Note: I mean the original Crimean war, not the current conflict.

Hi!

I'm currently writing a music composition that will be based on a fictious bedouin tribe's culture (and additional lore but that is beside the point). Speculative art :) !

I've found plenty of information on politics, social structures throughout the ages and so forth, but it is difficult to get detailed information on old bedouin music (from before early modern times, that is). Generally, ancient music is a difficult subject, but I at least know where to look when it comes to european music.

I'm most thankful for any possible sources on the subject, general bedouin art history is helpful too!

/Mortimer

In a military history class, I was introduced to the concept that the US Civil war was considered "A war by amateurs" by many foreign observers due to the martial ineptitude and technological backwardness of both the Confederacy and the Union.

Are there any strong historical or contemporary accounts that support this claim?

I have to write an essay for my university unit on anything American pre-2004. So i was tossing up between doing:

American Football as an allegory for war

and

Using Ethnic Restaurants to track Immigration

So far the 2nd is more interesting since i work in a Vietnamese Restaurant but i just wanted to see if it was viable first.

Was it just on account of their isolation?

This is a serious question please.

A moon goddess I believe...

I know that while flight was being developed many (most?) people were at best skeptical of the idea and at worst dismissed it out of hand. Did this attitude significantly delay the advent if flight, or were there hard technical limitations like engine weight that would have prevented flight from taking place even if the general population believed it was possible and supported research?

I've always wondered how a foreign religion was received in Europe. I'm from the US and I have to admit that my European history never went into depth about the issue. It also doesn't help that I was raised in the bible belt where these kind of questions are frowned upon. I know that Rome was the dominant power at the time and they viewed other Europeans as barbarians and relatively uneducated; so I expect most mainstream accounts to be from a Roman perspective. But are there any other accounts from that time? If anybody could point me in the direction of answers or an interesting read it would be you guys. Thanks in advance for any help.

As a result of the habit of renaming places and changing administrative districts, does history every fall through the cracks? Are there cases where historians believed an old city was at location X, which matches the name today, but then it was later discovered that it was actually originally at place Y? I'll give an example in my own area to illustrate my meaning.

After the Jin conquest of the Northern Song, the was relocated south, eventually settling in Lin'an, now called Hangzhou. Today, Hangzhou is a city of substantial size, and Lin'an is the name of a city to the west of Hangzhou. They are two different places, the latter having taken the old name of the former. I was listening to the latest China History Podcast and he says the Song moved to Lin'an, "outside Hangzhou". But this is not correct as far as I know. They moved to Lin'an, which is now called Hangzhou, and there just happens to be another place now called Lin'an which is not where the Song set up their palace.

Now as a result you have people saying things like the Song weren't in what's now Hangzhou (in the narrow urban area definition). It's easy enough to find out that that's not true for that example, but are there other cases where we just don't know where an old city really was because of this sort of thing?

I searched for this but didn't find anything, and I may also be searching for the wrong terms. So if there's already a post about this, I missed it, but would be happy to have someone direct me to it.

From what I understand, mitochondrial DNA can be used to trace lineage, but it is only passed from mother to child. So, is it possible that we have been overlooking large armies, not unlike ghengis Khan, spreading their genes because it is paternal lineage?

Did European colonial powers ever see the United States as a nation to be worried about? Specifically, how did the British feel about the United States in the 19th century? Could they have taken back the former colonies through force?

Was there any writing or other indications describing anything gay?