When does historical work 'get started' on newer topics/people? It seems like Obama is going to have a fairly decent amount of historical consideration, and may be Bill Gates, possibly Tesla/Musk too or at least the people associated with the "Mars race." It seems like the rise of the smart phone would be something future historians might look into, too.

Are there currently 'historians' working on cataloguing everything things these to be studied later down the road? Is that even allowed for somebody who's considered a "historian" to begin working on somebody or something who/that's still 'making' history? Or is there just some point where stuff gets moved from the realm of promoters/PR people to actual historians with real degrees?

Could a freshly graduated history major choose to start working on Obama or Smartphones or whatever else, knowing that it'll eventually have some historical merit in the coming decades?

Did it end up sinking, did they use the parts for other ships, did the ship wreck, or something else?

I don't get why freedom of the press was acceptable and yet freedom of speech wasn't. Aren't they essentially the same thing? And even in that time, wasn't it easier to disseminate information through printing (making freedom of the press more dangerous than freedom of speech)?

edit: I am referring to the states of the United States of America

I've just finished reading Timothy Mulligan's Lone Wolf: The Life and Death of U-Boat Ace Werner Henke (Praeger, 1993). I was really impressed by the way that Mulligan collated U-Boat war diaries, Kriegsmarine high command records, and Allied naval records to create a rich, contextualized account of Henke's career.

I have two more U-Boat books on the way, U-Boat commander Peter Cremer's memoir and a biography of Wolfgang Luth by Jordan Vause, published by the Naval Institute Press in 2001.

My question, though, is: what are the best academic/archive-based books about U-Boats during WW2? I'm looking for work that shares the strengths of Dr. Mulligan's rather than memoirs or trade press books.

Just why.

I've heard that there were non-francophone groups that participated in this rebellion, and in fact Wikipedia does outline a few Anglphones that were involved as supporters of the rebellion. But as a French-speaker going through the Quebec French schools, there was no mention anywhere of anglophones being involved. I understand this as a means to manipulate history to appeal to a sense of nationalism, but I want the truth.

I was just curious to see if there was ever any fighting or whether there was just a real long gap.

So for example i read that Hitler was using drugs. Did any of the others, i.e Stalin, Mussolini, Mao etc, use drugs?

In The Plantagenets by Dan Jones, the author repeatedly stresses the importance of English mounted archers during campaigns throughout Britain and France. But he adds that these archers rode to the battlefield on horseback, then dismounted and fought on foot during the actual battle. Other sources differentiate between foot archers and mounted archers in troop estimates at Crécy.

So, is there any evidence of medieval English archers firing from horseback in the manner of Plains Indians? If not, what was so significant about the fact that they rode to the battlefield on horseback that historians still refer to them as "mounted archers"?

And how would the logistics of resource transportation have been managed?

I encountered the claim about eradication of hunger in Charles Mann's 1491 but am having a hard time finding more information. His bibliography cites Vargas Llosa, 1992 "Question of Conquest", American Educator. I'm not sure how reliable that is.

There seems to be this "common knowledge" that the emancipation proclamation didn't actually free a single slave. There always seems to be a lot of cynicism around it. What was the real impact of the emancipation proclamation?

Also, why is it the effect of the words is not seen as granting rights to slaves in the same way it has been written in some court opinions that the current executive action grants affirmative rights to undocumented immigrants?

Thanks!

How do I go about it? How much does it cost? How does it get paid? What if I also wanted to send a letter to my homesteading brother out in Wisconsin? Would it work the same?

I read somewhere that Pythagorus burned 100 oxen, just to clear his head. What was the Agora like in general? Are there any good sources to find out?

I know this question technically spans three centuries and hundreds of unique people groups, so I apologize in advance for the generality.

I've been reading a lot contemporary accounts of captivity narratives (think Mary Rowlandson or the Oatman Sisters) all of which share elements of seeming very embellished and with an obvious bias/agenda and racial bent.

How much of the (sort of weirdly parallel) facts of these tales would have been accurate to the true experience, and which were more about a clutch-your-pearls genre? And why did Native American tribes tend to take female hostages? Was this cultural, sexual, or economic?

Edit: I meant Operation Bagration, not Barbarossa. Sorry for the confusing title!

I hear a lot about how attacks are carried out on a grand scale - i.e. this many tanks and men attacked here and after a struggle overcame the enemy, etc. etc. But I don't know much about how the men on the ground would have attacked and overcome the enemy, the steps they would have taken, etc. How would they typically go about it?

I've chosen platoon sizes fairly arbitrarily, it seemed like a size large enough to have been examined before and small enough to cover the kind of tactics I'm asking about. I'm by no means a military buff so if there's a more appropriate unit size, or if you feel the topic focus needs narrowing, please do answer based on how you think the question is best approached.

I have also chosen two specific time periods to make it a little less broad: the beginning of the war in the east at the height of Germany's power and the beginning of the counter attack of Bagration when the Red Army was a lot more experienced and felt capable of beginning a massive campaign like Bagration.