I'm fascinated by the logistics of war, especially throughout history. Watching a movie that depicted The Battle of Agincourt, I couldn't help but notice the huge mess and logistical tangle the battle must have caused. How did armies sort themselves out after a battle of such scale? Because even victory seems to create giant logistical hurdles.

Some sources say it was traders others say it was also invaded. They say the hindus fled to bali, why not just finish them off? Why let them stay for hundreds of years? And yet buddhism plays small but significant role as well. There are some buddhist temples all the way up in nothern thailand that utilize balinesian styles so clearly balinesian buddhism was also immensely relevant itself. Theres so much to unpack.... i think i need an answer from the hindu/muslim perspective and then a different one for buddhism if possible. I live in Thailand so the buddhism angle is a very curious one.

In the comedy movie Airplane! a running joke is that the characters are constantly accosted by aggressive missionaries and spiritual thinker groups while trying to walk through the airport. How accurate is this? Did many missionaries used to work airports in earlier decades? An audience in the theater would have needed to identify with this "common problem" right?

Just as the title asks: when colonizers came over to America, were they also affected by diseases that the Indigenous people had? Like, from what I was told, the reason why illnesses like smallpox greatly affected Native peoples was because they had never encountered it before so they had no immunity to it, so the opposite logically has to be true for illnesses the colonizers didn't have immunity for, right?

Saint Francis thought he could convert the Sultan of Egypt to christianity and end the fifth cruzade. Amazingly he and some of his followers managed to pass through the muslim lines during a battle and indeed arrived with the Sultan... and then it all goes dark

Apparently we know Saint Francis spent a few days in the court of the Sultan and then left, but somehow there isn't a single arab source of this event?, how is that possible?

It's also susipicious that the christian sources don't say much about what Francis did once he met the Sultan, which is crazy. Saint Francis was a celebrity in his time, there were people recording everything he did, and he spent the last months of his life dictating important writings, one would assume someone would have asked him "Hey, Frank, about that time you tried to convert the Sultan, how did it go?, was he friendly?, did you discuss theology?, please just give us any details..."

All of this seems very fishy to me, like there's something weird going on in here, but I'm not sure what

I'm a christian but one of my biggest problems with christianity is how the bible seems to be a collection of arbitrarily selected texts written by humans who claim that it is exhaustive and infallible in its significance to christianity due to the fact that what the writers wrote was "directly inspired by god". I personally believe that at the very least, someone who really wants to understand god and christianity as deeply as possible should put much more effort into exploring other texts and perspectives rather than simply rereading the bible over and over for their entire life.

I'm curious about the academic community's take on this and what other texts, if any, are considered equally important to the bible, or maybe even what texts were controversially omitted from being a part of the bible from whatever group of people decided exactly which texts would go into the collection of books known as "the bible"

I read about the Teutonic State that a major export was bees wax as was wax a major export of the Russian lands.

Who was buying this raw wax and then producing candles? Were candles cheap enough that a family would buy their needs monthly or yearly or were they very precious and a peasant family would only have a few throughout the year and the majority of candles were used in monasteries or rich manor houses?

So i keep seeing people saying not every wehrmacht was a nazi and other people saying most of them were

so which one of these is true?

During the early Great Depression, how were rich/poor/city/rural people effected, and what were their reactions?

[I know the shotgun approach may not be the best way to ask questions on this sub, but this is for a short story I’m writing and I want to make sure I’m not way off the mark historically. It’s set on the East Coast and features an old, impoverished Irishman who had served in the navy in WW1. All those details might be completely incongruous, and if they aren’t they could definitely be more descriptive if I better understood the historical context]

I have watched the first few episodes of "Frontier" and an intrigued by the Dynamics between the Hudson bay company, the French, and the native American tribes. Can someone recommend a good cook covering the history during this area focusing on the fur trade?

Specifically, I'm thinking of fragrance distillers who would have used steam or submersion distillation for fragrance extraction.

I was doing a little bit of research for a setting I'm making for a game, and one of the characters in that setting will be a distiller making rose oil and rose water. However, since this would be a seasonal occupation that would coincide with the rose harvesting, I was trying to decide what else that character could do for the rest of the year. I was thinking that since she would have all the necessary equipment already, she could spend the rest of the year making distilled liquors, and her specialty would be a spirit flavored with rose water. I was wondering whether this has any kind of historical precedent at all, or if I'm missing something that makes this kind of mixing a bad idea!

She’s a retired southern evangelical whose interest in the Bible has sparked an interest in history. Shes a smart and tough cookie who never had the opportunity to pursue higher education, and she spent most her life as a nurses aid and mother. I really want to support this endeavor. Lots of visuals and easily digestible material would be a plus. Thanks so much for any recommendations!

The Imperial German Navy kept most of their surface fleet in harbor not long after the Battle of Jutland, but the u-boats continued unrestricted warfare in the open waters. With no supporting surface fleet to provide refueling and no obvious harbors for U-Boats to return to when fuel got low, how did they manage to travel so far away without running out of fuel? I was under the impression that their colonies abroad were either quickly captured or too entrenched to be able to stock a healthy supply.

I've also read that Germany had "Milk Cows" that were boats that acted as floating fuel stations, but from what I can find, that wasn't until WW2.

How did the Imperial German Navy keep their u-boats going?

The Japanese clearly anticipated American intervention vis-a-vis their territorial expansion in the 1930s and 1940s. The US, as time would soon tell, had far greater war-making capabilities based on the size of its population and economy. The purpose of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent offensives in Southeast Asia, the Philippines and Indonesia, was to hamper the American navy and gain a defensible perimeter in the Pacific. But because of the threat that the US posed, the attack on Pearl Harbor would have been absolutely insane if the Japanese were not certain that the US would enter the war in the coming years. Why were the Japanese so convinced that the US would declare war? When we look back at the American public's view towards intervention in WWII, we usually think of the specter of Nazism. But what did the American public think about Japanese expansionism? How did Japanese expansionism threaten the interests of the US government? If the Roosevelt administration had truly been close to declaring war on Japan, how did it plan on justifying this to the public before the attack on Pearl Harbor? How close was the US to declaring war on Japan before Pearl Harbor?

I hope this post won't fall foul of the rules!!

I read today that a 100 year old has been charged with being an accessory to murder due to working as a guard at one of the Nazi's concentration camps. It's reminded me of a question I've had ever since reading that the Auschwitz trials didn't happen until the 1960s.

Basically... given that the Nuremberg Trials took place straight after WW2 finished, why did it take so long to prosecute other Nazi war criminals? Did it just take that long to gather evidence? Was there no interest in doing so? Is there a good book anyone would recommend on this subject?

What about people who have been charged more recently? Presumably this is because it's taken time to identify the guards involved? How does that even work- how do guards get identified after so much time?

For simplicity's sake let's say there where no significant delays (like in the poem) and the hypothetical captain in question knew the way pretty well.

I've heard it said that Sparta's military was unsuccessful, but is this really the case when we take into account the various factors that might have worked against them?

Were they facing superior enemies? Were their foes able to wield larger armies? Were their enemies more technologically and logistically sophisticated?

Did the Spartans have a geographical weakness that might have given their enemies an advantage against them? Was their land less economically productive than that of their foes?

I guess the question I'm trying to answer is: did the Spartan military system hurt or did it help? It seems clear that their win and loss statistics in battle can't tell the full story about their system. It's not like any other system of societal organization would have helped them defeat the Persians and expel the Romans when they came knocking.