According to Martin Goodman's (and Jane Sherwood) 'The Roman World 44BC-AD180, Augustus kept such a large army mainly to secure power. He mentions how previous armies had been much smaller during Republican times and also how many of the legions saw very,very little action,e.g. legions in Egypt had almost nothing to do from 24BC to AD170. He also points out that Roman strategic defense was more about strong retaliation rather than quickly reaction or sealing off the the area of attack. Any users who could give an indication of how true is this argument is?

I've read that nomad warriors raided Mesopotamian lands on horseback while the Mesopotamians themselves still used chariots. Why did they use chariots so exclusively for so long?

*Also hiking? When did people climb mountains for fun.

Were books a common thing or something rare and treasured? Were they available to the common man or something reserved for the elite?

I am not sure if this is the right subreddit for this question. So I watched Imitation game a week ago and this was bugging the hell out of me.

The movie says that they change the enigma machine code every morning and send a weather report as the first message. Turner used this and his machine broke the encryption.

How did the German get the decryption code or know how to decrypt it? Like some of them are undersea, middle of nowhere, or somewhere fighting.

After visiting the Berliner Dom (Cathedral) I was curious about how popular/important religion was in Germany, especially during the reign of Wilhelm II. Being a Lutheran myself, I am very interested.

Without the aid of mirrors or shiny metal (such as I believe some Victorian nobles used), the only reflective surface I can think of is a pond. I assume, though, that not all cave-men would have seen themselves due to, for example, only ever seeing running water. Is this a fair assumption to make?

If possible, it'd be cool to learn about various times, e.g. Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantium, Arab/Ottoman, Renaissance, etc...

What was the scientific and what was the "religious" views of each time?

I have been watching Mad Men recently, and I was really struck by the scenes when MLK or JFK were assassinated, and everyone was sad. It really struck me as, kind of fake or unrealistic.

National grieving seems to me like kind of a forced pretense, like politicians and reporters would get on TV and say "we are all very sad" for a few days and compete to see who can be more mournful.

I may not be the average American, but it seems completely incongrous with current experience. People talk about the boston bombing and stuff, but it's not like anyone's crying. something bad happened somewhere far away in a country of 300 million people. It just seems kind of far fetched to me that there would be crying housewives everywhere.

Is that a show taking artistic liberty or was there this very real sense of national identity (deeper than just the empty patriotism of campaign speeches) that seems lost in modernity, or at least lost on me?

I just watched War Horse the other day, and it seems to me that the frontier battle doesn't really include much strategy besides running through the no man's land to acquire the opponent's trench, which is basically a match of human and resource? Is this historically accurate?

I know that slaves were expensive investments and not just casually killed for the fun of it, but were there any laws that protected slaves from their owners? If a slave owner decided to, for example, torture and behead a slave just because he felt like it, could he have been legally penalized in any way?

Also, slavery went on for longish period of time in the US. Were there protective laws that later were eliminated? Or vice versa?

I've only started reading up on this, but I keep hearing that he 'united the tribes of Arabia.' Was this the vast majority of tribes on the peninsular? And how and why did they convert?

My grandfather was born in 1928, so he was too young to serve in the war. However, he said there was an extremely high demand for boys his age, around 14 to 16, to lead programs for younger kids, say 8 or 9. These groups, he said, included the boy scouts, YMCA and the like, and saw an influx of membership because children of soldier fathers and factory worker mothers needed somewhere to be outside of school. At the same time, older leaders were themselves involved in the war effort, so it reportedly fell on people my grandfather's age.

My question:

Was this a widespread, nationwide phenomena? Were there any structural changes in the lives of US children ad I described above? Was there any "combat readiness" aspect to the BSA or YMCA camps at the time? Conversely, were my grandfather's experiences as a teenager independent of the war effort, i.e. many teenagers of the era would have been counselors anyway?

Question I have asked myself after reading the German wikipedia biography of Josef Mengele, who continued to defend his actions on Nazi ideology until his death in 1979, once even claiming he has never killed someone. Of the major war criminals at Nuremberg, only Albert Speer seems to have taken some moral responsibility, yet he actively obscured his involvement namely in the holocaust in all of his later books. So, does anyone know someone who truly confessed and accepted his guilt?

I can't imagine there was a defined border in the Roman times, or even in the Greek city-states. Am I wrong? When did borders on maps first appear, rather than just one town belonging to Kingdom A and the other to Kingdom B?

I feel as if it could have been a useful tool, and that someone, somewhere had discovered that if you spill vodka on a wound, it heals better. But I don't recall ever hearing about it in history. And After all, it isn't like alcohol was rare to come across. So why wasn't this used? Or was it?

During the second world war or any other war that utilised flak cannon

Even if the Nazis had not risen to power, would the injustice the Germans felt over the Treaty of Versailles eventually lead to World War II?

When did the practice of using monuments like the Coliseum as marble quarries for other buildings end and why? Was it mostly a factor of changing costs or did the respect for these ruins drive the change?