I've got my facts I just need some credible sources to cite and take notes on. Everything I'm coming up with is just terrible or from a public school. Please help me.

Just how much linguistic diversity was in the Ottoman Empire in general?

If it helps at all, the reason why I'm wondering about these years in particular is because my maternal grandfather was born and lived in Ottoman Lebanon (Beirut, 1903) for the first 20-30 years of his life. He spoke a lot of languages (we aren't sure how many exactly) and I'm wondering what are the odds of Turkish being one of those languages.

I just played a game called Company of Heroes which shows the beginning of the D-Day invasion from the German perspective. The German soldiers are just lounging on their AA guns joking about the coffee tasting like shit when they start to see tracers in the distance. They all scramble to turn on the spotlights and the sky is filled with C-47s and gliders. This had me daydreaming about how absolutely terrifying D-Day must've been to the Germans seeing the combined might of the allied forces descending upon them.

So how much of a heads up were they actually given? Did they have some sort of time frame? Were they caught completely unaware?

Thanks.

And perhaps more specifically in Castles and for people like archers or normal men at arms. Recommended sources, like books are appreciated. Thanks, Alex

Hey there!

I'm extremely curious as to which battle was more significant to the defeat of Germany on the Eastern Front? Was it Kursk or Stalingrad? I once heard that after Stalingrad, victory was unlikely but still plausible and that Kursk sealed the fate of the Third Reich. Or was it the other way around and Kursk was just another major defeat for the Germans following Stalingrad, on the long road to capitulation for the Third Reich?

Thanks!

Hey guys, could anyone suggest a good book about the the Arab peoples from the foundation of Islam up to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire? I wasn't sure if this is the right place to ask this, but I figured that, as I'm looking for more interesting historical content than dazzling writing, you guys would be the ones to ask! Thanks!

Or are they just saying that people made up and decided to credit it as an ancient Chinese proverb?

After watching Fiddler on the Roof, I caught myself wondering this question.

I've begun reading Keegan's Face of Battle and it got me wondering about the daily life of an American civil war soldier and what battle meant for them.

• Where did they sleep? Did they share a tent? How did they carry that tent?
• Would they wash their own clothes? How often?
• Did they have to carry around ammunition all the time? where would they get more ammunition after a battle? What would they do if they ran out of ammunition during a battle?
• What would they do in the rain? How did they keep their equipment dry?
• What would they eat? Who cooked for them? How did they get food?
• Where would they use the loo? What about during a battle?
• What was their training like?
• How would they communicate with family back home? How would they communicate during a battle?
• And lastly, were there any drastic differences between the north and the south in terms of the above questions?

Sorry for the barrage I'm just very curious!

In school we learn of Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment, where he dropped two objects of different mass to prove that they would fall at the same speed.

My question is not whether this experiment truly happened or whether it was just a though experiment, but was Galileo really the first person to realize that how fast an object falls isn't related to its weight? It seems as though it would be a very easy notion to prove wrong, did it really take until the 16th century for someone to try dropping two things at the same time or is this a misnomer?

I'm reading Dostoevsky's The Brother's Karamazov, and it's becoming very clear how poor my history is...

There are other things that I'm curious about, and being less lazy about, but I wasn't sure how to go about looking up this question on my own.

Thanks!

My understanding is that Sherman took very good care of his men and that they were very loyal to him but the march was a tough campaign. What was morale like?

Did people have better vision in the past? I take off my glasses... Oh god, I don't know what I would do. I'm so blind. I, and many others I know, have needed glasses since childhood. I have always wondered how people coped with that before the invention of glasses.

Recently, I visited Europe for the first time, and I was fairly impressed with how modern times allow interglobal telecommunications. Obviously, this was not always the case? How was it in the 19th century? Halfway through the 20th? ect?

• Were there alternatives being widely discussed?
• Was he the obvious choice simply because of Sardinia-Piedmont's power relative to the other states & its anti-Austrian foreign policy, or was there more to it than that?
• How involved was he & was his government in encouraging the nationalists to view him that way?
• What did the monarchs of the other states think of all this?