I gather that this happened during the early Renaissance, but I don't understand why neumatic notation had to go. It seems like it was fully capable of supporting polyphony. If the works of Leonin and Perotin could be written in this notation system, it seems like there isn't any good reason why the works of Byrd, Morley and de Lassus couldn't be written this way. What am I missing?

...and for that matter, where did the modern notation system even come from?

Edit: Grammar hard.

Hi! I'm wondering if there are any tangible differences and/or similarities in how Britain contra France treated their colonies before and during the decolonization. (1900s) How did this effect the development of the independent country, and what aspects led these differences/similarities to occur?

Thanks!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but during the 18th and early to mid 19th centuries, the Company was typically the smallest unit to be given independent orders, ie "Corps commander passes orders down to his Division Commanders, Division Commander to his Regimental Commanders, Regimental Commanders to their Company Commanders who shepherd their men to perform the movement."

Since Company commanders tended to be Captains, what role did Lieutenants play in these operations? In modern war, Lieutenants are almost always given a fair amount of independent decision making, especially in recent American operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am unsure of how current command delegation compares to Napoleonic styles.

Why didn't the Japanese seize the islands in Southern-Asia they needed for the oil and wait for a response from the US, instead of attacking Pearl Harbor?

"Top-level comments should be...comprehensive, informative, and in-depth."

I have a theory on why people post terrible top-level comments. Feel free to share yours. Nature abhors a vacuum. When people see a question with over a hundred upvotes, and few or no comments, people see it as a potential karma gravy train. Keep in mind in other subreddits, the first few top-level posts for a thread receive as much if not more karma then the thread receives. Typically in order to be one of the first few top-level posts one must luck out in manufacturing terrible posts for new threads, and hope one of the threads receives hundreds or thousands of karma points, and as a result, your post receives a lot of exposure and hopefully is consequentially upvoted.

This probably trains a lot of people to be unsuitable top-level posters for askhistorians, although they probably won't know enough about the subject material anyway.

Maybe mods can weigh in, and give anecdotal evidence whether multi-hundred upvote threads tend have more deleted top-level comments then other threads to confirm my theory or not.

I was recently watching 12 years a slave and during the opening scene it looked to me that the freed blacks seemed to enjoy almost perfectly equal status to the common white men - there were seemingly no separate facilities and they (seemed to be) treated as equals. Was this the case, or just how it's portrayed in movies?

I recently studied a course on the history of the Soviet Union as an elective in college and remembered reading somewhere that the illegality of drugs was one of the few areas where both the US and the Russians were able to agree during the Cold War. Despite this however, knowing what we do now about the widespread corruption and general inefficiency of the government in the Soviet Union, was there a black market for drugs in the nation and what drugs would have been the most common?

I've heard my professor mention this in two of my courses, but I seem to be unable to find anything about this happening.

There are Holocaust memorials everywhere in the U.S. but I was never taught anything about the other genocides while I was growing up. I had never even heard of the other genocides until I started doing more independent historical studies on my own.

I know wine was often watered down but I'm curious if there were there varieties of wine during those times, or would the option simply be "wine"? Are there any present day examples today that are like the wine from then?

Story goes like this: There was a strike at a coal mine or something like a coal mine. The governor got involved and sent in the state militia to restore order. The militia opened fire on the strikers. There was a train and the engineer saw what was going on. He stopped the train between the militia and the strikers.

Any truth to this?

Why didn't the Germans simply firebomb Stalingrad the way the allies did with Dresden? Why did they try to capture the city? What value did it have?

I was reading "Great Expectations" recently and the question popped up.

I'm guessing that's the case because literacy is much more wide spread today than it was 457 years ago?

Pre-Islamic Arabia and even early Islamic Arabia did not have many grand or elaborate temples and later mosques (the kabba wasn't that elaborate). So when did they start building some of their more glamorous structures?

Did he just take from the people and give to the enlisted until he was able to take what he needed from the countries he invaded?

My question pertains to the battle of little big horn. Now I know after death people tend to void their bowels. My question is was it before he died (due to fear) or after death? Serious question to settle a family argument.

Is there any evidence that humans haven't always know that thunder and lighting are related? They may not have understood the reasons for the delay in hearing thunder and seeing lightning but did we ever think they were completely separate entities?