch (Basileus, Khan, Khagan, Shah, Sultan, etc.), and sometimes do not (the Chinese and Japanese emperors)?

I am trying to work out why the Catholic church was selling indulgences in the run up to the reformation. I am under the impression an indulgence is in crude terms to "have your sins forgiven and get out of purgatory". Is this not very similar to Sacrament of Penance / confession which I assume was free?

These seem to cover very similar ground. What was the difference between them? Why was one free and one paid for?

In the time period 0ad to 500ad - how was silver actually processed? Gold and silver were the main precious metals, but while gold can be found in its raw state, silver normally is bonded in various compounds (sulfides normally)

How did the late Romans and surrounding barbarian people get silver?