So after Trajan went through all this trouble to conquer Mesopotamia, his successor Hadrian immediately abonded the province. I know Hadrian was all about the defensibility of the empire, but was the region really this easy to conquer? Was maybe trying to sell it back to the Parthians or setting up a client kingdom not an option?

I picked KC specifically because the Royals were two decades away from existing and the Monarchs were one of the Negro League’s most successful franchises, but to broaden the question: did whites in areas with Negro League teams but no MLB or minors often follow the Negro League teams or was that sort of fraternization unthinkable in the era of segregation?

Okay so I'm starting a half history/Half politics podcast.

I am also white as shit. But because of some events in my life, and general interest, I have a strong interest in telling the story of what has lead to the weird mashup of modern black politics.

Now I am not going to discuss policies or anything like that, I want to explain the groundwork on how we got here.

I tried writing an "up to speed episode" but there is A LOT to talk about, rangeing from the Haitian revolution, to the role of quakers in American abolitionist movement. There is a lot. And I feel like I am doing an extreme disservice to talk about 500 years of Western black relations 20 minutes.

I'm also a "wikipedia researcher" so I'm not going to go amazingly in-depth, but I want to go further in-depth than a highschool history class.

I was thinking starting with the colonization of africa, although I wanted to set the political scene of the empires in Africa prior to the point slaves were sent to the Americas.

I realized I know absolutely nothing about this time period, and that's why I'm doing it, so I can learn.

But if anyone has a good suggestion on where I should start, or someone very briefly explaining everything in 20 minutes so I know where to dig. It's all appreciated.

There is plenty of rabbit holes, I just want to know what is the best one to enter.

The kind of materials that the Europeans bought from the Chinese were not gold or other precious metals that are high in value. They were salt, tea, sugar, etc. I imagine it took over an year to travel between the two countries. The quantity of product they can transfer over such a long distance is limited too.

How was it worth it for Europeans traders to travel all the way from Western Europe to China? The only money they're making is on the markup on these products between the 2 economies for over an year's worth of work.

Hi all, I’m starting to learn Quechua and I would really love to also learn the history of some of the peoples/communities/civilization(s) that speak/spoke it. Does anyone know of any good books that discuss the Inca people, especially pre-Spanish contact? Thanks :)

Pretty simple question but I’m having trouble finding an answer online. I’m just trying to gain perspective on the scale of US involvement on both fronts. Also curious to hear how servicemen and resources were divided up accordingly

Ever country in proximity around Thailand was the victim of European colonization, at the hands of people like the French, British, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. I don't really understand why Thailand was left out of this, to my untrained eye it seems like an attractive target for a European empire, it doesn't seem overwhelmingly militarily powerful, at least not more so than Vietnam or Burma and I'm not aware of dramatic defeats of colonial powers trying to encroach on Thailand as happened in places like Afghanistan and Ethiopia, especially during the height of European imperialism in Southeast Asia during the 19th century. How did they manage to maintain their independence?

It seems so bizarre that I don't know this, especially as I imagine my own grandparents could tell me. I know that if you go to sleep around the same time you tend to awake around the same time, but there can be considerable variation. And without clocks, many people would struggle to go to bed at exactly the same time each day. Was it simply expected that some people would turn up to work late?

More controversially, how much (eg none, a minority, a sizable amount, etc) historical literature regarding life in the USSR do you believe has been tainted by political spin?

As a bonus question, what are popular misconceptions regarding the USSR that are conclusively false?

As context for this question, in less scholarly and more political discussions regarding the USSR both sides tend to use sources that seem to feature bias and further an agenda. Additionally, few of these sources take a micro perspective to possible lives of individuals. I'm also assuming a lot of historical education in the past has been tainted by political remnants of the cold war.

Modern languages change a lot over a relatively short period of time. English, as spoken 300 years ago, is almost unrecognizable from modern english.

Given the lifespan of the Roman empire and other civilizations, why does it seem like we have one universal latin as opposed to different forms of latin throughout the centuries?

When did tipping like you do at a restaurant, bar, coffee shop etc start? Is it tied to the ratification of the 15th amendment?

I am researching Rocky Mountain ghost towns for a fiction project, but something I haven't quite been able to find good, clear sources on is exactly how silver/gold mining was done in these places that, at their peaks, had about 300-1000 people. It seems that most the stuff I can find are either from large scale operations from that era, or just random pictures of miners that don't provide a lot of context of the mine itself.

Was the process not to different from what we picture when we think of mining: a large shaft with an elevator and then the miners dug out well-planned tunnels? Or, for what I imagine would be smaller operations, did the miners just start at the top of the mountain and dig more haphazardly until they ran out of ore?

Any sort of visual like a cross-section would be helpful!

Thanks!

So, after the Opium War, Britain forced China to open a bit and, though the Chinese court would remain in denial that the West had surpassed them technologically for a few decades more, I know some Chinese could see the writing in the wall and tried to push their country to modernize.

My question is: Is there any accounts of the first Chinese to visit Europe post-First or Second Opium War? How did they describe the new technology, the society, the culture?

Extra question, answer if you want: What about the huge European colonial empires? Did the Chinese express any opinion about them and about what they should do about it?

I've been working with a lot of wire lately and it got me thinking about the stuff in general. I know at one point pins we're used as a sort of ersatz currency (at least I think I know this) so I imagine it was, at one time, relatively hard to come across. Did that only change with the industrial revolution or, it being such useful stuff, was it sooner than that?

Bob Dylan just sold his song catalog for an estimated $300 million, and that reminded me of what happened between McCartney and Jacko in the mid-eighties.

The story goes that Paul McCartney told his friend and collaborator Michael Jackson how much money he made from owning old song catalogs, and that MJ should get in on the action himself. And then, when the Lennon-McCartney catalog became available, Jackson stabbed McCartney in the back and bought it, ruining their friendship.

But I've also read that McCartney had the chance to buy the publishing rights himself, and turned it down because he thought the price was too high, so it's really his own fault he missed out.

So who is right?

I am currently taking a History of Florida course and my professor has assigned me the question "What is another name of the maroon settlement of Poplar Bluff" I have been unable to find any information about this maroon community other than a town in Missouri being named the same. Any context into a possible other name of this community or its history as a freed slave settlement would be greatly appreciated.

Little description on the birthday boy: He'll be turning 16 and he is a walking history book, from Dutch history, to American to Middle east, he knows a lot! He likes to learn more than what's needed in his history lessons and I would love to gift him a beautifull textbook to fuel his hunger for knowledge

I, myself, wouldn't know what makes a good history book since it is totally out of my field of expertice. I'd like it to be in English, big, profound and prefferable visual

I hope you guys can help guide me in the right direction (and I hope I've choosen the right subreddit) Thanks!

It’s impossible to know how many questions we get here at AskHistorians that are really research for someone’s personal project, rather than just satisfying their curiosity, but one thing’s certain – it does happen!

Unfortunately, many of these questions go unanswered. There are a number of reasons: they might be extremely specific to the story’s needs or setting; they might be hypothetical, about what characters could do in a historically unlikely circumstance; they might be about aspects of history that we just don’t know; nobody who knows the answer is on AskHistorians, or is around that day. (And, of course, “research assistant” is also a job, and historians may feel like they’re being asked for too much unpaid labor to work with the askers in the depth they’re requiring.)

I’m a writer myself, so I have a lot of sympathy for people who feel stymied by a desire to be historically accurate. Let me give you a few tips for doing historical research for the purposes of writing a novel or screenplay or creating a game of some kind.

No. 1: Do the research before you start writing

By far the biggest barrier to questions like these getting answered is that someone has mostly written their story/come up with a detailed outline, and wants to know whether what they’ve come up with is good or how to fill in a plot hole – but the whole idea is off. There’s no historical basis to the situation they’ve come up with, so a historian can’t help them resolve it.

The way to fix this is to get in before the problem starts. Find out about the setting before you start to put the building blocks of your story together so that you don’t get trapped in a situation where the only thing a historian can say is, “Do whatever you want, because this doesn’t relate to how that actually works.”

Do you know your story is about a strike in an early nineteenth-century mill? Look for books and articles on labor disputes in the textile industry at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Were you hit with inspiration to write about the landsknechten? Find out about the structure of mercenary bands in sixteenth-century Germany before you try to come up with a plotline that involves them being hired as bodyguards.

Heck, are you not working on anything right now? Gather up some texts about stuff you’re interested in, and you’ll be even better prepared. (You’ll also probably get six new ideas.)

You can always ask AskHistorians for reading recommendations to prepare you to write about a particular topic. We’ll be happy to point you in the right direction in order to head off later confusion and frustration.

No. 2: Draw back and widen your scope

People who are working on a specific problem tend to ask about just what they’re looking at, in order to get a really targeted answer. Even when they don’t have the that-wouldn’t-happen issue I discussed above, these questions can often be hard to answer because there are other factors playing into the situation that require exploring – and not all of our historians want to or are prepared to think like an author to revamp the question or travel down those roads of other factors.

In these cases, it can be really helpful to broaden the narrow scope of what you’re looking at. Often, you can draw conclusions from similar situations.

For instance, say you’re trying to find out how a maidservant might feel about getting engaged to a journeyman tinsmith in 1750s London. That’s a pretty specific question, and a lot of historians might balk at trying to answer one like that with anything definitive. But if you take a step back and ask about what we know of working-class courtship in eighteenth-century England, you will probably get some more detail to inform your character choices.

(People can be resistant to this, sometimes. “But I want to know that specific thing! I don’t want to hear about what people who worked on farms did.” Okay, but you are probably not going to get an answer to that highly specific question – so isn’t this better?)

This also goes back to the first point: if you know you’re going to write about such a courtship, it might be good to look at books like The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class and Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century before you start writing.

No. 3: Read books, magazines, and other texts from the period

(Obviously, this can be problematic depending on what you’re researching. Some periods have very little documentary evidence left. You might also be blocked by a lack of translations.)

Fiction from the period you’re writing about is obviously not true – you can’t take Little Women as an objectively accurate representation of life in 1860s Massachusetts – but on the other hand, it shows you what people of that culture considered normal, unfortunate, or interesting. We can see that it was important for middle-class women to participate in charity, and that people perceived a moral dimension to fashion choices beyond simply “sexy = bad”. It gives us descriptions of what school could be like, family letter-reading, handicrafts, and courtships.

It’s important, though, to read widely. There are writers in every era who concoct unrealistic characters and situations, and you don’t want to assume that the only book you pick up is useful to copy. Once you start to read literature from the period you’re looking into regularly, you’ll spot the patterns of literary tropes and normal manners.