The movies opening scene where conscripts cross the river by boats, half of them are given a rifle and the other half ammo, and then they charge at a fortified German line with no support, and the survivors are gunned down by a blocking regiment.

I've asked about the rifles before so I know that part is fake, and I believe I've heard about the blocking regiments being a similar myth (they existed but they weren't just machine gunning down survivors of failed human wave assaults), but how about the whole charge? Hollywood seems to be obsessed with depicting the Soviets as dumping men onto the battlefield and using absurd cruelty to keep them from running away from certain death but how truthful is that? I'm suspicious because American soldiers are never presented as being pushed out of their landing crafts at Normandy by evil commissars executing random people on the spot as traitors and cowards while the soldiers just try to survive rather than push objectives.

For those who don't know the Mulakkaram was a Tax that was apparently imposed on any lower caste woman in the Kingdom of Tranvancore (present day Kerala) who wished to cover her breasts. Apparently it came to an end when a woman chopped her breast off and threw it at the taxman. Apparently she is considered something of a martyr to this day. There has even been a movie made about it.

However, I have come across sources online that claim that the tax never existed (or has been grossly taken out of context) and that even high status women in that area went bare breasted as as part of their normal dress and that the story of the protest is a complete myth. The story does seem a bit unbelievable but the sources denying it are rather nationalistic and make me wonder if they are reliable themselves. What is the truth of the matter?

I'm sure we all tried inventing our own languages and alphabets as kids. Most of these probably never went to fruition for obvious reasons. Have we ever found ancient evidence of "draft" language? Take the Latin alphabet as we know it. Each letter has it's own respective shape. Have we ever found evidence of the "discarded" letters that didn't make the cut or were altered versions of what we use now that didn't make it into the final alphabet? This can apply to words as well.

I was listening to a podcast about the fall of the Byzantine Empire. When the podcaster was talking about the 4th Crusade and the sacking of Constantinople, he briefly said that some orthodox residence helped their Muslim neighbors defend a mosque from catholic crusaders. And this got me wondering about how Muslims and other groups were treated by the Byzantines. Before listening to this podcast I had assumed that they were just as discriminatory towards non-christens as their western counter parts but now I'm wondering if they were kinder or at least less violent towards ethnic and religious minorities?

I guess my scope basically surrounds the Cold War. E.G. it's generally well-understood that the U.S. played a role in the training of the Mujahedeen, yes? But how do we know that, aside from American weapons (notably anti-aircraft weaponry) being used by them. Sometimes, the governments of countries outright do it openly.

But, if I'm trying to find out, as a random guy, if Soviet advisors/volunteers were sent to Vietnam, could I somehow contact the Russian government and ask "Hey, can I peruse your old top-secret files?" - Obviously I'm kidding, but what route would you go through.

Or any other military action of the time? Why was it "ready, aim, fire" instead of "weapons free"?

Arthur Tudor was Prince of Wales and heir apparent but died 7 years before his father. If he had lived long enough to be crowned, would he have chosen a boring name, or kept his mythically significant “Arthur”?

What were his parents thinking in naming him something so evocative?

This question came about because in a TTRPG campaing I'm currently in one of our players has a task to map possible overland trade routes for his home country, despite the fact the country supposedly has a sizable merchant fleet and that overland trade routes weren't able to carry as much goods as overseas routes, so I suspect our game master has other plans about those maps in the long run.

Things like the trial of Jesus under Pontius Pilate would have legal documentation in my mind, is this correct? Or any other significant events from the time period that might also be recorded in both the Bible and elsewhere.

I looked into this and I’m amazed. There are tons of discoveries that can be made from the oxyrhynchus papyri. What do you need to be able to work with them? Is there any profession specifically for this?

(I realize this may be a way-too-general question, so if it helps I'm specifically interested in forms of unit-based warfare prior to the invention of massed fire; medieval European/Sengoku Japanese/Greek hoplite-type stuff.)

I've always been interested in the logistical qualities of how an actual battle is run, what with all the screaming and the dying and the chaos of trying to get large groups of people to do anything with any sort of cohesion. But one thing that I've been wondering for a while is: standing in the front line and charging another unit, especially one that's had time to place their spears, essentially seems like asking a bunch of folks to run full-speed at a wall of sentient knives. I get that mid-way through the charge the mass of bodies probably made individual qualms moot in the face of inertia, but how did soldiers overcome the terror of what seems like fairly certain death? For that matter, was it as impossibly deadly as it sounds to try and avoid being immediately impaled? How were these soldiers selected? (The most-skilled would seem to make sense to have the best chance of surviving, but also this seems like a great way to sacrifice your best folks early on.) And finally, were there special provisions set up for unit leaders, bannermen, musicians, commanders, etc?

I realize that head-to-head unit-to-unit is probably the least ideal matchup compared to flanking, or arrows, etc. but it had to have happened enough that there were some ideas of how to do it properly...right?

In the 90's, there was a wave of privatizations of state owned companies in former socialist countries like Romania,Bulgaria,Hungary. My question is why was there a need for such measures? What was the logic behind them and why were they taken?

I've been seeing stories lately about many of the 'founding fathers' of the U.S being influenced by Roman systems of government and ancient Greek and Roman philosophers' view of government. Were the authors of the constitution also influenced by the Iroquois Confederacy? If so, where in the U.S. system of government can we see the influence of the Iroquois system?

Somebody told me today that the Saxons used Roman coins as pendants. Is this true, and if so, how aware were these people of the Roman Empire?

I think some dude at YouTube said a philosopher designed a prototype for a steam machine, and that could have kickstarted the industrial revolution about 1000 or so years earlier, and even speculated we would have colonized Alpha Centauri but that’s wild speculation

Obviously all years are arbitrary, and nothing physically changes when Dec 31 1969 becomes Jan 01 1970. But is there a reason to believe that people have put enough meaning into their decade to actually affect the way we write history. I know Bruce Schulman wrote a (fantastic) book called "The Seventies," but do you think professional historians will abandon decades as a unit of analysis? Was there a tradition of historians using decades before the last fifty years or so?

I'm interested in learning more about what esoteric systems are used as the basis of fictional magic systems both popular and obscure. I'm aware Kabbalah and Gnosticism were referenced in the more obscure stuff /u/MKirkbride put into Elder Scrolls, or what Patrick Rothfuss may have referenced when coming up with Naming - what other systems or philosophies are often chosen as the basis of these fictional portrayals?

I recently came across the factoid that it took nearly 200 years of emperors before there was an emperor who had been born while their father was in office (Commodus).

It seems like it was the main obsession of many emperors and of Roman society at large was to have a biological son to pass their family linage off too so why did Roman emperors seem just so damn bad at it?

Was it something like trench warfare, or was it more mobile?

Thanks.