Boston Post road runs from Boston to NYC and led to the first major highways in the US. It also would have been covered in feet of snow during blizzards. How was it cleared for horses and stage coaches? How did this practice change over time?

It occurs to me that men's neckties -- although I happily wear them and think they are beautiful -- serve no real purpose other than decoration. I'm assuming this hasn't always been the case. I'm wondering in what decade/century the necktie became an impractical fashion accessory.

They must have realized that Europe had not always been Christian, right? Did they simply ignore their roots or only condemn them when acknowledging them at all?

I'm watching a set of documentaries given to me by this subreddit which follow the war on the Russian front 1940-1945, and then a small section about Manchuria. In the documentaries, they make a lot of mention of von Manstein and his leadership around Kiev and Sevastopol during the invasion of Soviet Ukraine.

I did a little research on von Manstein, and ignoring how odd it makes me feel knowing I live down the road from where he was interned following his trial at Nuremburg, I wanted to know why he had such a following amongst non-fascist nations following the war. The fact that there was international pressure from Great Britain, the United States and even France, to have his sentence reduced, which did infact lead to his early release from prison after direct pressure from Churchill.

So why was a man who was directly involved in the invasion of Russia seen as.. well not necessarily a hero, but someone who we should be easy on? This is in no way a question on whether or not he was a criminal, surrounding his anti-semetism, his actions on the front or even his ill health... I just want to know what the people of the western allies saw in him.

For context I'm a third year history student at universit working on a dissertation on Veneto-Ottoman relations in the 15th and 16th century. I have found (and so far read some of) a great deal of excellent secondary sources from historians like Dursteler, Pedani, Faroqhi, Casale and Brumett to name some, but its primary sources I need more of.

I already have a number of primary sources, largely from travellers' reports, as well as English sources in the Calendar of State Papers, but it's Italian sources that I'd love to use, particularly the Venetian State Archives.Only problem is I don't read Italian/Venetian...

Can anybody point me in the right direction for examples of Italian sources of 15th/16th century (especially on the Ottomans) being translated into English? Or any additional literature that they know about?

I hope this is the right place to put this. Thanks in advance

I realize that the overlapping period of time between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Internet as a social phenomenon in the mid-90s is small to nonexistent, but did the Soviet government at least experiment with global computer networking?

From what I have gathered, the speech was written down in the Chronicles of his close confidant, the logothete Georgios Sphrantzes, but Sphrantzes' text doesn't seem to be uploaded somewhere.

Does this speech even exist in Sphrantzes' text? If yes, can someone please link it/write it?

29 years? 79 years? 149 years ? 299? where is that line crossed?

As I understand it Hannibals army was ethnically and linguistically diverse fielding carthaginians, numidians, iberians, celts, Greeks and some italic peoples and probably other mercenaries of foreign extraction. The diversity of his army coupled with the fact that his campaign against Rome lasted 15 years would suggest that there was a strong possibility of a lingua franca developing.

I have sporadically seen the claim that 80 million Sikhs and Hindus were killed by Muslim rulers. This seems like an exorbitant number for a conflict in a pre-Industrial setting, can any of you tell me if this number is just a guesstimate or if it is accurate?

Thanks in advance.

Hey everyone.

I'm doing some research into a novel at the moment. I appreciate this is a big field/question, but does anyone know of minerals, used in the Bronze/Iron ages, that had (and still do have) large deposits in Europe? Were there any good places that these were traditionally mined from?

I was reading a book on the Italo-Turkish War that dwelt on the uneasy alliance between the Turkish military and local Mujahideen in what is now Libya against the common invader which had me wondering: how much of a problem did radical interpretations of Islam pose for the Ottoman Empire in its later stages?

Was a combative definition of religion a component of the nationalist movements in the Middle East and North Africa?

Thanks in advance!

I am studying how the Buffalo Soldiers helped secure the West and continued the spread of white domination, thus beginning the construction of an imperial nation. My professor mentioned them as liberators but I can not find any support for that notion until at least the Spanish-American War.

I'm not a big history guy. I just over-think a lot. And the one thing I always think about is all the history that just wasn't recorded and we'll never know any of it happened. I'm sure there's some crazy shit that went down and was important in shaping the future, our present time, but no one wrote it down or painted a picture or took photographs. Makes me wonder, what important things are happening now that we should be keeping records of but don't. I feel really weird thinking about lost history.

Also, which 'dark' periods in human history do you find most fascinating and wish we knew more about? Dark in the sense we don't know enough.