Even today with heavy machinery mining is difficult work. How did ancient societies i.e. Greek and Roman locate and harvest mineral?

To be clear, I'm not referring to situations where geographic or spatial boundaries divide language-speaking populations, like the Atlantic Ocean dividing England from the U.S. I'm more interested in populations that speak or spoke the same language in close proximity, yet were politically divided for some period of time, as in the Korean Peninsula.

I remember learning back in the day that William the Conqueror made all of the aristocrats in England swear an oath of loyalty to him which superseded their oaths to their immediate lords, and that this greatly increased his power. I think I also remember learning that this centralization was a big part of why England became such a military power, and was able to go fuck with France for so long, despite France being so much larger. Is this accurate?

If so, then I'd love to know if it imitated by other monarchs. And when & how did that happen? And if it didn't, then did they find other ways of consolidating their power?

During my western civilization class today, my instructor told the class that there was a discrepancy in how European civilizations kept the date and the year could either be in the 1800's or 2200's. According to him, when the collapse of the Roman Empire occurred, western civilization lost the cohesiveness to keep a calender synced. I have never heard of this, though I have heard of the phantom time hypothesis. Is there any veracity in his statement?

-By the third and fourth centuries A.D., were most of the army's recruits not native Latin speakers, speaking mostly other languages or a dialect of Latin?

-It's my understanding that orders were given in Latin, so did soldiers have to learn how to speak it? If so, was there any formal instruction?

-Was Latin the "lingua franca" of military life, with Latin the only way men recruited from different linguistic regions could speak to each other?

-In his texts, Cassius Dio reports how Septimius Severus' Pannonian legionaries shocked the senatorial elite of Rome with their "most savage appearance, most terrifying speech (emphasis added), and most boorish in conversation" (Dio, 74.2.3-6). Could this rough "army Latin" have helped to create the perception that the army had become "barbarized"?

I am currently researching on the 14th Dalai Lama. Obviously it is very hard to find unbiased texts and books. There are two extreme viewpoints, and from there it is hard to judge. My questions regard the critical points in his life. I read, but without any given source, that he wrote letters of apprecciation to Mao Zedong, but I can't find them, especially not translated. Anyone knows more about these? What was his relation with the 10th Panchen Lama? And which group did influence him in his early years, especially towards confrontation with the communist china? As well as how did shift the critical opinion on him, which was pretty common in the 90s imo, to a "popstar"-like figure in the 00's?(Sorry i should read the rules better :( ) I would just be happy with some recommendations for articles and books you guys think that have at least a scientific approach to them and are useful.

For anyone else interested, the most interesting book i found so far is "A Tibetan Revolutionary: The political life and times of Bapa Phüntso Wangye". He helped the Dalai Lama with translations between Mao Zedong and him. A very great read! Though it is somewhat a scientific biography, so of course biased and subjective, but given with context. Sorry that this is all confusing, I am so confused with this topic. Thousands of esoteric books and websites with lawyers, students etc. for tibet...

Leaving aside for a moment arguments about Hiroshima's own status as a military target, was there any discussion by American commanders of dropping the bomb on a more obviously military target in 1945? Like Japanese positions on Mindanao? Or in China?

Living in the UK, myself, I'm intrigued by American exceptionalism, which seems to be ever apparent in modern times.

I've heard a few quotes regarding 'American exceptionalism', one of which, and possibly my favourite, is "Americans are so caught up assuming our nation is God's gift to the planet that we forget just how many parts of it are broken.". So, to what extent has the notion of such exceptionalism warped what the history of (arguably) the world's most powerful country really was?

There's obviously a lot of political garbage going on today about the Federal Reserve being the epicenter of evil and what-not, such that I'm not sure who/what to trust in terms of an account of why, exactly, Jackson was so opposed to the central bank of the US. Help me out?

I use the term "Negro", and not slave, because the film The Butler begins in the mid-1920s, on a plantation where sharecroppers are treated little better than their slave grandparents would have been.

How different were the lives of the people in the houses and the people in the fields?

Are there any surviving diaries (even published, if possible) that were written despite this ban if it existed?

There seem to be a lot of them. I couldn't get anywhere with google, just a list of names with no explanation.

I have been reading up on early societies and civilisations as of late. I have read of ones that developed as agricultural and pastoral cultures as well as the older hunter/gatherer system. Were there any that depended solely or near solely on fishing? How many feed themselves by gathering solely fish or by developing more complex aquaculture? In addition why were agricultural and pastoral cultures much more common?