I'm under the impression that it's Manhattan, with Andrew Carnegie's contemporary steel method and all that jazz.

14 of the first 31 Nobel prizes in chemistry went to Germans, lets not forget the likes of Plank, Schrodinger and Einstein. What were the conditions that contributed to this?

I am currently studying the Reconstruction period and really struggling to get my head around some of the chronology and different policies. I know it made a lot of news when Mississippi finally ratified the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery last year. I thought that one of President Johnson's prerequisites for readmission into the Union, even before the onset of Radical Reconstruction, was that the states had to accept the end of slavery. So how was Mississippi readmitted into the Union when it refused to ratify the 13th Amendment?

When Mehmed took Constantinople, he claimed to be "Kayser-i Rum" "Caeser of Rome", and in many ways carried the tradition of being a "Roman" ruler forward even if it was a tenuous claim.

I just wanted to know if there are any historical sources indicating the use of the term "Romans" in Ottoman life in following years, and if so at what point that ended.

Google isn't very good with medieval demographics and economics

The obituaries of The Duchess of Alba state this as fact but I have not found any that offer a rationale for this protocol. Would love to know more.

I'm researching for a little book I'm working on, where one of the main characters is the leader of a band of bandits in the middle ages. This group becomes a nuisance to the state, and a detective comes after them. Are there any documented cases of this happening, and how were their methods (forensic and otherwise)?

I recently read a book on the fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna. In it there is a vignette about Lord Castlereagh, the British Ambassador, sitting in his carriage outside Paris having an improvised lunch of pheasant salami and champagne. This got me wondering, was champagne such a common wine that Castlereagh was able to get hold of a couple of bottles with relative ease? Or is it more likely that Champagne was a the relatively expensive drink that it was today and he was able to obtain it because of the dislocation caused by war?

All across Europe and in many other parts of the world, marriage seems to be the mechanism to ally monarchies with each other. Why?

And how was this information transmitted to the public before clocks were cheap and small enough to own?

(Today's idle breakfast-table argument in the Caffarelli household.)

I am aware of that the polish discovered the machine in about 1933 and began their analyzing of it and eventually decrypted the code. I am also aware of that the British and French military met in Warsaw in 1939 and brought home 2 Enigma machines.

That being said, i read an article concerning the capturing of the submarine U-110 in 1941 during a North Atlantic convoy battle. In this submarine they should according the the author have found an Enigma machine. After further reading of several articles about this, some might say that the capturing of U-110 and from this, obtaining an enigma machine for the cryptologist's in Bletchley park, played the major role on decrypting the enigma machine.

So who decrypted the code - or did it even matter, obtaining an enigma machine from U-110, two years later?

I heard in one of my history classes in college that in the beginning of WWI, European nations didn't know how to fight with modern weapons and were still being taught as if they were using ball and muskete, and that it took them a little bit to adapt to the new style of war. But when the Americans went to war, since the army had experience in the Civil War and as well as the Spanish-American War, that they knew right away how to wage war in the more "modern" era.

Particularly in the early modern period- 1500 to 1800, or whatever you define it as being..

Or did they just view Islam as a great big monolithic bloc?