What were the rations like? How were they treated? How did the get captured in the first place?

I was wondering were the roman developed their Scutum(shield) from, I have heard that it came from the celts they fought at the battle of allia, while I also heard it had a samnite origin. Does anyone know which one?

So I started to watch that new show on AMC, Turn, about America's first spy ring. During the first episode, they are discussing a tavern owner known to be against the British Crown. The Redcoats keep calling him and his cohorts "patriots" in a disdainful tone.

Is this just bad screen writing, or was this actually a term used back then that has come to mean something slightly different now? Looking back we would naturally call those men patriots, but somehow I always attributed it as a term given after the fact.

The popular answer to this question is Jack the Ripper, and while he is certainly the most famous, the psychological underpinnings of serial killers have to have existed longer than 100 years.

It seems everything I read about Scottish clans involves them conducting some sort of massacre against each other one after another. Were Irish clans as violent?

Edit: By which I mean did they spend most of their time warring with each other like Scottish clans or was there some level of cooperation between them (as the title of High King did rotate through about four main clans - I think).

In golf, the names bogey (+1), par (E), birdie (-1), eagle (-2), albatross (-3) and condor (-4) were used in the score system. I know bogey comes from the song 'Here Comes the Bogey Man', but I'm intrigued why eagle, albatross and condor were used instead of other birds.

I want to try and get an accurate number and so far I am getting mixed results. The general consensus says around 20 million, but I wanted to get a second opinion and any information is greatly appreciated!

I'm particularly interested because a lot of websites I go to say that they were independently landed but then to on to say that "geneatas, the peasant aristocracy who paid rent to their overlord." If these were the highest among the various class of ceorl I find it hard to imagine a lower class churlish would own land. Also if they owned the land why would they have to pay rent for it?

I was planning on putting together a Who Would Win post positing the Ottoman armies against Westeros and general A Song of Ice and Fire shenanigans but my google-fu failed to turn up good info on the Ottoman logistics. The best (but still questionable) info I got was that the army probably had 69 bombards organized into some 15 batteries with bombards such as the Orbis gun that wrecked the walls with ease and a handy chart on wikipedia with a breakdown of the entire Ottoman military, but no clue on the exact force composition at Constantinople. What sort of logistical footprint did this army have and how did the Ottoman's support it? How powerful was their fleet?

This has reappeared in TIL. The typical anecdote of concrete being completely lost when Rome fell.

I have a very hard time believing that this is true. First of all, there was a whole other half to the Empire that was possibly more well off at that point. They also clearly used mortar in all their buildings, and as far as I can tell, still used concrete in a structural manner, just not as widely (preferring brick over concrete). They even achieved Hagia Sophia without the use of a ton of concrete, so it'd make sense that they may have had the technology but saw no use in it if they could effectively use brick and have easier access to it. They also retained great engineering feats and good infrastructure like the vast sewers and cisterns in Constantinople.

The Roman Empire was just a lot bigger than just Rome and the Italian peninsula. Plus it was all soon reconquered (albeit briefly) by the East. It just really seems improbable that the West had a special technology that the East lacked and that was completely lost when one half's government fell.

So is it actually true that the technology of Roman concrete (and other technologies) was lost with the fall of the Western Roman Empire? Or was it retained by the Eastern half, and that just gets overlooked?

I know, I know... FAQ! I did look around the FAQ and /r/linguistics but I couldn't find an answer to the specific question I have in mind.

The title is something of a generalisation. For example, I know that accents in Australia tend to be divided according to distance from an urban centre (e.g. as a rule of thumb, the further from a city you are, the "broader" your accent).

Similarly, even people within London have their own accents.

One thing I can think of is that the United Kingdom is much older than (modern, Anglo-Saxon) Australia. Is it the case that time (and not distance) is the major factor in accents "splitting"? Are there any historical events which contributed to the particular divergence of accents?

I'm aware of the important points, the Moors arriving and reaching to Tours, El Cid and the Fall of Granada (coming from a Spanish speaking country, history courses tended to focus on the Spanish side of the Reconquista while the Portuguese one was largely ignored), but I'd like to learn more about the rise of the Christian kingdoms and how Moorish Iberia was and how Al Andalus fractured into the smaller sultanates. I'm fluent in English and Spanish so any recommendations in either language will do.

Thanks

Great grandmother is 100% of ethnicity 'A'

Grandmother would then be 50%

Mother is 25%

Which would make me 12.5%...

Is that how ancestry works?

I'm aware that "collapse" isn't well-liked as a descriptor for the transition between Classic and Post-Classic Maya civilization, I'm just unsure of the current terminology.

I'm interested in anything you can tell me. For example, Wikipedia leads me to believe there were changes in architecture (though I'd love to know how exactly), and my understanding is that Post-Classic works like Popol Vuh reflect a very changed religion from that of the Classic. Were these innovations, or do they reflect a cultural transition from the previously dominant lowland culture to the newly dominant highland centers? To what degree did things like literacy survive? Were political and economic structures notably different?

I'm reading about Apollo 13, and I realized that they jettisoned the command module and took a couple of grainy pictures of the blown side panels, and that's all they could do at the time. Any written account of where that piece may have floated off to? Did it burn in the atmosphere, or is it in some kind of tracked orbit one day to be recovered for a more thorough examination? Or is it just floating off into space, likely forever lost?

If the 5th century population of Rome was around 500,000 and was reduced to around 100,000 during the 6th century, where did all of those people disperse to? Was there massive loss of life in the wake of the fall of Rome due to starvation or violence? I just finished reading The Fall of Rome by Bryan Ward-Perkins, but I still don't understand what was happening to the population of the city of Rome during the transitional phase between late antiquity and the dark ages. Anyone with some expertise they can share?