Britain (or most of it), Spain and France (Gaul) were all Roman provinces that were later conquered by Germanic tribes. Yet the French and Spanish speak Romance languages, but the English/British a Germanic language (with the exception of the Celtic minorities). What happened in the case of Britain that caused them to adopt a Germanic dialect?

I understand revolutions like France or Russia where you come in and take everything. But how and when did the British Royal family say, "Okay well we're not going to make any more decisions but we're keeping our cool house"

I always see paintings of men with long straight hair or military men with short combed, but still straight, hair.

Was there any reasoning at all from Imperial Japan's perspective? I know that seeking a reasoning for genocide is generally a fruitless endeavor, but for a nation that was just a decade or two away from its shift from a feudal state ruled by Shogun to an industrial one, it has always baffled me why Nanjing was brutalized in such a grotesque manner.

Reading about the constant defaults, bank collapses, political unrest, and reconstruction required, it looks like it was doomed to failure from the beginning. France and the UK also seem to have been at least somewhat reasonable later on, allowing Germany to default many times and only reluctantly occupying portions of Germany to force compliance. There does not appear to be a malicious intent to destroy Germany, just to humiliate and humble.

OK, so i have football sources that say that Franco used Real Madrid to restart diplomatic relations and it gave a huge boost to economy. But are there any hard historical sources which suggest any of this. Was his support of Real Madrid even true or an exaggerated rumour

So I'm a Medieval reenactor (time period 1066-1485, area Europe - mainly England) looking to make my Crossbow somewhat more interesting.

Small ones are easy to set up, hide under a cloak and walk up to someone, fire a shot at point blank and walk away fluidly. Likewise, large ones are optimal for sniping from massive distances, my brother estimates some of the most powerful ones might be able to travel 200-300 metres with very little bullet drop.

So I'd like to become a Medieval assassin, but I'm not too well-informed on the subject, so may I ask:

• Are there records for Crossbows being used for assassination methods?
• Are there records for Crossbows having attachments (i.e a Bipod, Bolt Rack for quicker reload etc)?
• I know poison is a big one, but what other tools/techniques would hired killers use at the time for their assassination methods?

First off, is it more accurate to refer to them as vassal or subject states, seeing as though in reality, that's what they were? They had no choice in their "alliance" with Rome (as Capua would prove in the Second Punic War) and were obligated to provide Rome with soldiers for their armies. Is it correct to, nowadays, refer to those cities as Rome's subjects?

As a second question, and the one posed in the title, why were they called allies? Obviously, the term is much friendlier than "subject" or "vassal", but was it really fooling anyone? Also, it wasn't like the idea of conquering cities via war and annexing them into your empire was completely unheard of. Or perhaps it was because of the previous rulers of the Italian peninsula; the leagues of Etruscans and Latins, or the various isolated Greek city-states, or the united (is it correct to call them united?) bands of nomads.

Heroin, meth, pills. Was there anything like the modern drug epidemics of today in the ancient civilizations?

And why didn't they try to negotiate a peace treaty if they knew defeat was inevitable?

During total wars, like the later stages of WW2 in Germany, what kind of profit margins did the big armament companies (in this example, Krupp and Messerschmidt and the like) have? How did they justify their profit (if any) in a time of such scarcity?

Today, the hexadecimal color scale (ranging from 000000-FFFFFF) covers every color visible to the human eye. It allows standardization in graphic designs around the world. Before this system came into effect, how did people collaborate on color schemes?