I heard this repeated recently on reddit, and I remember thinking in high school that Nixon seemed to have done some pretty cool stuff, but that his legacy is too tarnished by scandal to really say so. Is there any truth to that, or should I stop spreading misinformation?

During his time, men almost always wore hats. Yet Hitler is not wearing a hat in most pictures you see of him. Why?

Whenever I watch (slightly) older comedians---David Cross, Louis CK, Patton Oswalt, that crowd---they often mention the comedy crash that occurred in the early 1990s after a humongous growth in the 1980s. They never go into much detail, and I can't really find any in-depth history of it. I know it's a pretty strange question, and I'm not sure what kind of historian you'd have to be to know something about it, but I figured I'd give it a shot.

Some years ago my grandfather did some research about our family's history. My family had come from Italy in the late 1800s to the US and settled in NJ. We believe they were from Gallo Matese. There was a documentary that one of my uncles got a hold of about Gallo Matese that showed a baptismal registry, and our family name was shown. The documentary spoke about the area originally being populated by Bulgarians who had been exiled. I've never seen the documentary, and I honestly don't know who has the copy of it (it was on VHS, this was some 12 years ago it was being discussed).

So my question: was there some sort of group of people who were exiled from Bulgaria that may have settled in areas around Gallo Matese in Italy? Why would they have been exiled? I have no sense of when this could have happened other than well before my ancestors came to the United States in around the 1890s, I believe.

Many thanks. I know it's sort of a trivial question but I think we all have a desire to understand our roots. Any information -- even just a link to some journal article would be nice. I have access to academic databases, I just don't know where to start looking.

EDIT: Typos and added second question.

Brassicas are the crop group containing cabbages, turnips, kohlrabi, broccoli, brussels sprouts, among others.

According to the Wikipedia page on the Act, the Royal Navy declared slave traders pirates and set up a squadron in the Atlantic to seize them. By the way, in that case could British privateers also capture slave ships?

From my (very limited) understanding of prizetaking, a captured ship would be taken to a Prize Court in a British dominion, where they would condemn the vessel if it was a lawful capture and award the value of the prize as bounty, right?

What would happen to the (presumably now freed) slaves after that? Did they just stay where the Prize Court was located or were they transported somewhere?

I remember listening to Taylor Branch's trilogy on MLK via audiobooks. It seems to get a lot of praise, but I honestly didn't feel that impressed. For starters it says 'America in the King Years', but there never seemed to be much analysis on a national scale. Figures of the civil rights movement who didn't fall into MLK's non-violent position didn't really get much attention (I was expecting a lot more on Malcolm X).

It also seemed like the structure of the book failed to really do justice to the racist, white, Jim Crow supporters. What they did was terrible, I agree. But I would have liked to come away from a study of the period having understood their racist ideology and its roots a little better. As it is it just seemed like they were the antagonists, like in a novel, whose psychological motivations are never really explained. At least not to my satisfaction.

I've been told, when I brought this up with people who liked the book, that the issue is that Branch was writing in the 80s when King hadn't been as canonized as a positive historical figure as he is today. Thus it was important not just to detail MLK's life but also turn the biography into a quasi-hagiography.

What to historians specializing in the period think about the trilogy today? What books should I read instead?

Also, I know that the Byzantine empire had a very strong influence on the development of east slavic civilization... was Greek studied by anyone? And were educated people generally aware of classical (Greek and Roman) history or philosophy?

Also looking for pre-colonial East African (lit,folk, etc...) and South American Indian (lit,folk,etc). Can be religious text, just not exactly a retell of history. Writing a paper comparing the three different cultures pre and post colonialism to analyze the effects of cultural hybridity in post colonial times. My prof is basically forcing me to include literary resources to to document the development of each cultures development in South America so I'm a bit stuck on the literary docs. Any suggestions would be helpful. Thanks :)

Not sure if this is the right subreddit or not, if not please direct me to the correct one

There was an article I read a while ago that said that the Soviets were being underestimated by NATO, and that they encouraged NATO to think the Soviet Army relied on sheer numbers etc.

Here are some excerpts from the article. Could anyone tell me if the information provided is correct or not? Thank you.

From the outset the Western Allies and, later, NATO would've failed to use their inferior numbers as a unified force (France was always a bit of a wild-card and it's anybody's guess whether they would have stuck their neck out over an 'Anglo' issue, especially while Stalin was alive - he and De Gaulle were relatively chummy. Worse, even when they finally formed a military of their own in 1955 Western Germany's politicians insisted on using their forces to defend their peace-time borders... which were often totally indefensible, let alone the fact that (because they were right on the border) they could quite easily be encircled, cut off from all food and ammunition supply, and be forced to try to punch their way out through the Soviet defenders or simply sit on their laurels contributing little to NATO's strategic defense), and they had no campaign-plan to counter the Warsaw Pact's (a massive knock-out blow to split NATO's forces in half on the North German Plain, crush the isolated northern pocket, and move on to break up and finish off what was left).

The Soviets military's ability to actually live up to its rhetoric depended very much on the time-period. From 1945-53, Stalin gave the military the resources it needed to carry out this mission - with the expectation that it would fulfill it even with its forces and the German, Polish, Soviet, etc cities that supplied it taking the USA's several-hundred nukes. From 1956, whatever ability the Soviet military might have retained after its one-fifth downsizing by Khruschev was totally negated by his insistence that they adopt and use tactical nuclear weapons (which, in all probability, would've led to the war going nuclear within a matter of days if not hours). Under Brezhnev in the late 1960s the Soviet military was gradually 'restored' to the point that they again had confidence in fulfilling the operation (without any use of nukes, of course). But in the late 1970s Soviet theorists began to fear what they saw as a coming 'revolution in military technology' which would make the campaign difficult if not impossible by the late 1980s, something subsequent studies (using NATO and WP records) have tended to confirm.

On the other hand, the actualy likelhood of the Soviets achieving this operational goal - regarldless of their capabilities - depended very much on how the USA chose to respond with its nuclear arsenal. Throughout the 1940s-70s the USA initially, and later unofficially, had a policy of 'Massive Retaliation Doctrine'. In other words, in the event of any Russo-American conflict whatsoever the USA would have attempted to immediately glass the entire Warsaw Pact. In the 1970s-80s this was replaced by 'Follow-On-Forces' (FOFA) Doctrine, which mandated that the USA would only use tactical nuclear weapons, and only when NATO forces looked like they were losing to boot. The problem with this was that, due to the incredible vagaries of NATO doctrine (which did not have an 'operational' level) it was not clear where the 'tactical' use of nuclear weapons ended and the 'strategic' use of nuclear weapons began (For instance, nuking all the major cities of Poland would have been a key element of stopping Soviet reinforcements, ammunition, and food from transiting through Poland to the frontlines. However, Poland would not have been on the frontlines (and may have been as far as 500km from them) and Polish forces might never have attacked any NATO units up to that point). At pretty much every stage of the Cold War, then, if the US president of the time had adhered to his military's official doctrine then he would've made the war go nuclear rather than lose western Europe. Depending on the Soviet leadership of the time's response, this could've led to the northern hemisphere being cleansed of human life. But, hey, at least it wouldn't have meant negotiating with the Dirty Commies.

That said, tensions between the alliances were low throughout this period until the "Second Cold War" of 1979 onward, which saw the first proper (i.e. intense) arms race between the two. The former Sovietologist Christopher Donnelly has likened the Cold War to two players preparing for a game of chess, in which NATO focused on crafting the best pieces possible...and the USSR focused on becoming a Grand Master. Broadly, the Soviets focused on fighting simple and fighting smart - using simple and easy to maintain weapons, focusing on logistics, planning, and leadership. Similarly, the Soviets had (simple, but devastatingly clever) campaign plans that they would make months and years in advance and in agonising (and astonishingly accurate) detail.

Also, are there other military inclined monasteries in the Buddhist world that follow teachings similar to Shaolin? Or are they an exception like Sparta was in ancient Greece?

1. To what degree did the system of providing land in exchange for military support during times of emergency (Fengjian) continue?

2. Would nobles rule over a barony/county/duchy and collect taxes, or did the government rule and collect taxes? If the latter, what would the nobility do?

3. Would the emperor award titles that would be passed on through primogeniture? Would titles normally come with land?

I'm primarily interested in the Han, Tang, Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties, and Three Kingdoms period.

So, Chernobyl blew up during the course of an experiment to see if the steam turbine, spinning down, could still power the emergency core cooling system until the backup generators could pick up the slack (which took 60-75 seconds).

Obviously that failed, but there are still a number of RBMK reactors in operation, so I'm wondering if they tried again in a different reactor and found that yes, the steam turbine could do that? It seems like an important safety feature so I assume they must have tried again?

I'm making my way through "The World at War," and in one of the early episodes, it's implied that the Allies missed an opportunity to roll through Germany while the bulk of German forces were still conquering Poland.

Instead, the French proceeded maybe five miles into Germany but then pulled back. By the time fighting began in earnest, Poland had been subdued and Germany's military machine had been moved back to the Western front.

Why did the Allies pass up an opportunity to defeat Hitler at this early stage of the war?

To hear commands between shots?

Would be too loud?

As depicted in movies like How the West was won and The last Samurai.