Is it geographic in nature? I imagine traversing the Sahara desert or boating around Africa to be a difficult task. So, the usual tech and innovation trades that were associated with the silk road weren't in tact?

Maybe it might have to do with my own personal educational background as well, a fault in the USA's Eurocentric education system that hides the true developments of African nations. (Granted, I will lend myself some credit and say I know about how awesome Axum/Ethopia is, at least up until the communists). So, maybe I simply don't know?

Maybe some other elements I'm not aware of?

And just for clarification, this is before European colonization, not during or after which is generally considered FUBAR.

I'm currently watching Peaky Blinders (set in the early 1920s) and one of the characters was a tunneller during WWI. When this was mentioned by another character (Churchill in fact) I can't tell if he said it with respect or disdain. So were tunnellers seen as brave volunteers doing what no one else would do, or were they seen as lowly soldiers doing what no one else wanted to?

I think Napoleon said something about an army marching on its stomach. Based on taste alone which army in WW2 had the happiest stomachs for marching?

Suppose a British supply officer is going to meet an American supply officer. They both have all the bullets fuel and guns they want. What luxury items would they trade? Completely off the books of course.

Or did they thake a "six of one, half a dozen of the other" attitude to both empires?

As part of my internship, I will be giving a talk at a local private college about the Titanic's stop in Queenstown this coming April. I want to talk about why the Titanic stopped there, as well as some of the passengers who boarded there. I've searched my college's library and Amazon but there is nothing regarding this particular area of Titanic/Irish history. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I don't know how far the archives are opened or how the process is in general (somehow most of the stuff I find on that is conflicting).

But apart from the obvious WWII-Questions, what are others things you want to have answerd?

I'm interested in learning more about the Iran Iraq war. Can anyone recommend a book that gives a good overview of the conflict?

•Russia under the czars had political power centered on individual men and women.

•Then the country experienced a huge populist revolution only to see power almost immediately centralized in the hands of a series of leaders or strongmen.

•Most recently, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia adopted democratic elections only to find power concentrated, within just a few years, in the hands of one man.

What about Russia, or what external factors, makes this so?

Note: This is not a critique of Russia, but an earnest question, and I invite contributors to correct any of my premises.

Have there been any riots in high schools that attempted to oppose the administration? Not racially motivated riots, but students who felt like they were being 'oppressed' by the administration.

Hello all, I just had a question about the spread of Islam to Malaysia and Indonesia. I know that it spread there largely because of pre-existing trade routes, and was adopted by local authorities who wanted to have a religious connection to their trading partners (and who, you know, thought it was the word of God, and stuff), and from them spread among the Malaysian and Indonesian populaces. I believe that this is how it spread in West Africa as well, along the Saharan Trade Routes. My question is, why didn't Islam take hold elsewhere on the Indian Ocean trade networks? What was it that led it to spread more widely to, say, Mogadishu than Zanzibar? Why isn't there a larger Muslim population in the south of India (especially considering how much of it was conquered by various Muslim dynasties later anyway?)

And speaking of conquest, Islam was also spread to the Balkans by the Ottoman Empire. What made them more successful at proselytising in Bosnia, Albania, or Kosovo than in, say, Serbia or Bulgaria or Greece, even though Bulgaria and much of Greece had been under Ottoman rule well before Bosnia had?

I just got done reading about followers of Dionysus, and at the end there's this mention of Dionysiac Architects. I did a cursory search, but it's the first I've heard of this ancient society.

Dionysus is viewed as a late arriver to Greek Mythology, but an early contender since his mention in Hesiod's work. It is posited he may have roots in Crete. Put 2 and 2 together, if his origin is indeed Crete, and Dionysus predates Ancient Greece, its plausible the Dionysiac Architects are from Minoan Crete.

For an article and some training on databases, I'm interested if we have identified the earliest example of data organized in tabular form. I'm not talking about electronic tables, but rather early written tables that have recognizable rows and columns (a simple list isn't enough). I could envision, for instance, some tablet recovered from some Greek ruin that indicated taxes paid by citizens per month, or some kind of ledger indicating quantities of goods imported by a list of ships.

Do we know the earliest existing example of tabular data?

Closest thing I've gathered is that it was a more central stop for Arab traders... Is it really that simple?