Watching a Weny's commercial, and it made me wonder why we started making beef into patties an then why we put it on a hamburger with vegetables. America is, I'm pretty sure, the #1 consumer of hamburgers. Why did they develop such a popularity here rather than somewhere else?

How did radios and movies allow propagandists and political leaders to reconstruct orderly and reassuring images of the world for ordinary people even as high-culture artists, composers, and writers continued to dismantle traditional cultural norms and express the anxiety and fear arising out of World War I And its aftermath?

I'm curious to know how accountants/mathematicians/scientists organized data and made calculations before computers were commonly used. Were there any special charts, books, or techniques to manage data?

Basically, what was the predecessor to excel?

If somebody like a king of Bohemia claimed to have been descended from every king before him, how would the first king have become a king?

I ask this with places like Malaysia in mind.

By "classical music", I'm referring to the broader definition of the genre as a whole, not trying to distinguish it from Baroque, Romantic, etc. And I'm excluding any pre-Baroque music or 20th century classical music.

It seems like communism has been a political umbrella term for a variety of governments but more often than not it's merely a totalitarian government.

Why did we continue to pay attention to conditions in places like Bosnia, Albania, and Chechnya.

It could be said the Anglo-Saxons pretty much "won the Game" as their culture has taken over the world. By contrast, the French haven't done so well considering the fact that they were the dominant European power for a long while. Why did History turn out that way?

Speaking broadly, the village huts are all pretty shabby, like you would expect to see in medieval Iceland, some of the Motte and Bailey castles are basically picket fences around a hut, and even the "good" Castle where King Edward lives seems to be a ruin (I suspect this is because they filmed in a ruin). Some of the interior scenes actually seemed a bit incongruous, because the exterior shots would suggest that there aren't any building's in Scotland big enough for a man to stand up straight inside.

Is that a fair portrayal of England/Scotland in the 1200s, or did the film overplay the squalor?

As far as I know, this was the main strategy of the Germans: drawing the Allied forces into Belgium while outflanking them at the same time through the Ardennes. Correct?

So, I fail to see what purpose an invasion of the Netherlands has actually. Was it just to take out a potential nuisance, like Norway? Or was there any strategic connection to the rest of Fall Gelb?

I was sitting on the bus and noticed every single person was wearing jeans. They couldn't possible have had jeans hundreds of years ago (I think), so that made me wonder when and how jeans became the most popular type of pants.

What type of pants did people wear before jeans? When and where were jeans first invented? What did people initially think of them? How did they become so popular?

Genocide doesn't seem to make much sense. Whether it's the political fallout or alienating your own citizenry, it doesn't seem like a practical idea. Obviously there are moral issues there too. It seems mostly as a mechanism of blame diversion (i.e. It's the Jews fault the economy is bad), or a cheap, dirty was to satisfy a desperate population who wants to see someone's head roll for their misery.

Has there ever been a time where Country X killed most or all of an indigenous people, as as a result, the citizens of Country X actually saw their lives improve?

Thanks.

I got to thinking about this while reading my daughter reprints of those Little Golden books. Was reading to children just not a "thing" before WWII? What's the history?