Did it change their religions? Did they try to attack us? How did they react to technology?

I was supposed to be a lawyer defending America's decision with another student the prosecuting me, the conversation ended in a heated screaming match. Help us out Historians!

In an American Military History class I'm taking at uni, we covered WWI a couple of weeks ago. When the professor briefly covered the Russian Revolution, a friend of mine in the class-- who is from Russia-- asked why he referred to Nicholas II as a "Czar", saying that the last Russian emperor to call himself that was Peter the Great and it was incorrect for anyone after. Needless to say this stunned the professor and the class (full of mostly history majors, haha) as we've never heard this before. My Russian friend was very adamant that the term "Czar" was not used after Peter, and that Russian rulers were only called "Emperors" after him.

Has anyone else heard of this? Every book I've ever read that mentioned it always referred to "Czarist Russia", etc. before the Revolution. I don't doubt my friend, but is this just a language issue or some massive historical oversight of the West?

I'm asking about homosexuality between the slaves themselves or even between the slaves and the slaveowners. Are there accounts of this happening? (I'm sure there are.) What consequences do the slaves face? The slaveowners? I know accounts of (female) slaves being encouraged to have relations with (male) slaveowners to "move up" but would the same thing be encouraged of homosexual slaves?

I am doing some research on the book industry. It seems there was a pretty standard 40% margin from the printed price in the pre-Amazon era. But when did that start? When did the price printing practice start?

Most other countries that went communist changed their flag, and Cuba's flag looks like a state flag of the USA, was there ever any talk of changing it?

I could really use a bit of help in finding a book on this subject. Google hasn't turned much up for me yet. Also helpful would be the role that railroad tycoons, and the US government played to facilitate American expansion into Mexico as well. Thanks for the help!

I had a professor in college who would always say this as fact, which made me believe it. I'm now a history teacher, and have said this to my students in the past, but I have not been able to find any viable sources to support this claim. It's always fun to talk about how the world would have been different if the French were never let back in Vietnam, but I'm not quite sure if that's really what F.D.R. said. Thanks for any help.

• Both public and private worship

• By use I mean prayers to those depicted in icons, venerating them with a kiss, etc.

• I realize some answers may be tied into Saints and their veneration, and that's okay.

• Since Christianity is big and diverse, I'd like the focus to be on Eastern Orthodoxy if it's a post-Schism answer.

I love exploration computer games - from Uncharted Waters, Pirates!, space games such as Elite/X3/Freelancer, to the more recent Sunless Sea, EU4 - however I never realized how stressful/boring could be because in games, time runs at hours/days per real-time minute (in the case of EU4/X3, even second).

Sunless Sea is the most recent exploration game and the first one that made me realize how boring and stress it can be (the game did it on purpose) while travelling in the sea. 5 minutes of drifting in a direction seeing nothing but just water around was already quite painful, even though I'm chatting with friend/reading reddit/watching TV/listening to music during the same time.

Then I imagined, for example, how horrible for Columbus' first few voyages must be:

• Time. His first voyage took 5 weeks. 5 weeks constrained to a ship. 5 weeks looking at nothing but water.

• Boredom. It may sound very first world, modern problem, but there were no MP3, no internet, no console/PC for gaming, heck, even no electricity, no coffee, no chocolate. What would he do, except for writing the same sea journal entries "nothing happens today", "Pete loses 5 ducats today", over and over again? Read the same book over and over again? Solving math puzzles?

• Uncertainty. They were going in a direction that no one dared to go. They went and 3 days without land in sight...5 days...10 days...20 days...Have they ever thought of a threshold of seeing no land that they MUST turn back? Or did they have some kind of gambler's fallacy that "since we are already 30 days away, we might as well keep going"?

• "Where the heck are we?" In current time, if I got lost in the middle of some country side, I would panic a little bit - even though with GPS in my phone which is in my hand and cars everywhere nowadays, it's never possible to be truly lost. But back then, there were no map, no landscape in sight to refer their own position to, everything and the only around was just sea water...I would surely question myself, where the hell am I?

• Life quality. 30 days on the sea must be...terrible, by today's standard. No bath, no entertainment - what SORT of entertainment would they have? Gambling? Suntanning? Reading? Would sailors back then even enjoy reading? And half seriously, there were no brothels on the sea...

• Food. I guess it was just days after days of salted meat plus alcohol? Have they ever thought that their voyage might last longer than, say 50 days? How would they survive then? Fishing? What about drinking water?

Also, not exactly related to seafaring, but let's say they've discovered a land. How (soon) would they know they have discovered a tiny island, or a massive landscape (e.g. the North America)?

tl,dr: How would sailors/captains on a ship deal with the horrible life quality, extremely boredom, and most importantly, maintain a sufficiently high morale to deal with "it's 30 days seeing nothing but sea water now...how long must this go on?"

The story of Rasputin's murder tells how he survived poison, multiple bullet wounds and an attempt to be drowned. Meanwhile, he was noted for having a very distinct physical appearance with some unique features such as "phosphorescent" eyes and a gargantuan manhood.

I'm curious if there were attempts to scientifically explain his condition through biology and genetics.

I was listening to the Ask Historians podcast about the Byzantines and the commentator referred to the Seljuks as 'hordes of Turks' invading Anatolia. Perhaps I'm wrong, but for me the word horde has a distinctly negative connotation indicating a large number of disorganized and primitive individuals. According to Wikipedia, at the decisive battle between the Seljuks and Byzantines at Manzikret the Byzantine forces outnumbered the Seljuks 2 to 1 so the Seljuks hardly fit the dictionary definition of horde at least in that instance. In addition I've never seen word used to refer to a European army, for example I've never seen the crusades referred to as 'hordes of Christians' invading the Middle East. This leads me to believe the term seems slightly outdated if not outright Euro-centric and racist, akin to referring to hunter gathers as savages. But I'm completely open to being corrected.

By the way the Ask Historians podcast is awesome, and the specific episode I'm referring to is amazing. Just being nitpicky and annoying, sorry.