A little while ago i heard something about norsemen owning bears as pets and that they were called "house-bears" is this true or just one of those exaggerated stories?

I recently read a magazine from National Geographic called "Women in the Bible" which discussed not only prominent women in the bible but also the roles and statuses of women during biblical times. Throughout the magazine, the author stated that, despite being extremely poor by our standards, women were treated far better by jews and early Christians compared to their contemporaries. Is there any truth to this claim? Did this change over time? (I assume it would since this is such a huge period of time)

Looking through the list of the key personnel on the Manhattan Project you notice a trend

Robert Oppenheimer

Hans Bethe

Klaus Fuchs

Leo Szilard

Many key scientists on the project obviously had very strong German/Hungarian heritage. In a time when we locked up Japanese Citizens because of our war in the pacific why did we trust Ethnic German scientists to develop a bomb for America to use in the war?

If I was just a common farmer living in 850 AD England, how much war would I see in my lifetime? Were battles a yearly thing? And how often would I be expected to fight?

I’m listening to the History of Rome podcast and one thing I find peculiar is how the combat ability of the Roman Empire decreased during the later years of the empire. During the reign of Augustus the Roman Army was second to none and able to easily defeat any Germanic army, yet by the time of the 400s the Huns, Vandals, and Goths defeated both the Eastern and Western armies multiple times.

Was the Roman Empire still using the cohort and century organization from Marius? I know how later Gallienus created a mobile reserve and reformed the army, but it seems even this did not help against the Germanic onslaught.

Did the Germanic tribes also form into cohorts, centuries, etc.?

I tried to search and see if this has been asked before, but wasn't able to find anything.

From my understanding (I'm not German), East and West Germany had quite different structures of their education systems. What happened with people who were in the middle of their education at the time of reunification in the early 1990s? I am wondering about what happened to people who were in the middle of a program that may no longer have existed after reunification, or, for example, high school students who would have been preparing to enter university or a technical school in 1989 or 1990 just before reunification.

Were there provisions in the reunification treaty or later German law that spoke to the recognition of people's qualifications from East German universities or technical schools?

Hi, I am new to AskHistorians. I have listened to podcasts claiming that these holidays are pagan and I have also seen a youtuber argue that there is no pagan influence. What is the best unbiased view of where these holidays and their modern versions are from?

Was a war of attrition like this part of the Russian leadership's plan? Did they view and treat their soldiers as expendable like that?

If so, please provide sources as to the overarching strategy they were trying to employ... If not... where did this idea that Russia just used their service members as bullet sponges come from? And why is this narrative so prevalent even today?

Dynasty Warriors and ROTK by Koei made it seem like Zhuge groomed him to become the next Chancellor. But afaik after Zhuge's death, other people such as Jiang Wan and Fei Yi were the ones who succeeded Zhuge as chancellor of Shu Han.

So what was really the dynamic between Zhuge and Jiang?

Nazi Germany is used as a textbook example of how laws can be immoral, but I'm curious about what parts of the Holocause were actually legal under the laws of the Reich. Plenty of the persecution of Jews was legal, like the Nuremberg laws, but some events of Nazi history were illegal, the police just didn't do anything. The best example of this would be Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass.

I was born in the mid '80s (in Canada) and have often wondered what every day life was like in the Soviet Union during the mid/late '80s up until the collapse. Was the general populace unhappy with their way of life? Was the general populace really 'poor' by today's developed world standards, or is this just the propaganda that we in the west have been taught since the 'Communist scare' and has just carried over to modern times? I know a person who grew up in East Germany and he told me that East Berlin was the best place to live because it was the showcase of the best that Socialism had to offer. Is this also correct? The older I get and the more I study it becomes more obvious that history is written by the victors; I can't help but wonder how 'bad' the Soviet Union and its satellite states really were.

Is it considered a medic at the next battle, or is it never a medic again?

One thing I've been considering quite a bit recently is how the current state of US politics will be studied in the future. So much of political discourse today is charged and polarized on each side, with both sides collectively attacking any middle ground. How will history books document this? How does a school curriculum decide what aspects are taught to future generations? How is objectivity maintained in historical record?

I know that none of his acknowledged surviving children had heirs themselves so I didn't know if perhaps their father's relationships affected their own or it just so happened to be. Or if there was any kind of documentation regarding how it affected their psychology or upbringing or really anything. I can imagine it would be a bit traumatic.

If both Christianity and Islam were based off of Judaism why did they spread much further and farther than Judaism.

I've seen a couple of threads on similar topics, but I'm mostly interested in learning to speak it/write it naturally, changing less ''time appropriate common words and all that jazz.'' (Mostly British, preferably Northern British dialects.) Also, would that question work better in a subreddit on language?

Or would I have to read a lot of books of the time period? (I know of Gatsby, obviously, Wodehouse, Tally Ho! -text-game- (which seems time appropriate as the writer is a Wodehouse lover and a history teacher I believe) also, and some others)

If so any recommendations for portayals of historically accurate language, preferably that isn't overly enriched jargon for writing's sake, recent or of the time?

(or movies of the 1920s mainly, though I believe they were silent)

Mostly to learn common people's/and more high class speech, if there are differences, that is. Or at least learn something about the subject or myths about the speech of the time. And also if some words weren't contracted and things along those lines.

Thanks for anything

In 1921, the short-lived parliament of Southern Ireland had its first and only election. The results, were a blowout for Sinn Fein, who won all but 4 seats (with those four seats being appointed by Trinity College Dublin). Sinn Fein boycotted the new parliament, formed their own and Southern Ireland as an entity ceased to exist after that.

What I'm wondering, however, is how Sinn Fein not only won 100% of the contested seats in 1921 but won them all by default. Not a single unionist stood for election in any of those 124 seats, even though they had an overpowering presence in the simultaneous Northern Irish Elections. Outside of Ulster, they'd won 1/3 of the votes in the seats they stood in during the 1918 General Election so there must have been *some* unionist presence outside of Ulster. What is the reason attributed for not a single unionist, from any party, even competing for one of the 124 Southern Irish seats in 1921?

I haven't found a single explanation online about this and the one JSTOR article I found was paywalled. Wikipedia makes a reference to a single Unionist MP claiming their parties were too scared to run, fearing retribution from Sinn Fein, but I'd like to see other sources back such claims.

Furthermore, why do we today treat Henry VII and William the Conqueror as completely different (We literally start the counting of English kings from William I and ignore the anglo-saxon kings before him), when they seem to be so similar?

Both were related to the ruling line, but not descended from it (William being Edward the Confessor's cousin, and Henry VII being Henry VI's half-brother), both won the throne on the battlefield in spite of a very questionable blood claim, and both worked to legitimize their claim through marriage (to Matilda in the case of William's son Henry I, and to Elizabeth of York in Henry VII's case.) Yet, we don't restart the counting of kings with Henry Tudor.