As the title says why the Siege of Bastogne so important?

So I've seen a few descriptions and pictures of lynchings and general miss treatment of blacks throughout history.

Yet very little on any organisations or groups that had the specific goal of overthrowing slavers/KKK etc.

Did they exist? If so what sort of successes if any did they achieve?

For the sake of argument let's say the period is sometime right before the Peloponnesian war. So not only are there cities in Greece and turkey ( please excuse the use of modern borders), but also far away colonies and their cities. Could a man educated in culture and dialect of each locality simply fake citizenship in any city. Or was there an identification system for natives?

Last night I went with a group of friends to see a production of Hamlet which, I noticed, had eliminated references to Fortinbras and Norway (I can't imagine why). After the play had ended, I was explaining how Fortinbras represented a threat to Denmark as the tragic loss of the line of succession meant Denmark was now easy pickings for a revenge-minded heir to Norway's throne. As we were discussing the idea of Fortinbras being a threat on the horizon rather then a vivid threat (English nerds? Yes we are!), the parallels to the end of Beowulf struck me. After [spoiler alert] Beowulf is killed fighting the dragon, his people begin to weep at the thought that they are unprotected from the threats that live on the horizon. After Hamlet and pretty much everyone else dies, Prince Fortinbras shows up and pretty openly states that his claims to Denmark are now essentially unopposed (except by Horatio, who sidesteps the issue).

So my question is: would Shakespeare have been familiar with the text of Beowulf? Or even perhaps have heard it as an oral history? Would he have known of its existence at all? I've read up a bit on the manuscript that survived, and it seems that there exists an overlap of the Nowell Codex and Shakespeare's life; additionally, if there were anyone familiar with the story of Beowulf at the time, it'd be Shakespeare.

I've recently read 1177 B.C. by Eric Cline and that got me interested in the period. What are some good, easily availble books about the Bronze Age? And please, do not recommend something that is "in every library", I'm not US citizen so I'm only interested in books that I can purchase online.

Read in a book that the Japanese carried katanas and charged into their enemies, but when everyone has guns was it just suicide? Also how often did this happen? Have fights between two or more sword wielders ever happened?

Was it Martín Ignacio de Loyola, who did the first eastward circumnavigation in 1585? Or was it someone else?

I read that the Mesopotamian culture as far back as 2000 BCE was highly patriarchal and got to a point where women could not talk to men outside their family and had to wear veils. Their are very similar concepts today in some Islamic States. How much of these concepts can be attributed to Mesopotamia or is it all entirely based on the Quran?

Hey everyone, I posted this question a while back but never got any answers so I thought I would try one more time.

I started reading "The Grapes Of Wrath" and the opening pages have Tom Joad getting released from McAlester Prison. It just got me thinking about whether people during hard times like that people tried to get into prison to get fed or to have a place to stay. Are there any well known examples of people who did this? Did prisons have to keep less violent offenders out so they wouldn't fill up?

It seems like we have an okay idea of the Slavic pagan religion, but do we have any idea what was society actually like during this time period for the people living during it? Was society really as barbaric and violent as people popularly see the pagans of ancient Northern Europe? Would the lives of the common people be much different from before christianization to a hundred or two hundred years after the fact?

When Napoleon I was readying his forces to retake Paris in 1814, he had addressed his men on the offensive and they were in support. Yet when he went to take the plan to his commanders, Ney (with the support of the other marshals) replied that they would do no such thing and surrender to the Coalition, famously stating "Sire, the army will obey its leaders." in regards to the future actions of the Grande Armee. While any offensive would have likely been a hopeless cause, what caused this final defiance now, and not later nor earlier?