So I really hope everyone can keep the politics out of this one - I always hear this idea that the CPC just hid away in the mountains throughout the war and left the KMT to do the work - then came in afterwards and stole the country (more or less).

Is anyone able to provide a slightly more detailed picture of what the CPC actually did during this conflict, and make an assessment on whether or not the characterization of them as having done nothing and left the KMT to take the fall was accurate or not?

I’ve been thinking about how organized crime played a big part in the 20th century, and from what I can tell at least some of the 19th century. I’m wondering- how far back does this go?

Things like organized protection rackets, smuggling and bootlegging, murder for hire services (for purposes pettier than political assassination), etc. I’m aware ancient Rome had a “””fire department””” that was basically an arson protection racket, but I can’t find much more info on that sort of thing.

I've been watching old movies recently and I've been kind of astounded by how progressive on LGBT rights some of these movies from the late 60s and 70s are. Examples I can think of are Shaft, Dog Day Afternoon, and Midnight Cowboy. In Shaft there's a bartender who's gay. He's kind of stereotypical, but generally he's just a guy who owns a bar and is gay. Dog Day Afternoon and Midnight Cowboy also have portrayals of gay men just as normal guys trying to live their life. However, what's especially interesting to me is that both of those movies also have very sympathetic portrayals of trans women. In my lifetime I didn't really see that until maybe 2015 or 2016.

Further, I don't remember any big 80s or 90s movies having significant LGBT plots or characters. It seems that LGBT people were kind of ignored for those decades. I was young, but I also remember when Brokeback Mountain came out in 2005 it was a really big thing to have such a big movie center around an LGBT romance. However, it seems like Dog Day Afternoon did that 30 years before. It's not like Dog Day Afternoon was an obscure movie either. It stars Al Pacino and won an oscar.

I'm curious if these themes in movies from that era reflect a general progressive attitude people held towards the LGBT community in America, and if the popular opinion towards LGBT people became more conservative in the 80s and 90s before becoming more progressive again in the 00s and 10s.

I know that he definitely supported it and was an insane evil man, but sometimes the ‘great men’ theory applies to obviously villainous people too. Was the holocaust a Common idea amongst leaders of the nazi party or a specific idea by hitler or one of his advisors?

In the wikipedia article for the Orca, there is an offhand statement stating that the US Navy “…claimed to have deliberately killed hundreds of killer whales in Icelandic waters in 1956 with machine guns, rockets, and depth charges”

Is there any veracity to this claim? If so, what rationale did the US Navy have?

Hi! This question has been asked before but it never received an answer. At the beginning of Moby Dick, Ishmael's relationship to Queequeg is very close to what we today would understand as gay. Queequeg grabs Ishmael and says they're married (supposedly, in his culture, this would mean they're 'like brothers'), they go to bed unclothed (a common practice at the time, as I understand) and spend the whole night talking, Ishmael prays with him, etc.

Would people in the 19th century understand this as normal behaviour? Or can we say that Herman Melville might have been putting homosexual subtext in his work - whether he was or not?

Thanks!

Please I would like books on the bronze age Both fiction and nonfiction

I am researching Georgian London for a novel I'm writing and I need to find out more about which shops would have been on which streets.

My most pressing question is: where would one have found apothecaries?

Are there any 18th century maps of London with shops noted on them?

I mean, Czechoslovakia, despite how it turned out, had an official military alliance with France and an unofficial one with the UK, but even after the war, they let Czechia to be under the eastern bloc and before that they even let the USSR "liberate" most of Czechia despite the fact that they could do so as well and possibly in time. Why? Czechoslovakia was before ww2 one if the most developed countries in the world, had world's 4 largest arms industry and was the only democracy in Central Europe prior to ww2 (and let's be honest, by far most of Czechoslovakia's development, industry, population etc. was in the Czech part of the country and the Slovak party was kind of "worsening" the Czech and Czechoslovak "statistics"). Before the cold war, Czechia has always been more western-like country I would even say. So why didn't they incorporate the country into the "western" part of Europe instead of just basically giving it to the Soviets?

We always hear that the British Army left behind an incredible amount of equipment, and I’m interested in knowing to what extent various pieces of equipment was integrated into or at least used by to an extent, the German armed forces.

Thanks

I’m studying the reconquista in the 11th century to help understand it better and make it somewhat historical for my historical fiction work. I know there are chronicles such as the Historia Silense and Historia Roderici, but I am unable to get access to them. I also want to get access to letters and charters during those time to learn the character of the characters I’m supposed to write. How can I do this? Can it be done for free?

Asking the question because am interested in how well aesthetics transcends cultural borders. I know European art influenced both Islamic and Chinese art - Abu Fazl goes so far as to speak of the "worldwide fame" of European artists - but I would like to learn more on the topic. Did Asian critics consider European works inferior, or superior, or...

I imagine a lot of the sources talk about painting (it is, after all, easier to transport), but I am interested in all arts - especially literature. Eager to learn about any nation. Also keen to hear if there is any especially good book on the subject.

Interested in the Early Modern period - say, from the Renaissance onwards - but I also welcome earlier reaction.

Is there a simple reason why the industrial revolution started in the 1800s in western europe, and not sooner or elsewhere? What prevented steam engines or the early industrial textile manufacturing of Britain from being developed sooner?

I've read about bits and short-bits for purchasing drinks in saloons, but I haven't been able to find anything specific on what the buy-ins or stakes might be for poker or faro.