Here is the passage from the book

It is only in the first century BCE that we can start to explore

Rome, close up and in vivid detail, through contemporary eyes.

An extraordinary wealth of words survives from this period:

from private letters to public speeches, from philosophy to

poetry – epic and erotic, scholarly and straight from the street.

Thanks to all this, we can still follow the day-to-day wheeling

and dealing of Rome’s political grandees. We can eavesdrop on

their bargaining and their trade-offs and glimpse their

back-stabbing, metaphorical and literal. We can even get a taste

of their private lives: their marital tiffs, their cash-flow problems,

their grief at the death of beloved children, or occasionally of

their beloved slaves. There is no earlier period in the history of

the West that it is possible to get to know quite so well or so

intimately (we have nothing like such rich and varied evidence

from classical Athens). It is not for more than a millennium, in

the world of Renaissance Florence, that we find any other place

that we can know in such detail again.

How accurate is this assertion?

Pretty much from the beginning Roman Brittania seemed like a nightmare: open rebellions, civil wars amongst client kingdoms, tax revolts, supporting of usurper Emperors. This was even before raiders and started being a major problem from the west, north and east.

Three legions permanently billeted and the building and rebuilding of 100s of forts and two walls are a huge expense.

There's also the Legion destroyed by the Silures and the one by Boedicca (and potentially the 9th :p).

My question is why did the empire try to keep the province? Was it the mineral wealth of the west, the fertile south? A prestige thing? Especially in that first 150 years it seemed like it was all expense and no payoff?

A popular claim repeated by many martial artists on the internet is that the "esoteric" nature of many East Asian systems is because they're essentially the end result of a game of telephone. That is; the styles were originally more grounded systems of combat, changed over time to emphasize theory/aesthetics over application, and the practitioners have largely forgotten the "old ways" of doing things. In particular, there are claims that many of these styles originally engaged in hard sparring, or even engaged in public competitions/duels with rival schools.

Ignoring the elephants in the room that are the surviving grappling traditions from these regions, as well as the various kickboxing traditions of Southeast Asia (which are more intuitive for people unfamiliar with these cultures to follow,) I'm not familiar with any period sources from these regions that actually say or imply this. Trying to research this just leads me to claims from martial artists themselves, who tend to share few (if any) reliable sources to back up these claims. Obviously, stories abound of masters challenging each other to fights to prove the superiority of their styles; but any further claims tend to be harder to find, at least in sources available in English.

Intuitively, this theory makes sense. But I'm also well-aware that a claim about the past making intuitive sense doesn't necessarily mean it's true. So I figure it's worth asking people more thoroughly educated in the histories of these styles. Is there any truth to the claims of these styles engaging in more "grounded" training methods? If so, how much?

How did people who had been interned in the camps fare in the real world, after the war? Were people returning to their old homes next to the people who betrayed them/supported the Nazis, etc? How effective was denazification on the community level?

I was thinking about it as if an actual event. Surely the jewish people of the time, had thoughts on magic, death etc. Perhaps even prohibitions on certain kinds of magic? The thought of a 4 day old corpse coming alive to my modern thinking is pretty terrifying.

I wonder why the story is so benignly depicted in the bible.

Hi all - I've come here before seeking some advice, and got some really great answers and leads on some histories to read.

I'm assembling a number of oral histories on specific toy products made in the 1980s and 1990s that employed grossout humor (Garbage Pail Kids, Madballs, Boglins, Gak, etc.). There was this loose thread that interested me--why did grossout humor and innovative toy design seem to wane at the same time? And I tugged on it, and started collecting stories from toy designers, sculptors, etc., and I've got some really solid stories of these toys.

And I managed along the way to find how these toy products interlocked with the overall toy industry, and how toys and TV were trying to work together, and how Mattel and Hasbro kind of scratched their heads when He-Man and G.I. Joe stopped selling millions, and floundered for a bit before doubling down on their sales data to become basically THE only two toy companies by 1995, and it's about the death of one particular evolution of the novelty gag/trick toy business, and it's about the end of the humor trading card business as a kind of master/apprentice genealogy, and it's about the death of post-WWII American satire, and it raises some serious questions about better diversity in toymaking, creators' rights, businesses' reponsibility regarding cultural history preservation... and and and.

I want to write some prose chapters to sum up what the oral histories are saying, and bring in the necessary other history to situate these things, just so the whole thing holds together... but good god what have I gotten myself into? I tugged a thread and now I've got... this. It's getting very unwieldy and I feel like I'm lost at sea. It would be a bad idea to throw everything into the book, right?

How do you all decide where to prune your monographs so that the work stands and isn't a tangle of tangents?

For context, I'm an academic reference & instruction librarian. I feel like an academic groupie who sees some interesting connections, but I don't have the discipline-specific training to know what makes a good cultural history, a good business history, a good object history, good oral history, good critical literary analysis, etc. All of what I've put together is wildly fascinating to me, and I just want to make sure it's worthwhile (and maybe entertaining, come on, it's toys) for its intended audiences.

I'm trying to figure out a few things about the Manhattan Project and its segregation of different parts of the project due to the secrecy of it all. For instance, in the different "secret cities" that were built to house MP workers and their families, how many different pieces of the project would be going on in one of those cities?

Okay,I search a lot about The Presence of Arabs/Muslims in Medieval Britain,and I couldn't find a lot of informations,I am totally aware that it was impossible for muslims to settle in Medieval Western Europe/England because of differents reasons.

However my question is not about Settlings communities,I just want to know if there was ever an arab that had reached Medieval Britain,by example,The Arabs controlled Medieval Iberia or al Andalus,were there any arabs/Muslims from Andalus that went from there to Medieval Britain,for whatever reason(Commerce,Diplomacy,tourist)...?Also,I read that there were viking from as far as sweden/Ireland that went to baghdad as merchants,so Was there also arabs from baghdad that that go to Medieval Ireland/Sweden as merchants?

I see Christians often accuse politicians worshiping Moloch or Baal, and often these accusations are not rhetorical.

What is the historical background of believing people, specifically powerful people, adhere to this particular Bronze Age religion behind closed doors?

I'm writing a story with a little bit of alternate history and my understanding is that East Slavic Mythology dates at least to Kyivan Rus' in 980~'s CE; which predates all of the current day modern states of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and so on.

As I also understand it, while the book "Russian Folk Tales" was published by a Russian in Russia in the 1800s, this like Grimm's Fairy Tales, is a compilation of stories, folklore, and myth that dates back to older tales that had been passed down, in verbal or written tradition for hundreds of years. All without getting into metanarratives and Carl Jung's symbology/collective unconscious or Joseph Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces but for context that's what's shaping my thinking here where it seems like to my mind characters like Koschei, the Baba Yaga, the Firebird, the Bogatyrs and other heroes of Slavic mythology; just because the modern Russian state widely used these characters and symbols as a part of their cultural heritage doesn't mean it's also not a part of Belarus's or Ukraine's cultural heritage.

I know that when I try to google "Ukrainian folklore" I tend to just end up at tvtropes directed to "East Slavic Mythology" which directs me to Russian folklore; so to my mind these are basically the same or overlapping mythologies? Am I broadly right or am I very wrong?

I understand also that due to current/recent events this might also be a POLITICAL question, but for the purposes of my story I feel like I have good intentions in having some of these previously widely seen as Russian characters as having more Ukrainian or broadly slavic characteristics to them; a sort of reclamation so to speak, but I am neither Russian nor Ukrainian and at the very least I want to know where factually what does the actual academic perspective imply?

So to sorta repeat my thinking goes like this; as most of "Russian" folklore arguably predates modern Russia; it is then arguable to suggest that these characters and stories are part of a broader heritage common to all east slavic cultures? (And maybe South Slavic too but that's even more outside of my ability to even ask insightful questions about!)

e to add: "Slavic" is in quotes as I mainly wish to talk about what are pre-modern cultures and peoples and slavic is a very broad cultural and geographical group in general with a lot of political and historical baggage, so the quotes are mainly just to indicate I am talking in VERY BROAD generalizations, which I hope is taken as intended for the purposes of my sorta question.

i know that when European colonization started, all of the colonies were part of the monarchy of their mother nation, but why aren't there any lords on the continent? Why is there no Duchy of New York? No Earldom of Louisiana? No Barony of Brazil?

I’m working on research for general historical topics and I am looking for recommendations for reliably accurate second-hand sources that I can read.

I am not looking for theories, etc. but rather narrative type of stuff.

Recommendations for websites?

Thanks!

So as I understand it the Sepoys objected to pork and beef fat in the government ammo cartridges on a religious basis.

But to fight the British they logically needed ammo cartridges of some sort. How did they manage?

A friend recently made the case that crooked teeth in humans only became a problem after the agricultural revolution and that hunter gatherers had perfectly straight teeth. She also claimed that this is seen in domesticated animals that have jaw crowding compared to their wild counterparts.

I understand (I think) that agriculture made teeth more susceptible to cavities, but I'd like further understanding of the straightness of teeth and jaw crowding in humans and domesticated animals pre and post agricultural revolution.

Thanks!

Are there any online libraries like the fordham university sourcebook that contains old records from the romans containing first records/reactions of newly explored lands?

No fishing for food or anything like that, just going there, hanging out and swiming, etc

It's one of common conspiracy arguments, so how are we sure they're most likely real?

I’m currently in the very early stages of planning a novel and am hoping to get some advice before I make any concrete decisions. I’m considering it being set during the time of the Jacobite Rising (1745/1746), but want to consider other historical events first before deciding. My only requirements are that the historical event is set in Scotland (or involves Scotland in some way) and that it’s set in the 18th or 19th century.

I’m sorry if this is too vague, I was in a rush writing this post. Thank you for any comments or recommendations!