Also, which side contributed more? Traditional Chinese school of thought has it that the Communist forces tied down a large body of Japanese troops with guerrilla warfare, but the large engagements were all fought by the Nationalist forces. Is there any evidence for it? Which side was more effective?

In general which person, or reference of a person, is the earliest on record?

What area of the world are they from? What's the culture like for that era?

This can be either books, films or articles. I am able to read in English, German and Dutch.

Just about the Romanian revolution without a focus on the dictator is fine as well.

Thanks in advance

I ask because the non-binding referendum took me by surprise, and I was wondering if there were any previous instances of this. If, for example, Bavaria declared a desire to secede from Germany, it wouldn't be hugely surprising, due to such instances as the post-WWI Bavarian Socialist Republic or the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, along with numerous others I'm forgetting or don't know about. But I hadn't heard anything about Venice until the other day.

If this is too close to current events, let me know and I'll take this down, but I'm hoping the time period I chose (Unification of Italy to an arbitrary end date loosely based on the start of the Long Peace) is sufficiently distant (ie: Before 1994) for it to be okay.

Thanks for any information you give, and thank you for this awesome subreddit!

Edit: As /u/allak noted, Venice and the surrounding region of Veneto was not added to Italy until 1866 as a result of the Austro-Prussian Seven Week's War. So a better time period would be 1866 to 1951, as has been so helpfully pointed out. Props to /u/allak for catching this!

If I were to ask a blacksmith something like "why does quenching and reheating a blade make it stronger" how would he respond? Did blacksmiths develop their methods through pure trial and error, or did they have some form of proto-metallurgy that gave a loose scientific framework?

I asked about the medieval period to give my question some specificity, but an answer about any time period would be welcomed.

One of the common depictions of battle surgery from these times is of 4 men holding the patient down, while he drinks whiskey and the surgeon saws through his bone to amputate. ie Difficult

A guillotine could be made from 2 bits of wood, a rope and a blade. It would have been rapid, "clean" and portable. It's always struck me as odd that it wasn't used for this purpose. Given the amount of swords around I'm sure a grinding stone would have been available for sharpening.

Was this just simply overlooked? Did anyone ever use a guillotine for this type of surgery? Is there something I'm missing?

I know it's a morbid kind of question, but it's a question that's been on my mind for a bit. How do we go from stoning adulterers to injecting prisoners with sodium thiopental?

So ive got a task for school where i'm supposed to write about a travel from Portugal to Japan in the 15th century. A few keypoints is how long time these travels would take with boat and what kind of boats they would be using. Ive searched the internet and have found little to nothing about it. Anyone here with this knowledge or some good sources where I could read about it? I know that the Portuguese had established a trading route from Goa in India to Nagasaki in Japan, bud what kind of resources were they trading? Any help from you Historians would be greatly appreciated!

Did this result in a large about of the royalist force being from Nottingham?

My hometown was heavily bombed by allied forces in WWII. I've found out what type of bombers were used, but I'm very interested in what kind of bombs might have been used by these bombers in Europe at the time. The actual target was the harbor used by German Kriegsmarine, if that might make any difference in the type of bombs used.

Just wondering because it seems like everyone ignores the Italian campaign when it was the second front. I know it wasn't as big and achieved lesser results, but it was the second front that the Soviets had wanted and did force the Germans to react (Battle of Kursk). Follow up, what was Stalin's opinion of Operation Husky/Avalanche?

^

American Exceptionalism seems to be merely an extension of Manifest Destiny in a post Industrial world while Manifest Destiny is an ideology that i think can be seen as pre-industrial Nationalism. Is there any truth to this or have i gotten it wrong?

I was reading an argument on reddit about an unrelated thing and there is this one redditor who keeps saying Han Chinese is a modern construct used by the Chinese government to control and unify its people. This are some of his quotes:

"The concept of Han is a relatively modern thing. Especially since racial theory was a modern European pseudo-scientific endeavor. China claims that 90% of the population is this "Han" in order to unify 1.3 billion people."

"Sun Yat-Sen and the nationalists did the same thing by creating this mythical Han race with the Yellow emperor as their divine figure as the origin of this mythical race."

"You do realize that the concept of Han was only popularized in the days of Sun Yat-Sen right? The fact that these people took the name from the Han dynasty doesn't really proved whatever point you're making since this only happened in modern times."

Is there any truth to what he's saying at all? I'd like to think my ethnic group is a real thing.

Having recently watched the documentary World War 1 in Colour, I'm kinda baffled that the allied commanders kept sending hundreds of thousands of men into their deaths by charging them into German lines.

I get that it was about 100 years since the British had been to war and that war was a very different kind of game in 1914, but one would imagine that they would consider trying something differently after the first few failed attempts.

Tanks didn't show up until late 1916 AFAIK (and wasn't really effective until mid 1917), but there has to have been other options opposed to what was going on during 1914 and 1915.

What about landing in Denmark? Netherlands? Belgium? Was any sort of tactics like this ever considered?

For example an arm, leg or back break

Inspired by an earlier thread about the population of china where the top comment pointed to the two food growing zones and stability in china as the reason for its large population I got to thinking. In the “old” world the cultural power centers were based around the large rivers. The Indus river the Nile the Tigris/Eurfrat and so on. But in the Americas, the most know city cultures are located in Central America, and the Andes. Not around the two huge river systems the Amazon and the Mississippi. Are there any theories as to why this is? I realize that there were cultures and large populations along those rivers, but they didn’t build and leave the same easily recognizable imprint as for example the Incas, Olmec or Aztecs.

I was watching the Pacific yesterday and noted that many of the Americans in it refer to the Japanese as yellow-skinned and as monkeys. What racist stereotypes were there of the Americans or British in Japanese society and are there any examples of anti-American/British propaganda?