I just want to know if this is something recent that has happened or if there was some sort of natural flea repellent that people used to use.

Was it because Italy was always considered the least dangerous of the Axis Powers (after all, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and the Germans had U-Boats attacking American shipping, while the Italians were for the most part bottled up in their home waters)? Was it a case of not wanting to offend the Italian-American population? Or did they exist but there were far fewer of them because Italy was knocked out of the war by 1943?

I understand the purpose of the drummers and other musicians in early armies, but I've seen a few movies where they seem to lead regiments and they are the first to get mowed down. That seems like a raw deal to have to go in first armed with only a drum stick, did this really happen or were they in a relatively safe position in battle?

In some of the books I've read involving time travel, women wearing short skirts and so on are seen as scandalous; sometimes they're mistaken for prostitutes. However, I'm aware that fashion trends have waxed and waned over the centuries. Did western women of any region and era wear bare legs as a style of fashion?

I'm reading Innovation and Incentives by Suzanne Scotchmer, and she makes the claim here at the start of the book (pg. 6):

We know that the ancient world repeatedly discovered and forgot the same inventions, such as central heating and the arch. Partly these failures were due to the absence of printing, without which the recording and dissemination of knowledge is difficult. However, inventors also tended to keep their discoveries secret, so that inventions sometimes died with their inventors. Available evidence suggests that secrecy was especially prevalent in shipbuilding.

Do we have evidence that this was all the case, or is it just a random claim? Were the inventions of central heating and the arch "forgotten" and then found again, and was secrecy so big over inventions?

Thanks!

I know that cave paintings have been found in many areas around the world, suggesting that prehistoric people would have explored them to some extent, but are there any locations where evidence of exploration has been found particularly far from the surface / entrance?

Also are there any accounts of other people's making contact with Native Americans prior to Columbus?

I am particularly interested in the 19th Century, as both of these nations expanded as it went on and both ended (with more or less success) their systems of slavery.

I understand that the names given to territories are generally related to the name of the people who lived there, but then the question becomes how did they name those people? Were their own names merely Latinized or were they named for their description?

Cheers.

I went to the nutcracker ballet tonight and was left thinking that surely these types of productions occurred prior to electric lighting, and it seems insane to me that these types of productions were lit with candle light. Am I just confused on my time periods or did they have some tricks/techniques to make this happen, even just dimming the house lights seems like a monumental undertaking if you were relying on candle light.

It seems as though Judaism's polytheistic origins are completely put away now, and I have had a hard time understanding how.

Also, I understand that many Chinese died as a result of the Mongol invasions. How many Chinese of the Jin Dynasty died and how many of the Song Dynasty died?

Also, what are some good online primary sources for the battle? Thank you

Is there a consensus among historians as to whether or not were slaves used in the Egyptian construction of the Pyramids of Giza?

Why did the Ottoman Empire side with the Central Powers instead of the Entente in the Great War?

So I've been doing a bit of reading and it seems that in the years leading up to the war the Ottomans had better trade relations and diplomatic relations with the French and British than what they did with the Germans and Austrians. In matter of fact the Austrians had only recently in the decades earlier annexed Ottoman territories. The wounds were still fresh so to speak. With this in mind why would the Ottomans choose to side with the Central Powers and make war an a superior British force that had the Ottoman empire surrounded with their colonies of that of their allies? Why wouldn't they side with their traditional relations and try reclaim territories in the Balkans?

To me the Ottomans siding with the Central Powers confuses me a bit. It seems like they took the saying "keep your friends close but your enemies closer" to seriously. What was their reasoning behind it?

Supposedly, given the strictly patriarchal nature of European society in the 1600s/1700s, there are records of European women being captured by Native Americans and, upon assimilating into the tribe, choosing to stay with them due to the more free, egalitarian role women played in their society. (I realize I'm representing a broad time period and a broad group of peoples, but then again, the source I remember reading was also broad.)

Any light you can shed on the topic would be interesting. Was this indeed a real documented phenomena, and what examples are there?