I was watching an old episide of West Wing and Rob Lowe's character makes the claim in season 3 ep 1 that terrorism has a 100% failure rate and it is more likely to inspire the opposition to rally support- making it doubly ineffective. Is his first point true? Do historians believe terrorism's track record to be that bad? I know it's just TV, but can terrorist group claim lasting wins? Or is that word too politically charged slash ambiguous, aka 'one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter'?

I've asked most of my history teachers this question and never gotten a solid answer. Often I've heard of Jewish people's persecution in history, I've wondered if there was a time/place where they held state power?

Any suggestions?

How did it effect the rise of the Nazis? What about their origins? Would the party have been basically the same without it?

For example, did tribes on the Northern Plains know that oceans existed? Did the Seminoles in Florida know about the mountains out west?

After Washington, the precedent was set for all presidents to serve for a maximum of two terms. What kind of public outroar or backlash, if any, did Roosevelt's decision to seek a third term cause?

I believe that the US Navy has generally been weak, but had a massive build-up during the US Civil War. Was the wartime Union Navy stronger than the contemporary British Royal Navy?

I was reading that the most effective way of attacking a star fort was to build offensive trenches parallel to the fort and then have zigzagging ones approaching it in order to stay out of fire from the fort and get close enough to bring the attackers cannons into action. But it seems like the trenches would still be vulnerable to mortar fire, were star forts loaded with tons of mortars and a huge amount of ammo that tried to knock out enemy cannons, or was this not as effective as I'm thinking it would be?

I'm interested in how white abolitionists were characterised by slavery supporters. For example, were they seen as 'soft', bleeding hearts, naive, 'n*****-lovers', interferers, self-righteous (what we might term 'social justice warriors')?

I was watching John Adams on HBO and they tar and feather a customs agent. It looks brutal and it got me wondering whether people survived this sort of thing? What were their injuries like if so?

East Germany had the highest GDP per capita of any Eastern Bloc country. Also, they had the second strongest military, and were at times able to defy Soviet influence on some matters.

How did East Germany become so powerful within the Eastern Bloc?

Why was/is it so influential to our art culture?

Did pirates during the Golden Age of Piracy smoke and what would they have smoked?

I was wondering how it could be that in ancient times public nudity, sexually related topics and even semipublic sex could be a thing, then be outlawed (especially in tage islamic world), be reinvented after the middle ages, again completely banished during industrial revolution until the 50s and 60s and today be handled completely different in the various cultures and religions.

Also, how did the US react to the resulting and forced capitulation of the former leaders of the Prague Spring (ie. Dubček), and were European countries different in responding to the actions? If so, how?

Or did the caliphs just want to expand?

I'm really interested in how culturally unified and how diverse ancient China was. In the anglophone world we seem to look at China as a monolithic culture, but I know that it's an extremely diverse country even today. I want to know how it was in the past.

The "warring states" were all considered Chinese, I lnow, but how unifying was that at the time? China is an exremely diverse country, built on expansion throughout its history - absorbing, assimilating, and being influenced by the cultures it encountered. How thoroughly were conquered people incorporated into China? Could they achieve high status or were they just subjects? Were they already closely culturally linked or were they seen as totally different?

I kind of get the impression that it was like imperial Rome, where it was ethnically diverse, but also had a strong unifying force in the imperial government and its institutions. By the late Roman Empire, the distinction between "true" Romans and Romanized Thracians, Illyrians, Gauls, etc. seems really blurry. Is this similar to how Chinese culture came to be seen as so unified?

In 1963 China signed an agreement with Pakistan formally receiving a part of Kashmir which Pakistan didn't even control (it was controlled by India). In 1967 China invaded India during the Chola incident. In 1969 China invaded the USSR in the Daman island war which caused (or crowned?) the Sino-Soviet split. And all the resultant territorial disputes would not get settled for decades (if at all).

What made Mao act like that?