I know that Vatican City maintained a position of neutrality, and that they also suffered damages during the Italian Campaign. But to what extent? How severely was Vatican city damaged, and were they considering any kind of war goal or objective? Did they have contingency plans based on how the war was going?

I realise I'm asking a lot, but anything you guys can offer would be awesome to know.

So can anyone give me some insight on what the British intended their battlecruisers to be used for during WW1? I know about battlecruisers being thinly armoured and pretty fast, designed to outrun anything it can't outgun.

Did the British use the battlecruisers for commerce raiding often? If so, did they do it alone (in the Napoleonic era frigate fashion), or did battlecrusiers always have to be escorted by smaller warships/sail in a fleet?

I know that kidnapping women to be wives/concubines has been pretty common in history, but I haven't heard much about how said women reacted to their situations. Did any of them ever respond by straight up killing their captors when they got the chance? It seems like there would be a lot of opportunities living in close quarters, even if it meant certain death afterward.

Alternatively, did women resist in other ways? E.g. breaking stuff, stealing, being crap at jobs they were given, refusing to move or do anything, committing infanticide rather than raise their rapists' children, committing suicide, etc.

I have been wondering this for quite some time now. Since there are no paved/dirt roads, how could they maneuver through a dense forest at high speeds?

I just read a book on the Wars of the Roses, dynastic wars between the the House of York and the House of Lancaster of England. I have a few questions regarding the names and Houses etc. For the sake of example I will use the House of York.

Did members of the House of York identify with a last name? For example, Richard the Third Duke of York is a member of the York House, but do all members of the York male line have a similar surname? If not how did that work? Did they just recognize that they were descendants of the Plantagenet line?

Any info would be of great help. Thanks in advance!

Another way to look at it - were there NATO ground plans to be the aggressor in this scenario?

Maybe this is a better question for AskCulinary. If so, I apologize.

It seems like the process for making chocolate bars is a huge pain in the ass, and it's extremely counterintuitive. So you harvest these cocoa beans (which has to be done by HAND, because they don't all ripen at once). You shell them. You ferment them for about a week. You dry them. You roast them until you get to a desired flavor, then crack them to separate the "nib" from the rest of the chaff. The beans are then ground, sometimes pressed to separate some portion of the cocoa butter from the solids, and then "conched" for days to weeks in order to get the desired texture, then combined with other ingredients (such as milk, butter, or at the VERY LEAST sugar) in order to make it palatable. Then you have a bar.

Or at least the process is something like that -- it just seems like an awful lot of work for what must have looked to early explorers like a dumb, bitter bean growing on some kind of tree and doesn't even have the same caffeine content as coffee. Why did we bother?

I don't want this to seem like a job posting, but I'm a well travelled and able bodied male who doesn't mind manual labor or mule work. I've also had military training in the Marine Corps. What are the best avenues of approach for me to land a job/opportunity like this? I say opportunity because I'm not trying to get paid either. I really just want the experience.

I know its the second time I'm asking this but it has been half a year since I last asked and received zero attempts at an answer but plenty of upvotes

I had to read this book as a summer assignment for my AP European History class last year and was wondering what the experts here at /r/AskHistorians think of it.

This might require some clarification. I know that in various Christian and Muslim civilizations, slavery was justified on the basis that it might cause slaves to convert to Christianity/Islam, thus saving their immortal souls, and so the slaveowners were really doing them a favor. In America, slavery was justified on the grounds that it was bringing the "benefits of white civilization" to the slaves, so again, actually doing them a favor. But you can't convert someone to Hinduism in the same way that you can Christianity or Islam, so was there some other basis for why it was justified, or were they just not as concerned with that in India?

If anyone has any information on how slavery was regarded in this respect in non-Muslim African societies, or the Americas before Europeans came, I'd nbe interested in that too.

• Was there a real Atlantis?
• Where was it located, and who originally colonized the island?
• How culturally advanced were they, and what led to their downfall?