I have always wondered why the early advances of China, India, and the Arab world in mathematics, chemistry, and astronomy were vibrant before Europe really took notice and seemed to suddenly atrophy just as the Europeans started to develop them and ultimately take the lead.

My premise may be flawed, if so, I hope my larger point is worthy of discussion. Where did the scientific momentum go?

I always remembered this story but never got any real confirmation or turned up any sources. I can't ever remember where I learned it from.

Basically the story goes that in June once the information started coming in about German units advancing supposedly Stalin locked himself in one of his homes for a couple of days. No one really dared to approach him. After a while one of his commanders and his staff supposedly went to him to get him up to date. Stalin said to have started cursing to himself thinking he was about to be arrested for inactivity and bad leadership but found out it was not so.

That is the story. I wonder where did it come from and is it one of these historical myths or does it have some truth to it?

Thanks

I've been conducting a research project (ultimately geared towards a public history display) with some of my student coworkers, and we've run into the interesting bump where our attention has been turned toward the old railroad in town. After some digging around, I found out it was built in 1852, which from my survey courses on the American West I remember to be the point at which the United States went into railroad frenzy. Ideally, we would like to investigate the building of the railroad in this town as a microcosm of larger Midwestern America's shift from canals to trains as the primary method of transporting goods.

The issue is, we have no idea where to start when it comes to secondary sources on the topic. Would anybody be willing to recommend a few places to get started?

I'd prefer examples in Europe or the Islamic World, from 500 to 1600 CE?

I know it's loosely based on historical events, but does it accurately reflect the level of violence/ depravity of the times?

I was thinking of times where maybe two countries has equal claim to something, or if they both had legitimate reasons for wanting something. It may seem a silly question, but I'm curious if such contests have ever determined factors beyond bragging rights.

The pope's statement about aliens got me thinking about how ancient people viewed them. I have some questions:

Were there any writers who wrote about aliens, like, over 1000 years ago? Were ancient people as excited about the idea of potentially meeting life from other planets as people today are? Are there any examples of how people imagined life on other planets might be like? What is the earliest known example of people referring to life that came to Earth from another planet?

I wonder why most of them are in Sweden and not so many in Norway? I know Norway had a fiercely Christian king, so perhaps they were destroyed as part of a 'heathen purge'? Any facts on this? Much appreciated!

I know that diseases such as small pox brought over from Europe by explorers caused an epidemic which killed many native people. I'm wondering if there were any diseases which the natives passed on to the Europeans in a similar manner.

Pausanias spoke of a column marked with the names of all the Spartiates who died at Thermopylae, which reinforces an account left by Herodotus of a memorial for the fallen soldiers. Have any archaeologists launched expeditions specifically trying to find that column? Is there enough context in Pausanias' and Herodotus' descriptions of the memorial to give archaeologists a frame of reference on where to look?

For example, the French missionaries in the early 1600s managed to unseat the local native American religion and instead convert them in to Christianity, despite the native American beliefs being thousands of years old. How did they go about doing this?

The general impression I have is that feudal societies were vastly more unequal than modern industrial democracies. Is this characterization correct? And does it hold for all aspects of inequality? (For ex. inequality in education might have be much larger compared to today but was inequality of income or general quality of life much larger than the more unequal industrial democracies of today?). And how much does the difference in inequality between the feudal past and the democratic present vary by region? (i.e. in Europe, Middle East, South Asia, East Asia etc.)

Has there been any attempt to put numbers on, say, the gini coefficients on distribution of some measurable aspect of medieval life?