In the Bible, Quran, Vedas, etc., there are many passages regarded by believers as direct quotes from a deity. Is there anything like this concerning Quetzalcoatl?

I asked this here last week, but instead of a "yes" or "no" all I got was some jackass who wanted to mockingly dangle his/her academic superiority over my head.

Did the UN make them? If so why? Did decolonization led to a decreased standard of living in Europe?

Visited the chateaus in the Loire valley last month, curious about the history.

Thanks.

I'm reading Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell which is set around the Civil War in America, in plantation south. But it's written in 1930's. There is a lot of pregnancies that occur throughout the novel and it's always pointed out the as soon as women are pregnant they try to hide it or stay inside and not see anyone. Why do women hide? Or is the novel not accurate?

The author tries to explain it by suggesting it's something to be ashamed of. How did this notion come about? It seems extravagant to have women holed up for the better part of a year.

Was there a state military with formal training? Or did military power belong to warlords who had their own local armies and shifting allegiances? Reading about the Three Kingdoms period it sounds more like 8th century Byzantium where armies were directed by generals who had varying degrees of loyalty to the emperor.

Did they hate each other like Pointcaré and Clemenceau? Or did they share the same views?

I love the old stories from antiquity which just happen to have men killing with impunity at no moral cost; in the bible there are passages where God commands to kill even infants; and there are, of course, all those horrific stories of what man can do to man from the Inquisition to the last crusades.

Today there's a stigma with killing. Watch almost any movie and even soldiers who kill show guilt. There's talk about the consequences of taking a person's life which burden the inner life. My supposition is those feelings presume a prohibition against killing. True or not, when did killing become codified into laws and when did -- what I'm assuming is a modern feeling -- of guilt start? Is there a certain culture or time period from which it fanned out, or does it happen spontaneously as cities/communities grow larger? I'm really interested in how we go from boasting about the number of people we killed to avoiding taking a life at any cost -- and I'm not asking solely of war.

I've just finished an A2 course on Germany from 1900 to 1945. One of the sections of the course was debating a 'controversy' about the nature of power in the Nazi regime. For that part, we basically were told that the strong dictator/weak dictator argument has been ended by Kershaw's 'Working Towards the Fuhrer' thesis. Is that true or is that oversimplified for dumb 18 year olds? Additionally, how respected is Kershaw as a historian?

This is a question of mine coming from my time playing Rome Total War. It was always weird to me that each faction of the Roman empire could expand at their own will but ultimately answered to the SPQR (senate)

Any further information on this would be awesome.

Would the people who inhabited Mesopotamia be considered their own distinct race or is there a race alive today that has more or less the same genetic characteristics? Are their entire races that have died out? Was racial diversity higher in the past? How many races on earth today existed in the same form in antiquity ?

By race I mean large groups of people that are visibly distinct from each other I.e. Indians, Arabs, Asians, caucasians, Africans , etc.

I feel like there's a major disconnect with history lessons that public schools give with regards to the history of North America. There's a subtle implication that history didn't start until Westerners showed up, but there's got to be a lot more to history than that. Did any Asian cultures have any idea about a landmass across the pacific?

I often see a range of answers to this and I'm not sure what to think now. I've seen everything from the Akkadians to the Neo-Assyrians to the Imperial Romans.

A recent podcast I heard even claimed one of the Sumerian rulers (of Lagash I think) had a standing army. He was the one that had unbroken victories for decades and beat a coalition of Sumerians, Arameans and Elamites IIRC. His name escapes me but I hope someone knows who I'm talking about.

In 18th century written works, the first letters of certain words often appear capitalized. An example, as written by Benjamin Franklin, reads like, "I should think it no Trouble to hear their Complaints if I could be of the least Use in accommodating their Differences; but since that was not likely, I could only wish as I had a Regard for both, that they would go on to the End of their Term as quietly as possible, since that would be most to the Credit of both." Why was this style used? Did it have any particular significance or was it just an 18th century curiosity, like s's that look like f's? And how did it fall out of practice?

It seems to me that China should be able to beat Japan in a war by sheer numbers alone. So, how has Japan been able to compete and in many cases win against a much larger country and populated country than itself.

I've seen multiple allusions to this idea without a firm grounding in historical fact. The suggestion is that the concept of multiple criminals and unrelated acts fit more easily with the communist world-view than that of the lone killer. This would seem to be reflected in the originally hampered search for Andrei Chikatilo.

Did the USSR genuinely perceive certain ills, including serial killing, but be indicative of capitalist society and not inherent in human nature?

It seems understandable that in a day and age where almost every decade is different from the next, we see a measurable cultural divide amongst generations. Off hand I feel it has a lot to do with technology. Therefore, it would stand that past generation held more of a cultural unity amongst generations with the slow changes in technology...but I dont know for certain.

I am specifically interested in soldiers in Europe who were recruited not from nobility. For further simplicity, let's even focus the question on Spain, France, HRE lands.

Was there a screening system that determines how to best assign a particular soldier? Could one switch roles easily ("Can I trade you my arquebus for a pike?")? Or did one have to switch roles over time ("Gee, I lost my halberd so now I have to carry this stupid pike!")?