I have recently started brewing beer and I am always cleaning and sanitizing my equipment to keep stuff from being contaminated. I have heard that beer is one of the oldest products ever created. So how did people in the ancient past keep their stuff from spoiling ?

I know nothing about post-War France, but was de Gaulle really not trusted by Western leaders? I've read that Eisenhower wouldn't allow France to have a nuclear program because of his distrust of de Gaulle. Did he have his own agenda as a politician?

Someone commented on this issue. Was he right and if so, how did it affect him?

Something clearly happened to make Viking raids obsolete. If they were still necessary for the Norse people, and it was just a matter of their neighboring countries becoming so good at fighting them that Viking raids couldn't happen anymore, Scandinavia would have experienced massive poverty and famines and never have progressed. It can't have been improved climate conditions in Scandinavia either, if anything things got worse with the beginning of the Little Ice Age in the mid-13th century. The only other thing I can think of is technology, but could it have progressed so much in the 11th century?

So how come Scandinavia transitioned from a land populated by people that were seen by the rest of Europe as low-tech "savages" who had to plunder (even settle, in some cases) more fertile lands to survive, to a collection of "typical" Christian medieval kingdoms who had normal diplomatic relations with the rest of Europe? How did they manage (without raiding) to achieve a level of material comfort high enough that their society stopped being centered around war and raids, and why couldn't that happen during the Viking age?

Hello, I'm part of a tight knit group of a dozen or so Bretons that have decided to construct a settlement near the ruins of the Temple of Mars about 8km outside Dinan in our homeland of Brittany (our reasons for doing this are our own). It's 1220, and we're well enough off to hire laborers as well as a few men-at-arms, for a total of ~50 people. Currently, we're constructing shelters, a storehouse, and light fortifications, though we've been carefull to avoid anything that might be construed as castle-building. We hope to establish a small, enduring community here.

We've not actually asked anyone for permission to do this - will this be a problem? Who can we expect to first show up at our door with some demand? And what sort of demands might they make of us?

And as a sub question, what parts of this scenario are unrealistic, starting from the assumption that we have this tight knit group and decent resources?

Apologies if this has been addressed elsewhere, I was not able to find a similar post.

This is frequently mentioned here on reddit and elsewhere, but is it true, and do photos that claim to document it come from reliable sources?

As we are all taught in school, Europeans brought diseases that the Native Americans didn't have immunity to and most died from that. Wouldn't there be many American diseases that the Europeans wouldn't be immune to? Why wasn't that an issue for the settlers?

The majority of religions and cultures at the time were / are still very patriarchal , did the culture of the Norse and Scandinavian Vikings influence for gender equality, especially when they integrated into the British islands?

My understanding is that all the major WW2 powers were working on nuclear weapons in some capacity and that there was a major British effort in Canada (code named Tube Alloys) that, after the US entry to the war, was folded into the Manhattan Project. My understanding was that there was an agreement of shared technology and research from the joint venture but that the British lost their only copy of that agreement. It was made between Churchill and Roosevelt and Truman did not want to honour the agreement with Attlee.

Is this correct and if so how did this happen?

A recent AskReddit thread on the atomic bombs got me thinking. The American gov. (and allot of average Americans from my personal experience) say they had to drop the bombs because an invasion of the main islands of Japan would have caused 10x or more military and civilian casualties and because of that the bombs actually saved lives.

Yet, did this implies the US HAD to invade the mainland, like achieving total-surrender was the only option. But at this point Japan had been pretty much defeated right? The US had taken their empire from them, the US homeland was no longer under threat. Why couldn't there have just been a ceasefire and peace? The Japanese had to have known their position was hopeless, especially with the fall of Germany and Russia about to enter the theatre. Surely they would have accepted any deal that left them in control of Japan and stay alive?

I'm strictly talking about the USA period of prohibition, a time that is associated with organized crime booming, which people claim was caused by the illegal booze business

But did it actually fail at reducing alcohol consumption or is it just a myth?
If it didn't, then why not?

And if it was true, what stopped them from an early silk road style trade route. I have read the merchants of the Roman empire would constantly venture past their borders to trade with the "Barbarian" peoples, such as in the British isles before the invasion. Was it the constant threat from the Parthians and related empires that kept Rome from ever considering the far east for trade?

I'm a beginner, so I wish to make sure buying them is the right call before spending a huge amount of money. I'm having second thoughts because I was told that cambridge history series is generally for people properly trained in historiography and not really friendly for rookies.