With the recent Pfizer and Moderna and AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine rollouts, it looks like we're nearing the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. That said, lots of vaccines that we take for granted today weren't invented until decades after the Spanish Flu (eg., Polio), and I doubt scientists in 1918 were able to collaborate on the scale we have today in order to create a vaccine for a brand-new virus in the span of a year. So, what led to the end of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic?

How and why did the Germanic people’s expand into present-day Germany, where the Celts were previously living? Why were they attracted to the area, and did they have any superiorities in areas like warfare that enabled them to do so?

in 1519 and onwards, when the Spanish saw the massive death toll due to diseases, did they think they were the cause of them? and when did the Europeans realize it was them who were bringing the diseases to the new world?

I was having a conversation with some friends couple days ago about this. They showed me some gifs and you can clearly see Hitler jittery af and twitching. How true was this?

I want a good Crusades movie, but after I've reconsidered watching this one because of the Internet Historian's video on it where he rips the movie to shreds. I've heard really good things about the Director's Cut so do you think it's worth watching from a history enjoyer's point of view?

edit so I got the famous naval hero The Duke of Wellington confused with the nursery rhyme hero the Duke of York...

For instance, the was the famous Scot, MacGregor, who earned a dowry, and used this to buy a promotion, but hiw exactly did this function?

"I've just come into some money, one promotion please."?

There are a lot of publicly available books about the fall of the Ottoman Empire and about Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, but virtually nothing until Erdogan's rise in the 21st Century. What are some of your reading recommendations that cover people such as Kenan Evren, Ismet Inonu, Tansu Ciller, or Turgut Ozal?

So from what I read, the first people that lived in England were the indigenous celtic Briton, until they were driven off by the Romans which caused them to live in Wales which was apart of England during then. However, the anglo saxons travelled to England in around the late 4th century, but what confuses me is how the anglo saxons were considered English? If they moved to England, how on earth did they get the English ethnicity if they came from different places, weren't the celtic Briton the original, ethnic English people? Why don't the English compare themselves to the celtic Briton but instead they compare themselves to the Anglo saxons? I'm sorry if my question is strange but I tried to find the answer in Google but nothing came up apart from random facts about the celtic.

Hello fellow historians :) I am new to this and this seemed the best group to ask

I am a master's student and I am doing my theses about Etruscan mirrors.

I need to consult a study that is part of this book Art and Technology: A Symposium on Classical Bronzes from 1970 published by the MIT Press, but unfortunately I can't find it anywhere, does anyone knows how can I consult it online?

i appreciate any type of help, thank you very much :)

I’ve asked this a few times and have never gotten a substantive response. As Mondale died this week he’s been on my mind and am hoping to finally get some insight.

According to the Wikipedia article about Danegeld, in the year 1012, the English "bought off" the Vikings with 17,900 kg of silver. Similarly large sums of silver were taken in other years.

What did the Vikings do with all this silver back in Denmark? Wouldn't the influx of this huge sum of silver just cause massive inflation without an accompanying increase in production of goods that they could spend it on?

And where did the English farmers manage to find all this silver to pay the Danegeld anyway?

Why were the Ulster loyalist paramilitaries so divided? Some even became worse enemies than their intended opposition the IRA and the INLA. Also what exactly was the UDA? Was it an umbrella term for all Loyalist paramilitaries or was it a Paramilitary in itself?.

I'm reading a biography on Stalin at the moment and it does not ever directly address this point. The people around him knew he was a Georgian but what about the common people? I'm assuming Stalin had a Georgian accent?

This also applies to other social categories such as ethnicity, but I would like to focus on religion to narrow the topic a bit.

What qualifies one to be a member of a certain religion is a matter of great controversy in the present day world. When looking at the history of religion, with it's many schisms, heresies, inquisitions and purists, that doesn't seem to be a new development. Whether or not someone is a "true believer" depends on who you ask. One persons faithful might be another persons heathen. One entity might even consider itself to be a non-member of a religion, while others might hold self-identification to be irrelevant and still judge him to be a member for other reasons.

How, then, do historians approach question that involve specific religion? If a question is about the history of, say, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity or Roman polytheism, then how do historians decide which peoples history to answer with?

Do historians simply use the least controversial definition available, thereby avoiding the need to defend their choice as much? Or is there a strict method with a lot of self-critique and conscious choice, that might lead to using controversial categories that are not acknowledged broadly? If the former, doesn't that risk leading to inconsistencies and oversights? If the latter, how do historians defend their theological categorizations from those who inevitably disagree?

Thanks in advance!

I’ve been listening to Dan Carlin recently and he makes the case that Western Powers hadn’t appreciated the significance of air power in naval warfare quite like the Japanese. As demonstrated by the sinking of the HMS Repulse and Prince of Wales by the Japanese. The convoy they sailed in didn’t have air support. Why? My thoughts being that given the Battle of Britain being a life and death struggle to contest air superiority to prevent naval invasion it would seem the British were clued up about this. What caused the screw up?

Does anyone know of a good introductory book/series for 9th century Britain, something that does a good catch on religion, tech, sociology, economy, etc? I'm in my research phase for a project. I appreciate your time. Thank you!

Of course there were some good reasons for an invasion of Italy as an addition to the eventual invasion of France, but how was the notion that Italy was an easy route into the rest of Europe justified?

Of course the Italian army was famously not terribly capable (albeit far from completely incompetent, as some people seem to think), but the Germans would undoubtedly have reinforced them, and the Italian peninsula is a long, narrow, mountainous funnel, ideal for defensive warfare and with little space to execute large-scale encirclement movements, which had been proven to be effective time and time again on the eastern front.

And even if the peninsula could be taken without the Axis having to spread their forces out to defend France as well (which it probably could have, just with great difficulty and losses), the path to Germany still wouldn't exactly have been easy, given that the peninsula is practically entirely cut off from the rest of Europe by the formidable and easy-to-defend alps.

On a specific level, I'm thinking USA to UK but any sort of information would be fascinating. There's sometimes references to major UK bands from the early 60s picking up things like obscure blues records and being "inspired" by them and my assumption would have been that access to them would be quite difficult. Were covers of popular songs from overseas done by national artists much more popular instead?