To follow up:

How would the Allied and Axis powers responded to such a failure?

Where there any crucial events that had to happen to ensure success?

I'm trying to grasp how we look at these events. What concepts are being applied that make Europe responsible for plagues arriving in the new world that are not applied to other peoples when discussing the black death?

I know there were a bunch of Germanic invasions, but God knows these weren't the only barbarian opportunists taking advantage of the collapse of Rome. French held on in France, Romanian in Romania, but in Britain we get...English. Was the language of these Angles and Saxons and Jutes modified at all by Latin (before its second coming with the Normans)?

I'm currently reading R.F. Foster's Modern Ireland, 1600-1972, which is supposedly one of the primary texts of the revisionist school of Irish history. The book was originally published in 1989 and I was wondering if historians have since developed a coherent counter-argument to the revisionist school. If so, what are some of the major authors that you would recommend?

I am currently reading Ken Folletts century trilogy, and am at the end of WW2. I am not sure how historically accurate the books are, but they do describe having historians to assist painting the contemporay picture, so the author must have strived to do it accurately.

The books deal a lot with politics, and are told from the point of view of working class, liberal people. Through book 1 and 2, it is described how liberal (left wing) classes quickly see the horrors of fascism, and are quick to denounce and oppose the likes of Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, and other such groups. However the conservatives (right wing) are described as initially being fond of these fascist ideas, and are very reluctant to see what we now know as the truth, that the fascist regimes were indeed, terrible.

Are there any WW1/2 historians here, who could comment on whether this is the general truth, of if it's really more nuanced than that?

Many representations of roman men's clothes I've seen are very bland; white toga, white or brown tunics. How accurate is this view? Did Romans have "formal togas" and "casual togas", or multicolored, patterned, or designer tunics, or perhaps dress sandals and workout sandals?

And a related question, how big was the textile industry in Ancient Rome? Are there any good resources about the topic?

Hello,

I'm a History undergrad and I'm currently on a half-vacation, half-writing sequester in Illinois. I had planned to utilise the vast academic libraries here to write the basis of an article to submit to an historical journal, my preference being the Comparative Studies in Society and History journal - however, I'm completely lost where to start. The bread-and-butter of setting down to formulate a research question and then going out and getting to business is mostly unknown to me beyond the stuff in books like The Modern Researcher.

So working historians and MA/PhD students: what is your working day like? How do you organise your schedule? What conventions do you use in research and note-taking - do you prefer using pen-and-paper notes or do you welcome using laptops and tablets in the research process?

Thanks!

In college, my history teacher who specialized in American slavery was adamant that raping slaves was just part of owning a slave. It was par for the course and happened close to 100% of time in a slave/slave-owner relationship.

Now I am reading A Renegade History of the United States by Thaddeus Russell, history Phd, in which he cites post-slavery surveys of slaves that determined that only between 1% and 2% of slave-owners would rape slaves. He also gives stats on the number of mullato slave children as an indicator to how rare it was.

One of the themes in the slavery sections of the book is the necessary respect the slave-owner had to have for his slaves. Basically the indirect consequences for raping a slave would massively deter doing so. He even claims that there were instances of slaves assaulting slave-masters with no repercussions. Mainly because slaves were the highest value of property. Damaging them would just be too costly.

So I ask you, reddit. What is the real truth on this issue?

By this I mean - 'Arab' in modern times is a huge national identity, with hundreds (?) of millions self-identifying as such. I'm wondering whether this is both a cultural shift - with the use of the Arabic language and Islam, seems pretty obvious - as well as a demographic one, and whether actual Peninsular Arabs began to settle in conquered/converted areas, such that it was an actual ethnic expansion.

I've been searching on the internet to find the exact miles. All I've found was the area of the Mongolian empire.

Sorry if this is too sexual for askhistorians but I know that Greeks had much different beliefs on penis size than modern society does. So when did men/women decide that larger penises become a desirable trait in men?