Edit: so what's been interesting to me so far is that our collective senses of humour are actually fairly similar across time and cultures, in fact it's quite nice to think that I could go back in time and sit around a camp fire with some Romans and laugh at one of them letting out a massive fart or someone making a pun.

What I'd be interested to know now is, whether there have been any cultures which had vastly different senses of humor?

I realize that this a tough question to ask without more specific information, but I was hoping someone could make a good educated guess with some of the information my grandpa told me about in a letter. I wrote a letter to my grandpa before he died and he had my aunt answer the questions. She mentioned that his memory was fading and that he was mixing up places and dates, but some things remain clear to him. He went through France, Belgium, and then Germany. When asked if he was greeted in France with kisses and flowers, his answer was that every village had been burned out and was empty when he got there. This is a clue that he might not have been part of the initial spearhead and the D-Day invasion. He mentioned that when they arrived in Germany, they had to first build a bridge across the Rhine and as soon as it was completed hundreds of people started flooding across; I assume those people being surrendering Germans and refugees. He participated in the Battle of the Bulge in the end of the war and brought home a Belgium pistol. I've seen the Band of Brother's episode on this battle and I just can't help but imagine him among those guys, but at the same time, and the reason why I bring this question to askhistorians, I know that some soldiers didn't necessarily get to see battle towards the end of the war, yet I suspect that he might have seen/participated in combat if he had to sleep in the snow and hunt rabbits and was ordered not to shoot at German surveillance planes. He added that it was a very difficult thing to go through and I suspect that it may be possible that he just doesn't want to talk much about it. I'm expecting two kinds of answers:

1. "well we can't know for sure if he didn't specifically tell you"

2. "well, if he was sleeping in the snow hunting rabbits while not shooting at surveillance planes, he was close enough to enemy lines. Every able-bodied soldier that close has definitely fired(?) their weapon at the enemy.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

It seems to me that improvisation has always been a major part of music making for all of history, but up until the jazz age, any music that wasn't written down was quickly forgotten (within a generation or two). Thus anything that was considered "serious" music got written down, and forced away from improvisation.

With the advent of recording technology it was suddenly possible for improvisations to be preserved for future listeners, thus "serious" jazz artists never had any reason to move away from improvisation, and instead developed it further than it had been before, until it reached levels of complexity that the average listener didn't have a taste for. The only reason we associate improvised solos with saxophones, swing-eighths, cycle of fifths progressions is because those were the musical idioms that were popular when it became possible to record improvised solos.

This seems intuitive to me when I think of it, but I don't have a good enough grasp of history to properly evaluate it. Can actual historians either confirm or refute this idea?

I was wondering how Hitler managed to continue German support for so long, and even manage to convince other Countries to side with him.

I've read a bit about this, and I what in particular made south america a good hiding spot after the end of world war II

I understand that this interpretation is not generally accepted any more, so this is partly about specifically why, but also I guess a more general exploration of how interpretations of history come and go.

A popular form of suicide seems to be hanging, as well as it being a penalty for death. When did hanging start and why? It seems like a bit of a weird form of death. Thanks.

I just wondered, since you hear a lot in popular media about robbers and highwaymen and vikings etc. How safe was medieval Europe. How much risk was there to get robbed or killed by traveling in a city or traveling from city to city. Was there any form of protection and if so, was it effective?

Hey there, I'm writing a story based in 12th century Denmark during the civil war between Svend Grathe, Knud and Valdemar (the Great). But I can't find any information about how big their armies were...

Does anyone around here have any ideaas to how big they were?

More specifically, I'd be interested to know if the average person, or even subsets within civilizations with imperial cults were in awe of their ruler and/or thought that he/she possessed supernatural powers.

Or, were they more like, "Yeah he's a pretty damned important guy and he's doing a good job of keeping us safe. Also, he said that he's a god and that if we finish his pyramid before he dies he'll keep protecting us from the afterlife"?

Lastly, and kind of tangentially, was is there any consensus on whether Alexander the Great claimed to be a god (or at least demi-god) during his lifetime?

I am writing an essay on whether the myths about the Trojan War portray it in a positive manner or if whether its consequences are tragic and I was wondering if you could suggest any texts or essays etc that would be particularly helpful? Thanks!

Was there a legitimate fear that not doing so would necessitate an invasion of the Japanese home islands? Couldn't the US have continued either conventional or nuclear bombing raids indefinitely? Butting up against the 20 year rule, I wonder this because of the relative historical revisionism in Japan versus Germany, where it would seem there is a more contrite societal historical perspective. As a secondary question, did leaving Hirohito in place lay the ground work for this revisionism?

Many Kazakh or Uzbek persons could pass for Polish, while many others could pass for Korean. As far as I know, looking "Asian" or "European" has no cultural association. Why is this? Decades of Mongol rule? Russian immigration? Have these countries always had such diverse-looking populations?

Why did Napoleon invade Russia in 1812? I tried looking it up on Wikipedia, but their answer didn't seem to make sense to me.

With the large debates surrounding gun control in the modern day, were there ever laws controlling the use or distribution of swords on a mass scale? In movies and paintings people are often depicted with swords even in everyday life. But how common was it really for the average person to have a sword, and how often would they carry it around?

It was so widely spoken across so many parts of the world I find it hard to believe that it changed so rapidly that Latin was lost or that some group wasn't isolated enough to preserve it.