Obviously Kit Harington's character is fictional and the whole thing is dramatized, but how accurate is the depiction of Roman society.

• Was Keifer Sutherland's Senator Corvus based on anybody real? Was this Celtic Rebellion in 62AD based on a real event?

• how accurate was the depiction of the pagentry surrounding the arena fight?

• What was that festival they were celebrating? Was it real and did it happen during the eruption as depicted?

• Were those aerial reconstructions of Pompeii and Londinium accurate? How about the street level depiction of the city?

Were there any other glaring anachronisms that I may have missed, or parts they depicted particularly accurately?

Now this question may come off as a conspiracy, so please tell me and delete my question mods if I am off my rocker.

That being said, I know that in many southern states of the United States history textbooks refer to the American Civil War as The War of Northern Aggression. I also know that states such as Alabama actually publish their own, unique version of American history textbooks.

Now I am from Wisconsin, and my question is are there "facts" taught to me about history of my State, Country, or the World in textbooks that are considered false by the majority of the world?

Instead of using the atomic bombs or Operation Downfall, would it have been feasible for the allies to try and starve Japan? They had already cut off Japan's supply lines, would Japan have potentially surrendered if this had been continued?

A lot of people who worked on the Manhattan Project (Richard Feynman, for one) justified their participation based on fear that the Nazis would get nuclear weapons first. Was there a Nazi or Japanese equivalent to the Manhattan Project?

Germany was home to the most important scientific developments in early 20th century Physics, so it wouldn't be surprising if the Nazis had a sophisticated program of their own. Then again, a lot of the major scientists were Jewish and fled to the United States before the war started.

Also, when did the Soviets join the race for the bomb? Were they on track to finish before the war ended had the Trinity Test not occurred when it did? Did they start before 1942 when they were still Nazi allies?

On a slightly unrelated note (maybe a bit more speculative), were the Nazis working to get to space? Wernher von Braun, who was arguably the most important single person in NASA history, worked for the Nazi government during WWII. He developed missiles during the war, including the first artificial object to enter space. After it ended he and many other scientists were recruited by the US government and they eventually sent men into space. Did the Nazis have any similar plans, or were they only interested in weapons?

I'm aware that Dragons are a very old and important creature in Asian culture and myth, but how did this imagery of Dragons spread to Europe? Was it coincidence that both peoples had fables with dragons? Was there knowledge of dinosaurs somehow to spark this idea?

Were there internal problems or was it just a matter of foreign conquest?

I was reading through his Wikipedia page and it states that Pan dies, except the section on it is sort of confusing and has a lot of [citation needed] markings. I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on this.

River systems have been the home to many civilizations (Nile, Indus, Tigris and Euphrates) but how come one did not develop along the Mississippi?

I know during WW2 America's declaration of war on Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany was (for the most part) supported heavily by the general public. I was simply wondering if this was the same way during WW1.

Looking at maps or globes today, every inch of land is directly controlled by one country or another. The vast emptiness of the Sahara is claimed by a handful of countries even though the benefits to their country the desert brings is negligible. This goes hand in hand, I think, with the ideology of solid borders overtaking that of a march or neutral zone.

Hello, I took a class last semester on the Ancient Near East, and was interested in looking into the Persians a bit closer. However I noticed there weren't any books on them on the booklist, do you guys have any good starting points for it?

I've tried googling this and searching this board, and can't really find a discussion of this. Maybe it's very widely known and I'm just searching incorrectly. Was it a gradual waning of support, and did it start to wane before the end of WWII or only afterwards? I guess I'm just curious as to how it got to the point at which the population that had supported it in such huge numbers ultimately came around to recognizing its having been so horrific.

EDIT: I'm told Polynesians are the ancestors of native pacific islanders, not Melanesians. My mistake - and thanks for the correction!

I guess two parts to my question.

First, how did ancient peoples of the Pacific Islands travel? What were their boats like? Could they survive at sea for extended periods of time, and if so, how? How did they find so many small isolated sets of islands they ended up settling, like Easter Island?

Second, if they could locate and colonize Hawaii and all these small remote places islands in the Pacific, how could they miss colonizing North and South America? I get they could miss something like the Galapagos Islands, but the Americas are rather large. My understanding is the ancestors of the Native Americans in both South & North America is they came across a Bering Strait land bridge.

Thanks!

In historical fiction and medieval fantasy, blacksmiths are shown to really only make armor and weapons, along with the occasional horse shoe. What would blacksmiths really make, and what techniques would be used? Would the average London blacksmith ever make armor?

I know that throughout its history China was a valuable trading partner for a lot of other places. I understand why the tea, the porcelain, the silk and so on that came from China was valuable. But what did the Chinese get in return? What did the non-Chinese world produce that the Chinese wanted?

Which would be better, an ideal monarchy with a good king or an ideal democracy?