Hello, I am currently taking a course in Russian and Soviet History and I have decided to write a paper about the historical debate surrounding the Ukrainian famine of the 20s with collectivization. Since nothing is ever simple when concerning the USSR and policy, I was wondering if any professors out there would know of an intellectually stimulating and non-melodramatic documentary I could watch. Perhaps something to give me a better overview and possible inspiration. I would very much appreciate it.

Kids going around collecting candy, and no mention at all of honoring your ancestors. The Mexicans do it with style, but they seem to have similar traditions to those in, say, Italy. Why is America different?

In the books he owned a service revolver (do I understand it right that as an officer he had to purchase his own gun and that he didn't "forget" to return it to the armory when he left the army?) until it was lost in an experiment. Had he kept it and had he lived long enough, when would he have to hand it over to the police?

In addition, could Holmes or Mrs. Hudson or their milkman legally own a firearm back then, and would the cutoff date be any different for them?

I've seen a few scant references and one was from a sci fi novel named "Warday."

Caveat - I do not have much of a background on this topic.

I don't quite know how to ask what I want to ask, but I've wanted to ask this since I first saw how long it took to reload a musket - and that muskets were still being using in the American Civil War.

When did rifles first appear that didn't require a soldier to bite off a cartridge, shove a ramrod into the muzzle, then a bullet, then the ramrod again before being able to fire?

If necessity is the mother of invention wouldn't an army that could wield a firearm that reloads quicker than a musket have done serious damage? If so, why did it (seemingly) take so long for this to happen?

Just finished reading figes A People's Tragedy and I want to know what happens next!

There must still be issue of the monarchs of Europe...what are they doing today and what has the last few hundred years been like for their families?

In Robin Fleming's Britain After Rome, she says that the people of Dublin, York, and Northumbria preferred the Anglo-Saxon overlordship to that of the Norse. Why? What were the Norse doing that made the Anglo-Saxon methods preferable?

I'm specifically talking about the tenth-ish century.

EDIT: Clarity.

It seems like a through and through positive thing, so I'm wondering what the downsides to it were. Sources would be nice please.

I was re-reading a text on Foucault, and came across this passage,

Foucault’s genealogies question such sociological categories as ‘society’ and the ‘individual’ by emphasizing their historical development. Even more, they reconceptualize the relationship between the ‘individual’ and ‘society’, as it has traditionally been understood. Since it emerged in the nineteenth century sociology has treated ‘society’ as a modern phenomenon, while ‘individuals’ were thought to have existed since the beginning of human history, organizing themselves in ‘natural’, face-to-face relationships. Foucault’s genealogical histories show that the formation of ‘individuals’ has been contemporaneous with the formation of the ‘social’ or ‘society’.

I thought that, by "pre-modern time", much of what addressed by Foucault (and I suppose by other philosophers and sociologists) is actually "middle age". They don't seem to address what happened in "ancient time". Religious officials who act as the spiritual intermediaries to the common person sounds really middle age to me. But of course this is an uneducated guess.

Today we understand individuals as autonomous agents, men who decide their own fate, not dependent on another person-in-authority (like the religious officials who act as spiritual intermediaries), the "creator" of their own self.

Do we know how common people in antiquity see themselves?

I'm most curious especially in early and late antique era Christianity (somewhere along 1 AD - 600 AD). But other eras/areas are also really welcomed. Thank you!

When Japan attacked the US in 1941, why did the US go to war against all the Axis powers? I know Hitler declared war against the US, and that the Allies were much closer to the US. But shouldn't the US have used its resources to defeat the attacker first?