What was the relationship between ancient romans/greeks and their gods (was it perceived as one of trust and love, pragmatism, fear...?) Also how did ancient romans/greeks see their faith explaining metaphysics? Modern religions often portray all of the observable and even the internal emotional world as not only caused by God but an expression of God, part of its very being. Did the romans/greeks also see things this way or were the gods seen as being powerful players in a world explained and constituted by philosophical and scientific truths?

Hello! A few years back I took a class on the Shoah. At the time, the class seemed to only really get up to the late 80's/early 90's in terms of the areas that Shoah studies were exploring. My basic summary of the main questions being asked were:

• Is the Shoah most useful when viewed from the perspective of what it means as a human experience, or is it more important to be viewed from the point of view of a Jewish experience?
• Is it more accurate to describe the Shoah as having been perpetrated by the Germans as a whole (Daniel Goldhagen), or more narrowly perpetrated by the Nazi's.
• Was the targeting of the Jews (and of the Gypsy's) purely a form of cultural bigotry, or was there an equal measure of economic subjugation involved in the motivations?

I'm curious what the status of these arguments are today, and what new questions/areas of study is Shoah studies focusing on?

Edited for formatting and words.

I'd like to know what other major ontological systems were offered to explain both chemistry and the practice of medicine from the Ancient world to the 17th century.

• What was the state of chemical theory just prior to the revelation of atomic theory by Boyle and Newton? What was believed that atomic theory modified?
• Was there any similar reveal centuries earlier that made at least basic chemistry 'workable', even if it was based on improper theoretical foundations?
• What intermediate theories were offered from the High Middle Ages to the 17th century, ie what were the building blocks which were supposed to be more 'elemental' in creating other items? I know that many chemical reactions were recorded by this point, including known inputs and outputs.
• When did ancient 'humourism' cease to be an accepted method of describing the operations of the human body? I know that bloodletting was a late holdover from that way of looking, but I was under the impression that by the 14th century, examinations of corpses had already yielded similar 'in between' theories for the operations of digestion, disease and injury.

I've heard many times before that the bodies found in Führerbunker were not the bodies of Adolf and Eva, and that the body that was supposedly Hitlers was actually the body of a woman under 40 (not Eva). Is this accurate? If not, how did this story come to be?

Is there also any validity to the theory that Russians found Hitler and took him prisoner and claimed a suicide?

Seinfeld and 3rd Rock from the Sun inspired question

To put it into context. Did European powers start with trade and gradually seep into politics and eventually colonize a country under the native Africans noses, or was did they march in with X number of troops, shoot/capture the chieftain and take over?

A long time ago, when I was in college, I remember my professor discussing Ancient Mesopotamian art and culture. In that lecture, she stated that when you see an upside down flower next to a person it meant that they were meant to be understood as deceased. It was a particular flower, and I can't for the life of me remember, but I've been fascinated by the idea ever since. Can't shake the memory. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!

I'd heard the Romans and Greeks consumed them en masse before Olympic games and that it was an ancient form of doping, is this completely fabricated or is it true? If so, did it actually work?

Whilst reading my first World History book (J.M. Roberts), I've come to notice that there is, to me, not really a clear distinction between barbarians and the "civilized" world. Some barbarians have culture, music and even agriculture. What makes them barbarian?

"Reasonable" is of course subjective, but what are some policy platform points that are in the realm of "debatable" policy by today's standards (either historically relevant or still relevant today).

And we should maybe limit it to polices that were distinctly associated with the Nazis in contemporary German politics. (e.g. the policy of putting thieves in jail wouldn't be a very interesting Nazi policy. )

I'm watching the Tudors, and Katherine Howard told her ladies that they must all dress "in the French fashion." But I didn't notice much of a change in costume between their clothes in that scene and the next compared to everyone else. Except frilly shoulders.

So, other than shoulder frills(?) what was French dress like at that time that Katherine would have been emulating? (And what was the comparable english fashion.)

Latin obviously was the language of the elite but did the plebeians and slaves outside of Italy adopt Latin? Would the lower classes speak Latin in places like Gaul, Iberia, Britain, or Carthage?

Also, did the Romans ever try to replace Greek with Latin in their eastern provinces?

I came across this in a completely unrelated forum. Although I have found that this wasn't the immediate origin of the company, which used carrier pigeons, it could be a anecdote about later policies or other companies altogether.

The more general question is, Did news agencies physically race news from one place to another?

How is it that in the 20th century with better antibiotics and other medical advancements the Spanish Flu after the Great War killed more people than the Black Plague did in the Dark Ages when actual medicine was pretty much unheard of?