I'm currently finishing my last semester as an undergraduate history major. Recently I've decided that I'm interested in graduate school and getting PhD. After talking to my professors, the general concensus is that I need to learn the language of the area that I'm interested in studying. I'll be European history and at some point I would like to study Scandinavia because I'm fascinated by the Vikings. So my question is what language should I learn i.e. Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, etc.

Colloquially, they're de facto synonyms. Any other terms, you'd like to clarify?

During the course of the war, a large number of war crimes were committed in anti-partisan operations. Dozens of civilians were killed in retribution for attacks on Germans or sabotage.

Notwithstanding their moral horror, were those actions actually successful? Did they deter further partisan action? Or were they counterproductive and encouraged even more resistance?

Is there any way to know? Were there any 'natural experiments', maybe different policies in otherwise similar areas?

This obviously also happened in other conflicts and wars, so evidence from these is welcome.

Since most people have probably seen footage of a satellite launch gone wrong, where the huge rocket explodes into a massive fireball shortly after launch, I was wondering if the US military (or any other military, for that matter) worried about having X-thousand nuclear missiles in their arsenal.

Even if the launch failure rate was a minuscule percentage, one or two missiles exploding after launch with a nuclear warhead certainly wouldn't be welcome news. I was wondering if anyone here could give me some insight?

What kind of uniform/armor, weapons, and general organization would the armies have during these times and how did they change as time progressed?

I see many questions have been asked about why Napoleon was exiled instead of executed. That is not my question. Rather, why was he given these military forces? I know Metternich predicted in 1814 that Napoleon would be back within two years, but surely you didn't have to be a canny poltician to sense that equipping the man with everything he needed to invade Europe (again) was not a good idea. EDIT: I should add that my source is Jan Swafford's 2014 biography of Beethoven.

Forgive me if I'm using the wrong terminology for "medieval" Korea. By "medieval" I'm mostly thinking about Joseon post Sejong.

I've read that King Sejong wanted to invent a language that was easy for the average Korean to read, to replace the complex Chinese characters used to write the language. The literati greatly preferred the Chinese and refused to use Hangul for years.

Having learned Hangul myself very quickly, I can understand how Hangul can be thought of as the "dumb man's alphabet" while Chinese is thought of as "higher" due to its complexity. At the same time, I've been reading a lot of Korean stories where it seems like literacy isn't as common in pre-modern Korea as Sejong had hoped it might be.

Is there anything significant that is left out, avoided, or in any way manipulated to downplay any wrong doing?

I am always astonished about how much we know. And how many sources are preserved. Im curious about things like Cicero's works. Do we have many old decaying scrolls? Is most of what we have, including the accounts of sexual debauchery, the result of collection and preservation by the Catholic Church? How much was recovered from the Arabs during the Crusades? Or brought to Europe by Greek refugees from what was the Byzantine Empire? How many works do we have that the oldest copies come from the Medieval Period?

Hello everyone,

I turn to you with a (sort of) broader questions.

A little background first: I am trying to learn programming by working on a game that takes place in a fantasy medieval ages. However my goal is to create a realistic representation of the medieval life around the year 1000 and now that I have created a sort of OK system for weather generation and simulation I was wondering if anyone here has any idea or information about how medieval agriculture worked? Now I checked wikipedia and several books in the past few weeks but I still am not sure about answers to these questions (the game will take place in a tempered climate):

a) What factors went into medieval agriculture? Obviously one is weather but at what time did peasants what? What weather was desirable at which month and what weather was really, really bad fir them? How much rain was good, did they like snow and wished for cold winters or preferred mild as far as agriculture goes?

b) How many people could a man working on the field support with the output? How much place was he able to work on? How much time did it consume?

c) How good was hunting as far as food yield went? How many people was a hunter able to support on average?

d) What happened in case of a catastrophic harvest? I am sure hunting/gathering was a thing but could it put an isolated village through entire season if the fields yielded poor/no harvest?

e) How long could they store the harvest before it went bad? In what form did they store the harvest?

f) As far as i.e. vegetables, apples and other products went how were they stored/consumed as they are seasonal food? Did they have any during late winter-spring?

g) As far as dietary habits go how big was a role of for example fishing, gathering etc. around year 1000 for the people?

h) Anything specific that I didn't think about that I should know about?

I am of course aware these are quite broad topics so if there are some good books/online sources please point me towards those first. Plus I won't mind shorter answers with suggestions where to look for broader explanations. I just have problem finding more about this in any books that deal with medieval life. They all explain feudalism and basic things about what they worked with and the fields but not about the above :/

Thank you in advance for any reply! I really appreciate this reddit being in existence :)

Thank you in advance for any reply! I really appreciate this reddit being in existence :)

When the room is completely dark and you move under a blanket, you see the little electric sparks. I'm guessing ancient people encountered this phenomenon at times and I wonder how they accounted for it...