I know they didn't have a written language and most tribes were small and independant. But it must be hard running a large empire like the Mayans or being a nomad tribe without having any maps. If you have access to any pictures of pre-columbian native american maps.

Was there a general ceasefire during the negotiations, it always seemed cruel to me that they waited until 11/11 11:11 to sign the damn treaty, did additional soldiers die because of the delay? Also was it possible for Germany to decline the terms and to start fighting again?

This question spawns out of a casual interest for me to use the Toltecs of Mesoamerica as a setting for a fiction story. I wanted to use good anthropology/archeology to frame the story. But the more I researched them, the more ephemeral they seemed. I've included below the sequence that lead to my question.

Often, Wikipedia has more than sufficient information for a casual interest in a topic, but when I looked there, I found that the Wikipedia entries on the Toltecs, Tula, Toltecayotl, Chitzen-Itza and related topics are a mess of contradictory stories and dates. So I kept looking further afield.

An broader Web search lead me to the pagan/shaman writings from the 1970s, where Carlos Castaneda and later Miguel León Portilla created a religious movement around the Toltec philosophies. That created a lot of pseudoscience/mystic followers. And then I found accusations in multiple places that Castenada and Portilla had fabricated much of their content. I couldn't prove those assertions one way or another, but both men backed up their claims with plenty of historical sources, so I dug into those. But digging deeper into those historical sources, I found lots of contradictions. Spanish monks in the 1600s listed dates that just didn't square with any archeology evidence. And the Spanish often seemed to have an interest in trying to prove that St. Thomas had, for some reason, sailed to the New World to promote Christ, so they "fit" the stories they collected to this notion.

The online data gets further muddled by the Mormons -- there's a deep black hole of online ancient conspiracy theories that you can wander around in for days, including that Chitzen-Itza's architecture is directly tied to the Antikythera Mechanism.

So I abandoned the Web and tried to track down peer-reviewed textbooks. And here I found good research -- research that was contradicted repeatedly every 10 years or so. That research is even cited with in this subreddit under the question: "What do we know about the inhabitants of the Toltec capital, Tula?"

Finally, I have found a book called "Twin Tollans: Chichen Itza, Tula, and the Epiclassic to Early Postclassic Mesoamercian World" published in 2007. The papers therein are from a round table discussion among multiple academics working on the Toltec question, and their position -- expressed over 500 pages -- is essentially that the Toltecs never existed.

That seems to me to be the one viable hypothesis that fits the stuff I've been reading. The Spanish asked the Aztecs for stories. The Aztecs provided stories. The Aztecs elaborated on those tales, the Spanish curve-fit those tales, then sloppy modern researchers used those tales as first sources, and they got repeated often enough that other data was then curve fit into it.

And this leads me to ask my question. Were the Toltecs entirely invented by Aztecs telling stories to the Spanish? Does anyone have further sources that I should be investigating to contradict this hypothesis?

I asked because someone from Estonia told me that Christianity was spread through the sword and that it brought oppression and slavery to Estonia.

Just wondering if that was what sparked the tensions, or if they had been present before that.

I got the book for my father for Christmas last year and I'm also very interested in religious history, so I thought I'd come to you guys to get a gauge of if the book is worth the read, well-written, historically accurate, etc.

Colonization of America:

• The Catholic church (15th-16th century) said that first man to see new land would get a reward? Why would the Church want this? What are their interests?

• Schools are teaching us the wrong story about Columbus? He was sailing to India to find gold? But he saw this new land (he knew this wasn't India) and stole the gold native americans had and made them slaves?

• Is this the start of slavery? The Africans had a more advanced civilizations (economically, politically) that Europeans back then, before they became slaves?

• Mayflower was shipping dutch and english separtists, also black slaves in US?

• If yes, this means US is based and formed on slavery?

American History:

• W.E.B. Dubois predicted that the Espionage Act would be used as an abuse of power. What is Espionage Act (explain me like im a 5 year, didn't really understood what wikipedia said)

• What are subversive leaflets?

• Did I get it right, Charles Schenck was sentenced ONLY for half a year for distributing those 'subversive leaflets' which were some military material? He was spying USA? For whom he was spying?

• Kennedy was killed b/c he knew about FBI's internal spying of americans? (at least this is one of the theories?)

• Is socialism basically marxism?

• Eugene Debs was arrested for 10 years after denouncing American involvement in WWI. Americans entered WWI after a US ship with ammunition/commercial was attacked by germans? If for real why did they enter the war, what did they won after it?

(would really like to listen to your opinions as well, if you have any)

(excuse my lack of knowledge and stupidity)

Just want as much information on it as possible. Preferably with links to sources and stuff. Writing a paper and I'm looking for a starting point

i.e. red for socialism

Specifically I want to know about English but if you know about the origins of any other language please feel free.

For example since I know English, how far back could I go to understand a specific population. If I traveled back in time to England after the Anglo Saxon invasion, could I understand them? Or even if I traveled to the other parts of ancient Germania where the Anglo Saxons/Germanic speakers came from, how well could we communicate?

I have heard they are the basis for geometry but what does that mean exactly?

I read some where that Ceretic (or Cedric) was the first King of Wessex, ruling from 519 - 534. Are there any laws, doctrines, treaties, or anything else still in use in the U.K (or Britain) to day that can be traced back to when Cedric was king?