Was having a discussion with a friend: the topic of rebellion and treason arose. We were discussing West Point graduates (and officers) who fought for the South. What happened after the War? Were these leaders considered traitors, did any hang? What about army regulators? By definition a rebel who loses usually is considered traitorous. How did the Union deal with it's former adversary in this matter?

After watching people in Saghetti Westerns and Civil War Documentaries shoot whiskey like it was nothing, I was wondering about the strength of alcohol in the 19th century. Obviously the actors in these media outlets aren't actually drinking, but I am curious all the same. Was the Whiskey about 80 proof like is the standard now, or was it stronger or weaker? Why is that?

Did any of them ever explain it in detail?

My professor commented in a conversation we had that dragons were, in western society, a symbol of man's fear of the wild. If someone could expand on this or point me to other concepts a dragon could have stood for it would be greatly appreciated.

People always attribute the winter to crippling the German forces during the Battle of Stalingrad but wouldn't have the Russians themselves been just as equally affected?

To what extent were the Russians affected?

How did the cold affect German equipment/vehicles in comparison to Russian?

Can the winter really be attributed to the Axis defeat? What about tactical errors on part of the Axis?

If so what were the reason for the opposition?

Everyone's seen a movie where a protagonist is in prison and someone mentions giving them out with a cake with a file in it. Has there been any documented escape that was attributed to a hidden file inside a cake or is this simply a popular hollywood cop out?

In my amateur history reading I always seem to hear about the Carthaginians through Roman and Greek accounts. Are there no first-hand accounts? For a people so rich and powerful throughout both the Greek and Roman periods (well, until Rome destroyed them), and whose wider Phoenician ancestry contributed to the adoption of writing (not to mention the alphabet) in Greece, is there not something strange about this silence?

Did they not keep records of trade and other activities? Did they not have political discussion? Did they use particularly non-durable writing materials? Or were their writings all destroyed by Rome? Or destroyed later maybe, by Islam? Were no non-Roman histories of the region written in the centuries after the fall of Carthage?

So this is a topic that my wife and I have been discussing.

Given how common rape seems to have been in medieval warfare and/or viking raids, what was its impact? Was the PTSD that commonly happens in rape victims today common?

I don't want to minimize the terrible impact of sexual assault by suggesting that women just shrugged it off back in the day, but if it was that endemic, was it something people were more resigned to happening?

Or does modern drama exaggerate how common it was?

I have seen several references to finding an old gramophone and only a single working record that was played incessantly during lulls in the fighting. I read that the tune was unknown to the soldiers at the time, but has there been any effort to determine the name of the tune? I first came across the information while watching the "Soviet Storm" series on youtube.