Are there immediate changes, what about in the next year? Ten years? Thirty years?

Since art tend to have subjective value, what was the art market like in the Soviet Union. Would you basically "queue" for art and then be forced to live with what you got? Could people buy art from dealers with any extra rubles they had?

The planned economy interests me and I'd love to know how there artistic goods were handled in the Soviet Union.

Perhaps I am mistaken, but the United States appears to be the only country in the world where a large portion of the citizens celebrate and venerate those who attempted to secede from the nation generations after the end of the war. This appears to be the result of the relatively lenient treatment of the leadership of the Confederate States following the end of the war, allowing the further propagation of the sentiments that led to the Civil War to continue to spread among the population of the Southern States. If this is the case, why didn't the United States government impose harsher punishments on those people? If I'm totally mistaken about the roots of the modern fascination in the South with the "heritage" of the rebels, please explain the roots of the Southern celebration of the losing side of a war.

I searched for questions regarding war elephants, but I haven't seen anything like this. I'm curious as to whether they had protocols in case an elephant were to go berserk, how much to feed them, how to train them, etc. Kind of a broad question, but I'm interested in finding it out.

Surely they must have lost a battle at some point, because they couldn't achieve their objectives in that region.

I've heard they had something close to 25,000 miles of roads! This is over extremely rugged terrain, in areas prone to earthquakes, and probably didn't help that they lacked iron. So it seems to be quite the engineering marvel. How'd they go about it?

Also, following their conquest by the Spanish, were the Spanish able to continue maintaining any of the network, and if not, how long before it had mostly fallen into disrepair?

I've heard many people talk about how all white people in the South - not just those who owned slaves - benefited from slavery. Economically speaking, however, it seems like poor whites who did not own their own land might have had a hard time finding work, considering they were potentially competing with free labor.

Thus, my question: Did the existence of slavery in the Antebellum South drive down wages for poor white workers? If not, why not?

From extra reading it seems that the British were very successful both with Espionage and gaining German intelligence however it seems that most if not all German spies were subject to the double cross system. Therefore is it fair to argue that Britain essentially "won" this section of the war from the outset and what influence did this have on the war?

I've heard that Eastern Orthodoxy is able to directly trace back things, namely apostolic succession and church traditions, from today all the way back to the original apostles when Jesus was alive. How much evidence, if any, is there for such a claim?

Note: I'm not asking about whether Jesus actually existed, the accuracy of the Bible, etc. There are a bunch of good posts in the FAQs dealing with those, for anyone curious.

I'd love to hear from political geographers like Kenneth C. Martis at West Virginia or Jeffrey B. Lewis at UCLA regarding their work and any plans to update/more accesibly present it. I'm not sure the proper procedure for that, or if AskHistorians is even the venue.

Hey folks, mostly thanks to the efforts of /r/askhistorians (paging doctors /u/elos_ and /u/DuxBelisarius!) I am kind of aware about the popular history of WW1 reparations being flat out wrong, but there's these things I'm wondering about – how did this 'history written by the loser' take hold? When did historical research show 'but wait it wasn't anything like that, they could have paid'? What is a (brief) outline of how the historiography about this issue developed since 1918?

I seem to recall something about East German archives shining some new light on this, but I might be remembering it wrong. So yeah, how did we go from thinking 'too harsh, armistice for 20 years hurr durr' – or in fact, has this ever been accepted outside the realm of popular history? – to 'not that harsh, the Germans were just jerks'? I'm particularly interested in the historical research side of things, but getting to know the developments, if any, of the 'popular history' angle is fine as well.

They have a much lighter skin tone and it is extremely prevalent. Is there any connection with the slave breeding issue?

A friend of mine has recently told me about a theory that Pope John Paul I was murdered by members of the Vatican due to his commitment to ban certain powerful members of the church. Apparently they were part of the freemasons and involved in major corruption cases. However, whenever i hear "freemasons" my skeptical alarm bells go on full Red Alert.

Apparently he read the book "In God's Name" by David A. Yallop.

Is there any truth to it?

Thank you!

I'm writing an essay on this and am reading some material but it is my first time studying the topic. Thanks! :)

Is it a "myth" to think NATO was generally more advanced?

The best I can think of is Submarine Development, Surface to Air Missile systems and Anti-Ship missiles to combat NATO strength in the Air and Sea Surface.

In most non-Arab Muslim countries, even though Islam is a very strong and important part of their culture, Arabic is not recognized or used by the general population. While I understand its not necessary for someone to know Arabic to be a Muslim, considering how everything in Islam is based off Arabic, I'm surprised its not used more outside of religion. For example Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are all non-Arab Muslim majority countries. They each speak Bahasa Indonesian, Urdu, and Bengali as their primary language. They don't even speak Arabic as a second language either. Those countries have English and Dutch as their primary second language. That's understandable. As those are the languages of the countries that used to rule them. All these countries, while diverse, have cultures very strongly connected with Islam (Note: I know not everyone in those countries is Muslim and all those countries have various diverse cultures that may or may not have Islamic influences. But the mainstream culture of these countries is still very influenced by Islam). Yet despite their cultures' ties with Islam, they do not seem to use Arabic at all outside of religion. I would like to know Arabic isn't a bigger part of those countries. Also, feel free to correct me on any mistakes or inaccuracies in my statements. I'm always willing to learn.