I've heard it mentioned (I think Colin Tudge said it once, and I know he's not a historian, but still...) that the Red Sea didn't exist during the last glacial maximum, and then filled around 12,000 years ago. Is there any shred of truth to this? I know sea levels were 120 meters lower, but I'm not familiar with the Red Sea. Are there any other major bodies of water that disappeared, just in case I missed them?

And was it common for soldiers to engage in "duels" on the battlefield?

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It's so common place now for big corporations to spend millions every year on acts of goodwill and charity. How long have corporations been doing it for? How did it become a standard business practice? Surely, I would assume, it was initially viewed as a waste of money.

Moreover, when did people start getting skeptical of these acts? What are some early examples of PR disasters that corporations faced?

So, I'm an attorney, and just for fun the other day I traced certain language in a deed for a house back to the early 1800s. But it occurred to me that this relied on the Registry having suffered no major disasters in the past 200+ years. So that got me thinking of fires like the Great Chicago Fire, or the like. City-engulfing conflagrations not occurring during wartime. Specifically, I want to know about all the legal documents that went up in smoke. Are there chain-of-title issues because the Registry burned down in 1906 in San Francisco? How much was business disrupted not by loss of life or facilities, but by loss of contracts and correspondence in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London?

Feel free to pick a particular disaster and go from there, to narrow the scope. I'd imagine stuff like this is less of a big deal now with electronic storage and backups, so I don't expect property ownership in New Orleans to be disrupted greatly by the flooding. But in the past, how did they deal with these paper records disappearing into smoke?

If that question is too broad then what was Thoth's festival like?

I just want to know how the public during the American civil war reacted to these massive somewhat decisive battles. Did people in the Union know a lot about Chancellorsville or were they in the dark, and if the confederates knew about the decisive battles they lost. If they did, did they think that the other side would win, or did they believe they still had a good chance of victory after these battles.

I understand that more lives would be lost if we didn't and that both the cities were producers of military weapons but why didn't we bomb a military base? It seems like it would've given the Japanese the same idea and also destroyed more of their military and less civilians.

I have been reading "Barbarians to Angels" by Peter S. Wells and in it he explained that over the past 30 years, the idea of an Anglo-Saxon invasion of England, and too of a mass migration of Germanic peoples to the island during the 5th Century, has changed due to the lack of significant archaeological evidence that would indicate an arrival of new people's from the continent. What then was the influence for English to become a language of Germanic origin if the island was left with people of Celtic origin? Is it just that the scale of these migrations have been reconsidered? Or have the previous works of earlier English writers such as Bede and Gildas left us with an entirely distorted idea of the Island's ethnic and linguistic evolution?

So if you were hit with an arrow in a place that won't cause immediate death, such as the shoulder or thigh, what do I have coming ahead? Will they really do the whole breaking it off about six inches from the body like you see in movies? Will they cut it open to be able to pull the broadhead out? Will they sear the wound shut with a hot iron like in Braveheart? What's my outlook and likelihood of recovery?

I was doing g a bit of reading the other day and I read that Constantinople was taken by the Ottomans just under 500 years ago, and from then on, it was known as Istanbul and was (and still is) a primarily Muslim populace. My question is this; How did eastern Orthodox religion maintain its leadership from the "Patriarch of Constantinople" up to today? How did such a legacy live on when the Byzantines fell and their city converted?

It seems that Cubans were much more involved, on the ground at least, than larger Communist powers such as China or the USSR. I understand that there is the whole internationalist aspect to the movement, but why get so involved in Africa when they could have meddled plenty in the Americas (not to say they didn't, seeing as Che met his end that way, just that I don't see what direct benefit Cuba was getting here).

Hello there, respected historians. This question might not fit the usual style. But I still think it had his place better here than r/travel!

Im going for two months in Turkey and already got my itinary pretty planned but im wondering if im missing something, on the historical side.

So what are the historic places you would go see in Turkey?

Although the documents from Operation Ajax weren't declassified until 2013, I've gotten the impression that it's been common knowledge in Iran for a long time that the CIA (with the help of the British) came in and orchestrated a coup to undermine the fledgling Iranian democracy of Mohammad Mosaddegh and put Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi back at the top of the Iranian power structure. Kermit Roosevelt Jr. published Countercoup about his role in the coup on January 1, 1979, just as the Iranian Revolution was approaching its climax.

My question is: How aware were Iranians of US & British involvement during and immediately after the coup? Were any groups suspicious of the propaganda against Mosaddegh throughout 1953? When did the Iranian public discover proof of CIA involvement, and what were their feelings when they found out?

Bonus question: What is the general attitude toward Mosaddegh in Iran today?