I'm a college student who is going to be writing a research paper about the North Africa campaign in World War II, largely focusing on Germany.

It is going to give a general overview of people, places, events, etc., but it is mainly going to focus on the strategic impact. The main focus will be how Hitler never took the North Africa theater seriously, and how that caused the Axis to lose. Moreover, I want to go into what the strategic implications were, not only of losing North Africa but also of losing strategic options that would be open if they had won, such as gaining another oil source in the Middle East, or possibly opening another front with the USSR in the Caucasus.

If anyone could give me good sources that address the North Africa campaign in general or any of those things specifically I would greatly appreciate it. Obviously, they must be reputable sources, peer-reviewed if possible.

Primary sources such as army dispatches or transcripts of high command meetings regarding the North Africa theater would be the best sources I could use, so I would be very grateful if someone could point me to those.

How old is the oldest Southern African rock art and can it definitively be attributed to the San? Is the art found in all areas that were once inhabited by the San or is it concentrated in specific places? Is it generally accepted that there was a continuous rock art tradition stretching from the Paleolithic into modern times? When did they stop and why? What do the current San say about this art? Do they feel it "belongs" to them and do they have narratives about what it depicts? What are some authoritative books or articles on the subject?

Today Brazil is the 5th largest country by Area in the world. I have been passively researching colonization and decolonization in the Americas as I find the time period very interesting, but I have a question as to why it ended up as it is today, with Brazil remaining united despite 9 Spanish speaking countries emerging over time. Did this have anything to do with the Treaty of Tordesillas? Was Brazil always more likely to stick together? In addition, what caused the Spanish colonies to go their seperate ways when they were, for the most part, all under the Viceroyalty of Peru while under Spanish rule?

Thank you in advance for your responses.

I'm wondering about this on a practical level. For instance, traditional horse wisdom says that horses need space to run around, but I imagine that there were a lot of horses used in daily business before automobiles became widespread, pulling coaches to move people and goods around, and those working horses would not have had an acre to run around in at the end of the day in a large city - or did they? Was there still areas of open pasture in NYC in the late 19th century for urban livestock?

This comes about because I was wondering out loud about the logistics of bringing horse power back to modern urban centres, in a scenario where oil becomes too expensive, and and there is no ready alternate energy source capable of maintaining our current levels of convenience. The concensus was that in modern cities, horses would be a very bad idea, based on any number of factors, foremost being their need for space, the amount of upkeep and care involved, and the damage to their hooves and knees from clomping around on concrete.

But as I said, it seems to me that large urban centres have used quite a lot of horses in the past. How did they handle the dung? Did the horses have shortened working lives due to the environment? Was spooking an ongoing issue? Did city horses have any significant behavioral issues or neuroses as their lives went on?

What were relations like between Iraq and Syria in the 70s and 80s?

I've been told that Supposedly in the third century the roman empire experienced a lot of financial inflation because the successive Barrack emperors kept just coining new money everytime they needed to pay men.

Did they not know that would happen, ....or did they know and just not care?

Medieval/Colonial European national borders seem to, as a rule, conform to geography. For instance, Germany having a border approximate with the Rhine, or the France/Spain border being approximate to the Pyrenees.

Therefore it seems odd that Portugal has (and continues) existed independently of Spain for an extremely long period of history. One would think that the Iberian peninsula forms a sort of "natural" geographic nation, so to speak, and thus it seems incongruous for Portugal to have existed within it despite sharing borders with a larger and quite militaristic neighbor.

The Electoral Palatinate, Brandenburg, Hesse-Kassel and Anhalt were all Calvinist at one point, but that didn't last for long. Does anyone know why Calvinism in Germany was replaced by Catholicism and Lutheranism?

First, please understand I'm not assuming someone will want to tackle all these, but if you see one that interested you, I'd be grateful. I haven't found clear answers for these elsewhere. If this is too long, please feel free to delete it

Thanks in advance.

I have been researching some grants and deeds which date from about 1190 to 1348, in which my family name appears (more on that, as it comes up).

I started out simply transcribing and translating them (with help, thank you r/askhistorians and u/telkanuru), but as I spend time with them I find myself wondering about the people and their lives. I have been doing much reading (finished Cantor's book on the Black Death recently, for example), but honestly there's a lot that seems either contradictory, or inconclusive, or I just am not understanding the whole picture.

• Most of the grants (of those actually dated when executed) were made on Sundays. Is this because after church, everyone from the parish would be present and it was more convenient?

• Would a scribe trained in the legal terms and charter 'hand' travel from community to community regularly for this, or would they be called in as needed? Or would every town just have “that one guy” who was really good at this stuff?

• The witnesses number maybe ten at most, sometimes only five men named but always say “and many others”. If there are only five or ten listed by name, does that imply that they are direct abuttors or live/own closer to the land in question? My thinking: just list those few who are directly affected and who are most familiar with the parcel of land in question because it affects them most, and the rest are just incidental witnesses.

• Grantees all pay annual fees in addition to some consideration paid at the time of the grant, to the person making the grant. One fee was a single grain of pepper, to be paid at Christmas, for a 1/2 acre parcel. For the majority of these grants, the person making the grant is apparently just another neighbor (i.e. not the Lord of the Manor). Why fees in addition to the initial payment, and why some so apparently small as a “grain of pepper”?

• Where do the fees ultimately end up, in the grantor's pocket, to the Lord, or are they kicked up the chain to the King?

• I know the definition of “ownership” is changing in this period, so this may be a flawed question. Would these people have considered themselves “owners” of the land? Or were they merely people (families even, for hundreds of years) who live on this land held in turn by the Lord (who further had a debt to the King for having been granted it in the first place), and by making a grant are simply shifting their responsibility for the land to a new person/tenant? Kings come and go, but the same family names show up in these grants for three hundred years. Would they have ever just assumed it was “their” land, and not the Lord's or the King's? At what point did someone truly own land?

• The earliest grant also mentions these fees and considerations “excepting duty/service to the King”. Does this mean that the fees and duties owed to the grantor are one thing, and in addition, if the King comes along to raise an army (or fund it, thru taxes), that the grantee understands he's on the hook for this extra 'service'?

• The first deed as I mentioned was from ca. 1190, a little over a century after the Norman invasion. My understanding is the inhabitants of England were beginning to adopt last names in this period (as a result of the French influence). Some of the deeds follow the convention where a given name was listed, along with a descriptive term or occupation (“the archer”, “the French”, “the clerk”). But a very few seem to have actual Family/surnames, names which are capitalized and missing any sort of comma followed by a “le” or “the” article and descriptive term. For example, there are three men from one family (reference made to “his brother”, and all three have the same last name. How common would it be for someone to have an actual “last name” as we know it, in 1190?

• To drone on, one name on the deeds (my family name in particular) shows up in other reference books (Wheatley's “English Surnames” for one) as being Saxon in origin. If it's a Saxon description, and three men in the parish share it, is it safe to assume that the name is old enough that it's no longer merely a differentiating descriptive term (like “John, who is the Archer”), but rather has already become a true “family” name, (like “John Archer”, and his son “William Archer”, etc.). Why the mix of simple descriptives, and others with surnames?

• I learned that “William” became a popular name in this period partly in honor of William the Conqueror. But that’s presumably for people on the winning side. Why would a family with a Saxon surname (mine) name a child “William” so soon (well, 125 years) after the Battle of Hastings, if they were Saxon. Wouldn't they still be a little peeved? This is less distant in time than the U.S. is today from the Civil War, and yet there is still much ire felt by the losing side in that one.

• Would the clerk who wrote the grant list himself as a witness? I have one with “Geoffrey, the clerk” as a witness ('Geoffrey clerico').

• A charter of about 1220 (undated) no longer references 'virgates' as the earlier ones do, but now describes discrete meadows with messuages, enclosed fields (many with field names), marl pits, hedges, boundary ditches, etc. I understand that in the earlier medieval period one might own a collection of strips, perhaps not even connected, that might be conveyed altogether (in virgates, for example), and you'd farm your narrow strips separately, alongside other men in the same field. But by mid 1200s these parcels now appear to be consolidated chunks of land in 3, 5, 10 acre parcels, with permission given to travel over other land to get to them (they are landlocked). Are people in this period living in and on what we today might understand to be 'farms', with a house on the same plot of land, and one or two large fields all connected? Are virgates no longer being farmed the way they used to be?

• Is it true that only land-owning men were witnesses to these grants, and if so, does that imply anything about social status or wealth if a person shows up on grants as early as 1190? Does having a family name at this time imply anything either? Were these people serfs, or tenant farmers?

• Would they have had any familiarity with the Latin used, and been able to later refer to these documents when disputes arose or was everyone pretty much illiterate except the scribe?

• The grants all stop in 1348. Is it a simple case of everyone dying off, or was there a general slackening everywhere of the legal process in general because of the upheaval caused by the waves of plague coming through?

Thanks again

What were the main reasons for the peace treaty (admittedly with good terms for the Soviet Union) rather than invasion and occupation of the country.

I ask because my boss is convinced that the Jewish Mafia is behind the last eight presidents being placed into power and is responsible for the deaths of at least 56 political aids with a significant number in direct relation to Hillary Clinton. I am just curious to see if there is any truth to this seemingly far-fetched theory.

I'm a writer working on a story set in the late 1800s where one character attends Mass on a regular basis. I've attended several of Masses myself (non-Catholic here but I come from a large Catholic family), but I'm not sure what to include from my own experiences as they may be anachronistic. Other than the liturgy being spoken in Latin, what else should I consider to achieve a level of verisimilitude in my work?

I know this is more of an economics related question but I'm hoping someone can help me out here as I'm a little confused and my textbooks seem to just think the answer is self-evident.

I'm sure that these meanings varied from the revolutionary to Filipino wars, but I'm still unclear on how the line can be drawn retrospectively. Militias were raised by the states, so who trained volunteers? Were they literally just people who saw a battle going on and ran out of their homes with a gun in hand?

It strikes me as something that would have been a huge elephant in the room. The Nazis advocated for the position that blonde, blue eyed individuals were the most racially pure, and the man leading the party had black hair and brown eyes. Was this ever addressed, at any time, or did everyone pretend like they didn't notice?