slavery was a given in the ancient world, yet everything i've read about say, roman slavery has it being a colorblind institution concerned with crime and defeated enemies. but "modern" slavery as was promulgated by the british and french revolved around enslaving only people of african descent. when and why did this occur? when did it become outrageous to enslave a white person and accepted that blacks deserved/benefited from slavery? the institutions name is the same yet somewhere it radically changed. why?

Age of Empires 3 represents polearm-armed garrochista cavalry as being more effective in combat against infantry, where sword-armed Hussar cavalry are more broadly useful. Civilization 5 represents this tradeoff in the opposite way, however. Lancers are a specialized anti-cavalry unit where regular knights are generalists. Which depiction of pre-industrial warfare is more accurate? How did renaissance era tacticians decide how to equip their cavalry? Or did the strategic dimensions of this choice matter little and come down to whatever was popular in the local culture?

As a British person, I have only known life through a British perspective, and an attitude to drinking came with that. I remember I was first allowed one bottle of beer on special occasions when I was 14, and by 16 I could pretty much share really whatever my Dad was having in an evening, with how much I could have depending of course on how strong it was and how much he wanted to drink it. But as an adult now, I have spend a considerable time in different parts of America, and the attitude to drinking is completely different. Of course, there’s the legal aspect of Americans needing to be 21 to publicly drink and buy alcohol and us 18, but also how fully grown adults treat it. I was stunned when I heard someone call another an alcoholic after 3 glasses of wine with dinner, when in England you’d still be driving home after that. And it’s made me wonder is this a direct result of Prohibition and alcohol being treated as something evil that has just stuck around through the generations?

I thought that salt was expensive in antiquity. Could Rome afford enough salt?

Would it be accurate to characterize the space program principally as a way to garner public support for large investments in ICBM technology/promote American ingenuity abroad vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, or was all this actually done with an eye to extending American dominance in space with something like a moon base colony thereafter? Put simply, did the US urgency to reach space dominance after Sputnik evaporate once both sides had roughly equal missile technology? Certainly more advanced missiles would continue to be developed, so this sudden fall of the space program in national prominence has always been unclear to me. Was a landing on the moon really so symbolically important?

I feel like Americans tend to idealize the old west as some representation of the American spirit where men were tough risk takers who lived free in the vast western expanse, but I'm generally led to understand that the old west wasn't much like this 20th century pop-culture view of it.

Was this a product of the boom of "Cowboys and Indians" media in the early to mid 20th century? Or was it viewed similarly by easterners contemporaneously?

I read somewhere that after World War 2 had ended in Europe, Churchill had a humiliating defeat in the British elections. Why was that? No place I've looked has given me a clear answer, so I've come here to ask. Thanks!

I want to perform a scene from a Greek theatre to my family. I need a recommendation on what scene to perform. The actors will be me, my brother, and my sister. I want the play to be no more than 5 minutes long, so please recommend a scene which could be fully understood within 5 minutes.

I know geography is not the be-all-end-all, but it seems that such a large divide would make Transylvania significantly more culturally aligned with Hungary. Historically, was there much over-mountain trade or contact between the Transylvanians and the Wallachians? I understand that part of the borders are due to treaty concessions, but how did the region end up part of Romania?

e: 'independent or part of Hungary'*

Hitler is known to have had a specific hatred for Jews, quite obviously, that was the focus of the ride of Nazi Germany and the holocaust. We know that many other groups were also persecuted similarly/the same. Were these groups added in as a “let’s throw them in with Jews” situation, or was there also a known dedicated/proportional hatred towards these groups as well?

My apologies if any of the wording is a bit crude.

Given the tendency of popular history to suggest that two people thought of as “really good friends” may have been romantically involved and the fact that people used to share beds more often, I’m wondering whether this was really a possibility.

Would it be easier or harder if the two people involved were of different social classes? E.g., perhaps an upper-class woman could live with her paid middle-class “companion” without raising eyebrows, but everyone would know what was really going on if two non-related upper-class or two middle-class women lived together.

I’m assuming anything resembling raising a child together or going out and doing contemporary “couple stuff” together (even without an overt romantic component) would be right out.

Were the British ever intent on incorporating it into Canada?

I have been watching a history YouTube channel lately and he has been going into detail about how how the west -- particularly the USA -- succeeded in rebuilding West Germany and Japan into the economic powerhouses they are to this day. Why did "nation building" succeed in these cases, but fail catastrophically as in the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq? What did the US do differently in the former than with the latter?

I have heard the argument proposed that the reason Iraq and Afghanistan failed was because of Islam and culture incongruity, but that seems weird given how different Japan was from the west.

Thanks in advance!

America cites “fighting communism” as the main reason behind political interference, such as in Vietnam or Italian politics after 1949. But why does America hate communism so much that they’d spend billions of dollars to make sure no other country adopts it?

- Or was this common for Transcendentalists like him, seeing how much of mythology goes against the mainstream churches, and their philosophy does not depend on seeking the church for wisdom?

- Or is he just showing off, seeing that he "flexed" on those who were ignorant to the Classics at one point in one of the chapters.

So I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but is there a reason for her breasts to be exposed other than “haha sexy woman with big boobs”

I've been wondering this for a while now. Caucasians seem to refer to the caucuses who's origin can be traced to Slavic peoples. They may have a relation to indo-european ancestry through their language but even that is not completely known to be true. So why did this term expand to cover all of western Europe regardless of ancestry or origin?

In the political talking nowadays you will see a lot of people throwing around the allegation that this or that political opponent is "fascist".

I think it was Orwell who said - sometimes after WW2 - that the word fascist has become so devoid of meaning that it has come to mean just someone you don't like.

However, in the beginning of fascism, probably the word had some actual meaning and was associated with some set of understanding as to how a country should be run. From what I have been taught at school, I can say for sure that the governments of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco were fascist. I just do not know what makes them fascist and how the label "fascist" makes them different from other non-leftist dictators.

I have also heard the word casually thrown around for other dictators like Pinochet, the Japanese government during WW2, and Chinese republican leader Chiang Kai-shek, as well as (surprisingly for me) Israeli leader Menachem Begin.

Didn't both parties claim to represent the impoverished German masses against the decadent bourgeois elite?