I know this isn't exactly the most interesting or inventive question but its something i've wondered for a while, how exactly would the zulus with spear and shield still manage to put up such a fight against the force of the British empire? Another thing i would like to ask is how dramatically did the Zulus tactics change in the face of rifles?

Edit: fixed some speilling mistakes

I need more understanding, from what I understand swords were mostly used by nobles because they looked cool and were expensive. But were they really useful in combat. Especially compared to axes and spears? Please explain, keeping the discussion mostly to medieval times.

Axes are more cost efficient don't require much training especially compared to swords and have a lot of utility. For example axes are effective against armor and some axe have spikes which increases there effectiveness against armor. You can hook an opponents blade and disarm them with an axe or hook an appendage or shield. Axes heads are very durable, not sure about the stick part, guess it depends on the material. The sword looks like it really struggled against medieval armor. Axes are about just as sharp and are more blunt than swords. I guess without plated armor you might want a sword over an axe.

Spears are amazing, you can distance your self from the opponent, are easy to use, cost efficient, very quick and agile, apparently were the most common weapon in the whole past, not to mention the pike and halberd were amazing weapons.

Swords were expensive, required lots of training, and have a hard time dealing with the most common weapon in history.

I don't specifically want info about US forces but they're a good example of the supply problem you have, they're constantly fighting very far from home, and a lot of effort was put into designing a tank that could be easily repaired in the field; but they used this big single piece hull. So what happens when you take damage during a fight but you're not really knocked out? A panzerfaust or a Pak leaves some nasty scars that are definite weakpoints going forward but you can still drive home. I assume they don't just ship you a new cast hull to swap out and it's a single piece so you can't just unbolt the damaged bits and slap a new one in. For planes it's even worse since you can just weld some garbage plate to the side or dangle some sandbags and logs in front of the hole, you need to maintain low weight and an aerodynamic profile. So if you take some heavy MG fire into your wing and make it home how does the ground crew deal with that headache?

I find it absolutely interesting that people in the past would discover new lands or be visited by people from countries never heard of and be able to communicate with each other. While I understand hand gestures and body language can be used to communicate, the interpretation changes from culture to culture which makes me believe it couldn't have been very effective or efficient.

And a follow up, how did people learn the foreign language (both spoken and written language) and become translators?

PS: I mentioned the time period because I was reading about the Age of Exploration but the question is also applicable to other time periods and from non-European sources.

Thanks in advance!

Edit: grammar

Correct me if I'm wrong, but literacy among medieval Catholic peasants would have been very low. However, the Catholic Church did make an effort to keep records of births, deaths and marriages.

Would the Catholic Church have divulged this information to a peasant who wants to know if the woman he wants to marry is his first/second cousin, etc.? Or would their records have not been clear enough?

Do we have historical accounts of peasants marrying first/second cousins out of ignorance? Do we have accounts of medieval peasants being encourage to move villages to avoid inbreeding?

I'm a fair skinned irish man who just returned from the Turks and Caicos and, even with all modern advancements in sun blocking, still got burned! How did predominantly white colonists in the 15, 16, 17, and even 18 hundreds go about their days, work, and just live in that environment?

I'm reposting a question I asked several months ago

A common justification I hear for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that a land invasion of Japan would have cost many more lives due to the willingness of ordinary Japanese citizens (men, women, and children) to fight to the death against an invading force. However, I've never seen a specific primary source that backs up this claim.

Is there any historical basis for this idea? If so, why was this the case?

I recently visited some Mississippian mounds and also have a visit planned to Mesa Verde. It made me realize that not only is learning about these places fascinating, but I don't know very much either.

I really don't need to learn anything specific, just looking for preferably a documentary or book that gives me a look into their culture.

I'm reading The Discourses again by Machiavelli. Later I want to look at Rousseau, who I understand also took the Roman Republic as a model of sorts. I want to be able to understand their thinking better by having a more solid understanding of the history of Rome and the republic's political institutions.

What are the best books and authors for this? I realize Livy would be a natural place to start, but I've also heard from others that it's a ton of name-dropping and can be hard to follow. Would Livy still be recommended? If so, are there still some other authors worth looking at, considering that some have accuse Livy of having certain biases as well.

What I mean to ask is, did things for slave masters and slaves continue to go on as before? Were slave owners encouraged or pressured to free their slaves by the society writ large, so that slavery was abolished de facto? Were slave owners seen as a potential fifth column and subject to suspicion? How did slave owners who supported the Union and the federal government justify their side in the conflict with regards to their practice of slavery, since they surely would've known that if the South lost the war then slavery would be abolished throughout the nation? Or did they not know that, and believe that at wars end the nation would return to the antebellum status quo, or that slavery would only be abolished in those states which rebelled?

That last point seems quite difficult to believe, as the abolitionist movement had already become much more radical and uncompromising throughout the 50s, after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the subsequent armed conflict which followed that, and that years of war with hundreds of thousands dead or maimed would only increase that sentiment.

My apologies if this is a query with a well known answer, I'm not American and have only recently developed an interest in the history of the United States.

As an addendum to the primary question, I would also like to know what the practice of slavery was like in these border states before the war? From what I've read, in decades preceding the war there was a movement of slaves and slave owners toward the deeper South, and the traditional plantation economy was already in decline in states such as Maryland; does this mean that most slaves in these places would've been household servants, field hands for smallholders, or even workers in urban and bourgeois professions and the trades?

Not in the perspective of his actions or polices but like was he a straight up a cool guy to be around or have a beer with?

Are these just one-off things that don't really mean anything or was there a deeper connection here beyond the normal trading relationships at the time?

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I have a hard time imagining people today naming a their kids after gods in other existing religions that they don't believe in and giving cities in their country the same name as cities in other countries unless they have a sizable immigrant population from a foreign country, as often happened in the United States when the French founded New Orleans or the British renamed New York.

Mainly the claims that the CIA overthrew democratically elected leftist leaders in favor of more right-wing leaders.