Talking about the Confederate flag and a friend dropped this on me

No part of the Civil War was about slavery...winners write the history books, and they write them to show themselves in the best possible light.

The south had outlawed, under states rights, slavery before the war ever started...by 1860, every state that joined the Confederacy had declared that only current slaves were slaves...their offspring were free, no more trade or sales in slaves, no more importation, no more indentures sold.

Being free takes experience and practice, as there is a LOT involved in being an unfettered man...the South understood this, and arranged to introduce a population of free blacks that understood to their core what "free" meant, yet didn't dump a ton of people into society and the economy with no practice at being free or exercising self-responsibility.

The form of "liberation" the Emancipation Proclamation took is the root cause for much of our current racial tension and conflict.

I would guess this is pretty far off base but may have some truths in there. Can you clarify a bit?

How did a nation like Bohemia, modern day Czech Republic, that was part of larger Germanic empire (in the Holy Roman Empire) manage to maintain a separate cultural identity?

I always wondered how a city was created from nothing, and colonies may explain it.

Like how many and what kind of people were sent, what did they survive of, how about women, how long until it became big as a city?

Also, what enjoyable sources are there about it?

I find it interesting, given the revisionism that appears everywhere nowadays on the internet, that the Charleston killer identified the Rhodesian flag as representing values akin to his. I grew up in Rhodesia and consider the laws of that state similar to - variations upon - Apartheid laws. To what extent do historians agree/disagree with this? Was Rhodesia an Apartheid state?

I recently watched The Boy in the striped Pajamas and read Anne Frank's diary. I just want to know why did the Germans hate the Jews and why did the Germans they apprehended the Jews? More so, what happened to the Jews? What is the Holocaust? Sorry if this is a stupid question.

Did they call each other shortened names - Matthew Matt or did they have "middle" names like john "bear strangler" McGee?

Of course this doesn't include scenarios where the Americans were ambushed by Moros with bolos (big knives) I am referring to battles waged by the Americans against the revolutionary forces which may include trench (which in the Philippines, usually depicts the kind of combat waged in their movies regarding this time) or probably Line combat if in the latter part of the 19th century it is still in use..

I decided to ask this question out of curiosity since we technically didn't have the best of generals probably only 1, and all of them except General Luna never went to a military school as far as I know.

I know that the Phoenicians had trading ports in Iberia around this time, so the journey must have been possible. How long would it take, and how dangerous was the journey?

Did they mug people did they steal cars?

So I was reading about how the ancient "catoblepas" was actually just a wildebeest. Yet this didn't stop Pliny the Elder writing things like this:

Pliny the Elder (Natural History, 8.77) described the catoblepas as a mid-sized creature, sluggish, with a heavy head and a face always turned to the ground. He thought its gaze, like that of the basilisk, was lethal, making the heaviness of its head quite fortunate.

or Claudius Aelianus from writing stuff like this:

Claudius Aelianus (On the Nature of Animals, 7.6) provided a fuller description: the creature was a mid-sized herbivore, about the size of a domestic bull, with a heavy mane, narrow, bloodshot eyes, a scaly back and shaggy eyebrows. The head was so heavy that the beast could only look down. In his description, the animal's gaze was not lethal, but its breath was poison, since it ate only poisonous vegetation.

Did Pliny actually believe a wildebeest could kill you just by looking at it? Did Claudius Aelianus really believe they had poisonous breath? I mean, these were intelligent people. Just as intelligent as, if not more intelligent than, the average person nowadays. How could someone see a wildebeest and believe this stuff? Even if Pliny never actually saw one and only heard about it from others (pretty common back then), it still seems weird that he would believe this stuff.

So was this just satirical stuff, or did they actually believe it? If they did believe it, then why and how? I mean, obviously nobody ever died from being looked at by a wildebeest.

Did anyone acknowledge and lament the "death" of the galley ship, which had existed in different forms since antiquity?

A popular claim is that five United States presidents - McKinley, Harding, Wilson, Truman, and Coolidge, were members of the Klu Klux Klan. I've had a hard time verifying each case, though Truman's membership seems the most clear. Is there truth to any or all of these claims?

The narrative I've always heard is that in WWI technology had surpassed strategy; the old viewpoint of just charging directly at the enemy didn't work because, well...machine guns. With no unique ideas, it became trench warfare because attacking was futile.

So...didn't they do the exact same thing 25 years later when they stormed the beaches of Normandy?

For example, was it popular to visit locations like Northern Michigan's Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes or parks like Yellowstone?