On June 6 1944, around 156,000 allied soldiers landed in Normandy as apart of D-Day and Operation Overlord.

This operation was obviously a success and led to the liberation of France and eventually Europe.

But say the Germans were able to defeat the allies and keep them on the beaches. The allied armies were simply not able to hold the beaches.

Would all the soldiers and paratroopers be left to be killed or captured, would boats attempt to evacuate them? Is there any declassified plan that goes over the plan for all these soldiers stuck in Normandy in the event of a defeat?

Hello. I'm doing research for a game I'm making about WWI and I'm trying to find some resources on infantry tactics to see which might fit as game mechanics.

I'm finding it hard to find information about WWI that isn't

a) high level grand strategy for the war b) reducing an officers thought process to "keep charging the machine guns until we win"

I know it was a revolutionary time for warfare so surely some officer kept a journal regarding new ideas and what seemed to be working and what wasn't.

Can anyone point me in the right direction of any resources that show tactics on a smaller scale during WWI?

Hello, I've left myself little time to complete a section of an Essay in which I discuss the reasons for the Collapse of the Soviet Union. The section I'm currently working on is focused on the Economy and Gorbachevs Reforms etc. In this section I need atleast 3 Primary Sources that either Support or Counter arguments claiming 1) short term economics caused the downfall or 2) Long term failures of the communist system ('doomed to fail') caused its downfall.

Any help finding Primary sources or places to find them that link to the key issues above would be greatly appreciated, thank you

So, we all picture the same thing when we think of a ninja; a dude clad entirely in black with a mask covering all but his eyes. In reality, ninjas did not dress this way. They wouldn't want to have a uniform/stand out.

I've been told the origins of this "costume" come from Japanese prop handlers in the theatre. They would wear these costumes and change props/sets while the play was going on, and the audience was essentially trained to just ignore them/blot them out.

Something I've heard recently, however, is that there was a specific play in medieval Japan that essentially "broke the fourth wall". At a certain point in the play, one of these prop handlers turned around and stabbed another actor, revealing themselves to be a ninja and darting off. After this, many other plays copied them until the kabuki prop handler costume became the ninja costume. My question is; is there any record of this happening and is there any validty to this part of the story? It would certainly be cool if it were true, but I can't find anything on it. Thanks!

I remember my Latin professor telling us that rich roman wealth was counted in area of fields, grains etc.. .and while there is numerous question already about the daily life of peasant and roman citizens (in Rome)

I wonder what was the life in villages and other little settlement. how different it was from middle age and how did it change during the various era and locations of the roman Kingdom/republic/empire.

I've read quite a few myths, especial christian ones and I've come to realize that the weapon shown to defeat a Dragon is nearly always a spear.

Is there some mythological or literary reason for this, besides the obvious benefit of using a weapon with longer reach?

Qin Shi Huang’s Mausoleum was originally recorded as being a kingdom in its own right. He was reportedly entombed in a buried city with a massive standing army and with rivers of mercury flowing throughout the highly detailed structures. The sheer extreme fantastical descriptions of the tomb and process of creating it had led to individuals long after its creation to consider that something remotely of this magnitude simply wasn’t true and was more imagination than reality. But the discovery of the terracotta soldiers in the 70’s and what excavation has been performed has seemed to at least give some form of credibility to the original records. This isn’t to say that the records were without exaggeration or imagination, just that they’re a bit more based in truth than what may have been previously considered.

Similarly, there are mythical creatures like the basilisk, a crowned serpent that could supposedly paralyze an individual with a glance, and that have records touching back to Pliny the Elder. Again, there’s no shortage of imaginative depictions surrounding the idea of a basilisk (an obvious one being the “head of a chicken”), but - to my knowledge - there’s been some acceptance that these early recording were simply attempting to convey the existence/discovery of the king cobra (a characteristically crowned snake known to spit venom in the eyes of those within its range in order to incapacitate them) and that some features were exaggerated or the specifics of what was being conveyed in these records were initially being “lost in translation” by later reviewers, and that this ultimately led to the basilisk being the mythical creature we consider today.

Under this line of thinking, what are some other particularly noteworthy/interesting examples of seemingly overly imaginative records being based a bit more in truth than what may have been initially appreciated? (Essentially my thoughts are that there exist enormous hurdles when we attempt to understand written record. These hurdles could be translation issues, incomplete information, inability of the individual creating the record to adequately describe what it is they’re attempting to record, etc… These issues, all summed together, may - and very likely have - drastically alter how we interpret what the record is attempting to describe and convey. The alteration is to such a degree that the message becomes seemingly ridiculous or imaginative. But more careful later review as these issues are fixed - we get more information, we have more useful translations, etc - shine light on what may actually be more cemented in truth than originally thought.)

Hello everyone,

I was hoping to learn more about the Chilean government's research and development of Project CyberSyn. The types of sources I'm looking for would be academic works (books, articles, dissertations) as well as primary sources (archival documents, testimony, news reports from the period, etc.)

My current understanding is that CyberSyn was an early IT/networking project where the goal was to improve the material well-being of factory workers and facilitate the successful transition to a socialist democracy in Chile. It worked primarily through self-regulation via feedback loops measured through self-reporting of worker happiness.

I'm especially interested in the high-level technical construction of this project. I want to better understand the function and operation of this system, and to understand how modern professionals view its long-term viability.

If possible, I would like to collect perspectives from those in Information Technology fields (such as AI & Data analytics). As well as the views of social scientists and philosophers regarding the project's viability from a humanistic perspective.

I know this is a big ask on an obscure topic, but really any direction would be helpful.

Thank you for reading!

Hi, as the title suggests I recently got interested in Roman civilization and want to learn more, preferably through Documentaries but I'm not picky. What are some accurate Books/Documentaries you'd recommend for someone who until recently thought Julius Ceaser was born through a C-section?

I'm new to the world of mongols and I want to get into the real facts of the Mongolian empire. I recently purchased a book by Jack Weatherford called " Genghis Khan and the makings of the modern world" and I enjoy it but I've heard some criticizing Weatherford's work and I'm nervous if I'm getting some false information. Long story short any book recommendations of the mongols?

Reading through the history of a lot of armed conflict, it seems that the overwhelming majority of battles are decided by clever use of tactics and strategy. Aside from the conquests of the Roman Empire, which is notorious for being the having the only professional army in more than a thousand years, what are some examples of battles decided by one army simply having better fighters?

These are crude estimates via calculations from Wikipedia, but 30% of British Indians are Sikhs and 33% of British Canadians are Sikhs. In the US, Sikhs are 5% and in Australia they’re 17%. Meanwhile Sikhs make up 1.7% of India. So even if my numbers are a bit off, Sikh diasporas are still proportionately way larger than in India. How did this come to be case?

Hi. I'm sorry if my understanding is a bit convoluted, but from what I've been able to pick up, we know El (Isra-El, Beth-El, etc.) was the chief of the Canaanite pantheon. I have heard two different things about Yahweh, one is that he was a mountain or storm god of the Canaanites, another that he was a chief god of a nomadic people called the Shasu. But regardless, the deities merged, and, if I'm not mistaken, Hebrew monotheism didn't come about until the exile period in Babylon, to differentiate themselves from the people they were now uprooted and scattered among. Is that all correct?

Secondly, when, then, did the Canaanites become the evil "other" in the Hebrew mythos? It would be a bit weird if say, the Japanese or the Italians all converted to another religion, without a massive population change, all the same people genetically and culturally, but then writing about how the pre-(X religion) inhabitants were an evil people they wiped out. Is there evidence of a population change at all at the supposed time of the Israelite conquest of Canaan? If not, was the othering of the Canaanites a result of the exile period, where the exiled Jews ended up creating an ethnic dichotomy between themselves and their polytheistic Canaanite ancestors?

There were many women who were, for example, thrown into a body of water to test whether or not they were a witch. If they drowned, therefore proving they were not a witch, is there evidence that their accusors, or those who threw them into the water, were remorseful for this?

We always hear about the big rallies, marches, etc. the temperance movement staged on the way to the 18th Amendment. It was a broad, intense popular upwelling. So did those people largely sail through Prohibition and repeal still insisting they were always right, or did they ever offer any kind of recantation?

It seems like no matter where you go, or even how far you go back into history, it's like every culture decides to bury bodies. Why?

I came across a NYT article that stated how having multiple (12) abortions affected a woman's ability to carry a pregnancy later in life.

This was in reference to Marilyn Monroe, so these alleged abortions would have taken place in the midcentury. Presumably, they would have been illegal, but relatively safe considering her means, resources, and connections at the time. Since Marilyn was never seen visibly pregnant, we can assume these all also took place early in the pregnancy.

I want to state, for the record, I have no idea where this number comes from. Most other sources say there is no evidence she had an abortion at all, let alone twelve. However, she was known to have miscarried several times.

Regardless, I would like to verify how true the rest of the statement is. Could having multiple abortions in that time period cause someone to struggle to conceive or miscarry later in life?

I know many people have asked this question many times over history, but I still want to pose it to see what answers I’ll get on here.

I am writing a novel based in a fantasy world that holds some analogues to the golden age of sail. I am looking for a competitive sport or activity that the ships boys could play against each other.

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I know that more sedentary activities were common place (cards, dice etc), but would prefer something that can be a turned into something a little more page turning.