They know where it is, why not dig?

In the midst of watching Ken Burns: The War and was just curious if any soldiers had to be through both hell's.

After the war, the British government nationalized transportation (rail, buses), utilities (electricity, gas supply, water), energy (coal, hydro, petroleum), heavy industry (iron and steel), healthcare (creating the NHS) etc.

The rest of Europe did pretty much the same and some countries nationalized large parts of their industry and natural resources; for instance, French carmaker Renault was nationalized, as were the Swedish iron mines.

Why was this acceptable back then, but now not it's completely out of the question?

Judge Andrew Napolitano recently propounded a contrarian view of President Lincoln, suggesting that other action could have been taken to end the practice. Napolitano goes so far as to suggest that the government could have bought up all the slaves for half the sum spent on the war.

I'm reminded too of an essay by Winston Churchill about half a century after the war which suggests he believed the Confederacy themselves would have ended slavery soon after defeating the North. Is this all revisionism on a grand level or is there any plausibility to their arguments?

Canada currently has only 34.88 million people, which is not only much lower than the United States (313.9 million) but smaller even than California alone (38.04 million). Canada has enough space to hold many, many more people, but doesn't seem to be as attractive to immigrants for some reason. Why is that?

It seems a lot of groups are given names after the fact (I'm thinking of posts I've seen here about the the Hittites and possibly the Cathars). What is the oldest society that we know how they identified themselves, and (if it's not the same) what is the oldest society that we still commonly use their own identifier to refer to them? Also, why did they chose these names for themselves?

EDIT: Also, I am called an American because I come from the land that was named after the guy who determined it was its own continent and not part of Asia. Romans were presumably named after the city that they came from. Is this pretty standard when cultures decide names for themselves? What other examples are there of people naming themselves after things other than where they dwell?

One explanation I was exposed to was that after the battle of Adrianople there simply weren't enough professional roman soldiers to field an adequate army. But wouldn't that problem be more temporary than it turned out?

What about the Catholic church? Do they just try and recreate the language too?

If it was Europe I imagine it would be easy to tell

I know that pirates had port cities like Nassau and Tortuga to flock to, but how did those communities operate? Did they elect their own governors and have laws in place to keep the peace, or was it anarchy? How did these communities sustain themselves? Did pirates bring back loot and share it with the community to keep it running, or work together to generate more profit from their pirating?

I've heard conflicting reports on this. Some say that after the first bomb, Japan would have surrendered anyway, and the second bomb was unnecessary. Others say that Japan were unwilling to surrender even after the first bomb, which is why the second was dropped. What was it really like?

This question came up because I was curious if the likes of Bach and Beethoven had heard Middle Eastern or Indian scales. Specifically, I noticed the use of a major third to a phrygian second, which is often used in Middle Eastern music, in Beethoven's Sonata Op. 28. Am I making false connections or were some composers occasionally influenced by other cultures' music?

Hey all,

I'm actually a Renaissance History historian who focuses on mysticism and Bruno is actually one of my research subjects. The Christ like fashion in which Bruno was represented (a martyr for science) both cracked me up and made me sad they failed to put him in his mystical religious context. His memory belongs with Pico and Ficino, not Gallieleo and Newton. Am I wrong?

We all know Marvel's Mjolnir and even the Mjolnir pendants that are all over the place. However what kind of weapon did the norsemen imagined that Thor had?

At the moment in university I am making a series of infographics about different planes in the second world war. I pretty much have them all done but I am struggling to get certain information about them and that is their K/D. The planes that I need this information for are:

Hawker Hurricane Supermarine Spitfire Messerschmitt Bf 109 Focke Wulf Fw 190A Mitsubishi A6M Zero Nakajima Ki-43

If anyone could help get me this information that would be fantastic.

I have a source claiming that this book wasn't banned, and that it was the most common of books confiscated from children when they arrived at concentration camps. Yet, the Nazis banned Kästner from publishing any other books in Germany. So why did Emil and the Detectives survive? Surely they would have assumed that all of his work would fall under the same category, having being written by a 'morally decadent' author?