There used to be a lot of expansion in ancient times - from persians to ottomans. Soldiers were probably killed, but I am wondering if civil populations were allowed to live peacefully in general when occupied by another empire or country?

This may be more of a linguistic question than a historical question, and I understand that I'm going to be guilty of boiling down a complicated question into a simplistic one. Why is it that we use the word "Greek" (at least in English) to describe both the ancient Greeks and the modern Greeks? It doesn't seem to be a standard we apply to other ancient civilizations -- Romans aren't often called "ancient Italians," unless you're talking about the early days of the Republic and lumping Rome together with the other socii. Modern Greek civilization seems to be significantly influenced by its centuries under Ottoman rule, although it does hold onto its Classical identity very fiercely. And I do understand how important words and names can be -- one just has to look at the anger over the Macedonia/Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia naming controversy.

Tl;dr -- Would it be more accurate to use different terminology to describe ancient and modern Greeks (such as "Hellenes" vs. "Greeks"), due to the significant cultural differences?

Apologies if I am reopening too large a can of worms, but I wanted to reinvite discussion about the subreddit’s total ban on “throughout history” questions. As I understand it, the rule serves to prevent a string of deeply annoying an uninteresting questions in the vein of “which army was the most awesome?”

However, I worry that the current rule goes too far in the other direction. By avoiding any and all questions that take on a subject or theme diachronically, the subreddit is reduced to a forum for answering questions about empirically verified minutiae. But professional history is about so much more than that. Much of the discpline’s contributions on the historicity of “throughout history” topics such as nations and nationalism, empire, borders, migration, time, and much else besides would fall to a moderator’s axe here.

Especially in light of the increasingly collaborative and trans-disciplinary nature of contemporary humanities scholarship, I wonder if some revision of that rule would produce some interesting conversations. AskHistorians is a unique community that would foster collaborative answers from scholars with a diverse set of expertise around central questions. If Mellon Foundation-sponsored fellowship programs, hundreds of conferences, and a slate of edited volumes can pull it off, why can’t a site whose mission is to connect the lay public with the contributions of professional history?

Is it really the flood of Mexicans that is the problem? People don't complain anymore about the Irish, the Italians, Brits and the Poles. They of course look like us and therefore we find it harder to complain about them.

Wasn't sure if i should post this here or on eli5 but here goes. So why did after the 17th century (and after all the 'development' in the laws and the system elswhere) laws stop mattering so much. Was this just the wild west and because of the circumstances there?

First of all sorry for the poor wording, I wasn't really sure what to ask exactly.

Basically I've been wondering how it is people go into studying in their chosen areas of history. I've recently started my degree in history and it covers a decent range of topics and while I enjoy it all, my main interests in history lie with the Roman Empire and the Viking Age. My main concern at the moment is finishing my degree and not knowing what steps to take to further my studies (though I am planning to try and travel overseas to study afterwards).

I have some understanding of ancient and medieval warfare, and it seems we know a lot more about the nitty gritty of an ancient or renaissance battle than we do a medieval one. There are of course numerous treatises on weapon use, but primarily for man-to-man duelling techniques, not massed formation combat, and very few for the real "battlefield" weapons like Bills, Pollaxes Halberds, Spears and later Pikes, etc etc.

The media often portrays medieval warfare to be an uttely chaotic, unformed mess, and while I don't believe this was the case at all, I don't have much evidence to back this up other than common sense and looking at other periods of history.The only examples I have seen of organised medieval massed weapon use and tactics have been speculative reconstructions by re-enactors, based on common sense and reverse engineered from the shape of the period weaponry.

With the decline of the earlier shield-wall model, would it be accurate to say mid-to-late medieval warfare inclined towards looser, wider spaced formations (with exceptions, of course), with the advent of advanced armour and the weapons needed to overcome it? (possibly contributing to the "orderless scrum" theory) Is there evidence of this or how period formations and manoeuvres would have been implemented? Where can I find out more about the details of massed combat and military thinking from the 13th-15 centuries (ish)

I'm finding a lot of contradicting information, although I might be interpreting it wrong. From what I understand it is one of these options:

1. They had no idea.

2. They knew Germany would attack, but didn't believe it would be so soon, so they weren't prepared yet.

I have searched for this question in askhistorians, and there are several questions about ancient civilizations (namely Chinese) finding dinosaur bones and using them in some way.

But my question is: did early cavemen ever find dinosaur bones, and use them as some kind of tools? Or was it impossible for those early humans to find these bones in the first place since they were buried too deep?

I've been wondring about this for quite some time but couldn't find any satyisfying answers in my books or on the internet. As far as I know, most early medieval countries comprised of two major demographic elements - germanic minorites who had migrated to or conquered those lands and established their kingdoms on them and their "Roman" inhabitans who had lived there for generations. What is also known to me, is that both groups had their own laws and justice systems based on their tradition and culture. However over time those germanic people would slowly assimilate into Latin culture and adapt local customs.

And here's my question, why this assimilation didn't include adapting the Roman law?

PS: I apologize for any possible mistakes, I'm not a native english speaker

I know that discipline was very important and that they practiced volley fire and reloading with live ammo, but was there some sort of boot camp or similar they had to go through?

Considering the Olympic carried over 400,000 passengers in its career, would its sister ships have done around the same number?

In the movie, it is said that Alan Turing and his team, using decrypted Enigma messages, that they 'decided who would die and who would live' by relaying what messages they could afford to to the army, determined using statistics. How much of this is true?