Hi, i was looking for suggestions on books about the Fall of Rome. I'm writing a thesis on Hystory Teaching and i wanted to focus on the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the causes and the interpretation of recent historiography.

I already did some research on the subject and tried to nail the "major" resources, which are:

• Peter Heater, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

• Bryan Ward Perkins, The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

• Adrian Goldsworty, How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower

• Michel De Jaeghere, The Last Days: The End of the Western Roman Empire

I think I got all the major authors in here but I was looking for some more suggestions, maybe if there are other major sources that I'm missing or if there are some interesting books which focus on a specific aspect like maybe Teutoburg/Adrianople, Christianity and how it became the official religion after 325, maybe something about the Parthians and Sassanids (even though I am focusing on the Western Roman Empire)?

Thanks to everyone for your time.

I’ve read that the US gave these scientists immunity for the knowledge that they obtained from there. I’m assuming the knowledges must be significant enough for them to do that.

What exactly did they learn from a scientific perspective and how has that contributed to modern science?

Whenever I try to find out a little bit more detailed info about any historical event, especially in the period 400-1800 AD, it's very very difficult to even find out which are our primary sources. For example: I would like to have a website that when I type "VOC, 1550", tells me which Trade Registers, from each year, we get our information from. Are you aware of anything like this or am I bound to secondary stories from historians' books?

I shouldn’t have used the word efficiently but I couldn’t find a better word so I had to go with it.

Anatolia had been under Greek rule for most of its history. Ever since Alexander the Great conquered the region, the region has been under Hellenic and Romanic spheres of influence for like 1,400 years until the Byzantine defeat at Manzikert.

The region was controlled by the Greeks from around 300 BC - 0 AD where the Romans absorbed it

The region was under Roman rule from 0 AD to 395 AD when the Roman Empire split in two, this region becoming the Byzantine Empires

The Byzantine changed their official language from Latin to Greek in 600 AD, then ruled the region for another 500 years.

You would expect that there would be many Greeks there but when I searched it up, it only says there are around 2,000 Greeks living in Turkey currently

What happened to all of them?

I assume they were subjugated but to only 2,000 Greeks?

How many Turks were there so they could be able to subjugate the population from being the majority to not being even 0.1% of the population?

There were many Chinese periods of fragmentation throughout history but the most famous is the Three Kingdoms period. But why did that period get chosen instead of other periods.

Keep in mind that I am not a Three Kingdoms anti. I just question why was it the most popular.

Spring and Autumn Period (771 BC - 476 BC) during the Zhou Dynasty

I get why this one wasn’t famous. It lasted too long. Imagine trying to make a historical drama or videogame out of this. It would be horrendously long and waste so much space on PCs. Imagine if a Chinese drama is made about it. It would be the Simpsons of China. And since this was so early, there are few surviving records. After all, the first is the worst.

Three Kingdoms Period (220 AD - 280 AD) after the Han Dynasty fell

This event was very well recorded. However, it didn’t really lead to great outcome afterwards. Not even half a century into Jin rule will China show signs of disunity. I don’t get why this is worthy of documenting. After 60 years of war, China reunified under the Jin Dynasty for only 24 years, then went back into disunity. Although the Jin were still around, they didn't unify all of China.

Sixteen Kingdoms Period (304 AD - 439 AD) during the Jin Dynasty

It was basically the warlords to the north of the Jin Dynasty fighting each other. After they unified, China was divided into either 2 or 3 dynasties. I get why it’s not that worth documenting.

Five Dynasties Period, Ten Kingdoms period (907 AD - 960 AD) after the Tang Dynasty fell

This is the last mass scale warlord period of China so I think it deserves some recognition. However, being the fourth doesn’t give you a golden gun. Instead, this was a stray arrow.

So why didn’t they choose the Five Dynasty Period as the official warlord period? It seems more acceptable to highlight this because: It was the shortest, it brought the longest time of unification (Other than the Zhou but they had their disadvantages), it was the last major scale warlord period, it was the most recent in time, thus making recording of the periods easier

Don’t answer “The Three Kingdoms Period was more popular than others cuz there are more videogames and sources about it”

First of all, why did video games like Total War choose to highlight this instead of the Three Kingdoms period. And since the Five Dynasty Period happened 700 years after the Three Kingdoms Period, why were there less sources? Since it is more modern, there should really be more sources about it.

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I know this was a lot so I will recap:

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Spring and Autumn Period (771 BC - 476 BC)

Too long and lack of information due to being so far back into history.

Three Kingdoms Period (220 AD - 280 AD) after the Han Dynasty fell

Didn't lead to great outcomes.

Sixteen Kingdoms Period (304 AD - 439 AD) during the Jin Dynasty

Not interesting enough.

Five Dynasties Period, Ten Kingdoms period (907 AD - 960 AD)

This one is worthy of being the most popular since it fits many criterias

• Shortest warring period
• Brought the longest time of unification (Other than the Zhou but they had their disadvantages)
• It was the last major scale warlord period
• It was the most recent in time, thus making recording of the periods easier

I know that the Vandals occupied North Africa for a while after the Western Roman Empire collapsed,yet i know no,at least extinct like African Romance, African Germanic,so what happened?Is it because the arabs have been there so long it's been wiped out?

Okay, so any good Catholic will know that the Papacy's power is primarily derived from St. Peter, who founded the Church in Rome, yadda yadda yadda, "Rock upon which I build my church", etc. etc.. That's where they derived their teaching from. One could also easily argue that the Protestants, Calvinists, and Anglicans also derive their roots from Peter's church.

The Mar Thoma Churches derive their origins from St. Thomas, who did the Apostle equivalent of looking at a map of the known world, pointing to a spot off of it, and making his way all the way over to Kerala, India, to start the church there. Surprisingly, they're still around.

I think some people in Spain claim that their Church is descended from James and Simon the Zealot, Matthew went down to Ethiopia, and Matthias went "up". Paul gets a lot of credit from Catholics and East Orthodox alike. There's probably a really edgy cult that derives their origins from Judas who I'd imagine sound a lot like Puritans (We are unworthy of God's love etc. etc.). Aside from that, I got nothin'.

So, what happened to the churches of the other guys? Did some fail to make churches? Did they just get eaten by the Catholics? Did they die out? Do I have the wrong one for Ethiopia?

I always perceived the bureaucracy of the USSR as being almost uniformly opposed to Gorbachev's reforms, and before Gorbachev there had never been an even slightly reformist leader of the Union (reformist as in "more democracy and freedom"; I'm aware of Khrushchev and his reforms). So how on Earth did he of all people get elevated to the position of General Secretary? It seems like everyone with any power would've been doing all they could to keep him away from the position.

I know culture and different beliefs boils into it quite a bit. But I was just thinking how did soldiers struggle with the emotional turmoil of war in various ancient civs?

I suppose that if you charge your horse with you on top against a wall of (angry) flesh you could mayhem the first few guys in the front but soon you would be surrounded by their angry friends with pointy sticks with your horse badly hurt and afraid while your friend behind you are just pressing his face against your back in a clustefuck accident of flesh, horse and blood... so... how it worked? I can see it working against loosen "formation" where you could, i suppose, hit someone as you pass by and dont get stuck, but how it could have any success against bundled together formations?

I find it a bit comical really. Why did the Hojo not simply take the position of Shogun for themselves after the Minamoto shoguns were gone ?

What was the point of then later making the Shikken who had been ruler after Yoritomo's death instead of the Shoguns, a second to the Tokuso (Head of the Hojo Clan) after 1256 ? (Unless the the 2 titles were held by the same individual if I understand well)

Or am I mistaken somewhere ?

It makes sense that the army crushes them, but the majority of soldiers in medieval European armies were levies. How then were they put down? Were mercenaries used?

Disclaimer: I have Read A Book, or rather two books: Herodotus' Histories and Mary Bachvarova's _From Hittite to Homer_ (2006). Those two have been fairly persuasive to me that the characters and plot of the Iliad were cribbed from an earlier Hittite source called _The Song of Release_, which in turn cribbed them from earlier Sumerian poetry. In addition Bachvarova says the name "Akhileos" is Hellenized from an earlier non-Greek source, although which source is unclear.

Other information is that there do seem to have been several historical sacks of Troy, which kept being rebuilt because of its location, but it's unclear whether Homer is referring to the sack of Troy around 1000 BCE or around 1300 BCE. There is also not universal agreement on where Troy was located; most scholars place Troy on the east shore of Asia Minor while a few weirdos place it on the shore of the Black Sea. In any case, it's definitive that the sack of Troy described in the Iliad occurred for economic reasons rather than any romantic reason such as the abduction of a queen by the Trojans. There are hundreds of thousands of years of established human practice of war parties from one human group raiding another human group to abduct women of child-bearing age in order to minimize the risk of local extinction from not enough reproduction, especially when the infant mortality rate was sky-high, and even queens such as Pasiphae of the Minoans gave birth to at least 12 sons. Herodotus is dismissive of "a little competitive princess-rustling" where various cities take turns kidnapping each other's royal princess and, apart from demands for return and reparation that get refused, little happens other than the kidnapped princess living out her life and dying in the foreign land. The Romance of a huge naval fleet sacking an entire city over a kidnapped princess very likely relates to a very rare real event that it would be difficult to identify now because we have no idea how long ago it was and how many times that unusual story was retold.

Or so it seems to me after reading Bachvarova and Herodotus. If the real scholars of this subreddit disagree I'd love to hear why. I'm just a lay enthusiast who did some reading; I don't really have substantive knowledge of these things.

The ballads collected by Child are presumably the ones that got performed often enough that many people could at least sing along on the chorus; but when and where did these performances occur? Who sang, e.g., "The Elfin Knight", and on what occasions? Were there defined places and times when it was expected that some singing would occur, say Saturday night at the pub, or on market days, or something similar? If so, who decided the program? Would there be instruments accompanying the singing?

If there were professional-ish singers, how did they learn their repertoire? Memorising the words of, say, "The Twa Corbies" is not very difficult if you can read and re-read them on a convenient screen, but seems more challenging if you have to have someone who already knows it repeat the words every time you want to go through it again. So what were the mechanics of oral transmission? (Assuming Child was correct that there was an older oral tradition which had been written down into broadsheets).

(The question also applies to other oral-tradition songs not collected by Child.)

I have recently been trying to learn more about early Christianity in the UK and have struggled to find any real answer to a question I had assumed would have a reasonably straight forward answer.

When did Catholicism in Scotland and the rest of the UK become the same as Catholicism in the rest of the world?

It seems in the early days that it was very different from the Catholic Church in Rome with its own important holy sites such as Iona, it's own saints and blending with the local cultures.

Early christiantity in the UK seemed so decentralised it surpsises me that there wasn't some sort of schism.

Was there a power struggle between these localised holy sites and the holy sea?

Did monarchs and other rulers turn to Rome for legitimacy abroad which moved the focus to the papacy?

There is a tendency to label the situation in India in 1856-57 as an Indian Rebellion or Sepoy mutiny in International historical discussions as opposed to what it is regarded in India i.e. Indian Revolution against the British rule (although it was still controlled by the British East India Company).

Although it seems a trivial question, the difference in rebellion or revolution does matter as to the intent of those involved. It was clear that the aims of a majority of the princes and movers involved was to " overthrow and destroy the oppressing power, as well as its accompanying laws " i.e. a revolution and not just to "evade and/or gain concessions from an oppressive power" i.e. a rebellion.

The Indian revolution of 1857 was not a well planned out movement but it was widespread enough and caused enough fear in the British government to actually abolish company rule and further finally reformat the government as an Empire of India. Also it lead to pretty much a complete overhaul of rules and laws allowing greater participation of Indians in the civil services.

It would be really great if someone could clarify and answer this question and the historical lens for looking at the 1857 events in India.

Unlike the other guy who asked this, I'm actually really interested in an actual answer. As he said, many communist countries, such as the USSR and China, have done so. Why is this?