Marie Antoinette has always been depicted as a queen with a very lavish lifestyle despite the fact that a lot of commoners are living in poverty. However, despite her bad reputation in history, I’ve watched several documentaries that doesn’t really paint her as a bad person. Was she just blamed for all the terrible things that happened in France because they can’t blame the king? Or was she really as terrible as history made her be?

As compared to other ancient civilizations?

As a related sub-question, he also mentioned that there were fancy men-only cigar clubs where men would go to sit alone and smoke cigars, but it was less for the sheer pleasure of it and more so they could have peace and quiet and be able to think without their wives pestering them for sex. Was that actually a thing?

The SCA as an institution has jousts and other games and sports - did they let women participate in these equally when the organization was founded, or is it something that had to be won by women members over time?

After the Holocaust, how did survivors end up reuniting with or learning about what happened with their family members? Did the allies just offer them a ride back home and then they’d hope that their surviving family members went back home too? But surely many of their homes were destroyed either in persecution or just as a result of the war.

And because of the huge number of people who were enslaved in the camps, it must have taken a long time to sort things out even if they were offered transportation home. Did they continue to live in the camp or were they taken somewhere else?

There must’ve been a long, painful period of uncertainty for everyone as to what happened to their families and I imagine many never learned what happened. Is this right? Was it common for people to spend years afterwards investigating and trying to track down loved ones?

There is a lot of evidence for the argument and I have seen very little evidence debunking the theory.

Specifically, I'm talking about examples where it's implied characters learned languages as second languages, not from being natively multi-lingual.

Why aren’t there as many paintings of four faced eye ball nightmare creatures? Why do so many default to the human with wings? Where did that come from?

Still not sure whether BC means before Christ or another term but thats besides the point. Say i time travelled to 500BC what would the supposed year have been in their time without knowledge of the BC and AD time dates of the future?

In recent years I have seen people on twitter, tumblr, and whatnot advocating the use of "enslaved" rather than "slave" when referring to Africans and their descendants within the American chattel slavery system. The argument goes that "enslaved" acknowledges the human status of the people shipped to America rather than just treating them as things. Yet, isn't there also an argument to be made for using "slave" in order to communicate that these people were, in fact, things (or thing-like) in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of the system under which they toiled? Doesn't "slave" acknowledge the extent to which these people were dehumanized more than "enslaved" does?

Or are the two terms just used interchangeably without any debate?

We all heard about the Bronze Age collapse, which was a mysterious time him history due to a lack of good research.

We were all baffled about what caused the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations, so much so that we seem to forget how the world recovered from the Bronze Age collapse.

How did Homer learn to write the Iliad and the Odyssey if the Greeks forgot how to write?

How did the Greeks rebuild the cities if they fled them into the mountains and the countrysides?

I assume that there were people who remembered how to build cities and write but the Greek Dark Ages were from 1,100 BC to 750 BC, which is a whopping 350 years, making this seem unlikely.

One other possible assumption is that Cyrus The Great expanded his empire close enough to Greece that it taught them how to write and how to build cities. The Persian civilization didn't go through the Bronze Age collapse so we could assume they learned how to write and build cities, but it is unlikely that the Greeks will be able to learn from the Persians this fast to resist the first Persian invasions, 50 years later.

Was it because many were drafted relatively young so it had a lasting impact, or was it the guerrilla tactics used? (I'm not sure why people would get paranoid over guerrilla tactics in Vietnam over Korea, just as an example) Or was it how America was almost objectively in the wrong in their handling of the war? But they constantly do this especially in the Middle-East for example, to this day. Even my English teacher said her husband was a Vietnam veteran and has mild PTSD, but I'm not gonna ask her why just in case it's a touchy topic. I even tried searching up answers but Google never gave me what I wanted. :( So what differed it from regular wars?

So why is the Vietnam war always linked with PTSD? I would really appreciate knowing so I am no longer ignorant.

Images of 16th century warfare includes fully plated Christian nobels. Yet images of Janissaries or Sultans tend to focus on chain mail and what an unelightened mind (like mine) would call fabrics. But this can't be correct, can it?

I'm very suspect of how accurate these western images are as it seems unusual that ottoman forces would wholly prioritise mobility over protection, especially when we are talking about Visiers and Sultans.

I do understand that it is possible to wear chain mail under fabric clothing or weave plates into clothing.

My understanding was that while yes the electoral college system did take place in an environment of racism and slavery with African Americans being considered 3/5 of a state’s population, that the electoral college was mainly established to be a protection from possible tyrannical leaders that could be chosen by a popular vote/so learned gentlemen could ensure the office would never be held by a demagogue under foreign influence. However I see many posts recently just saying the electoral college is racist. Is it a beautiful design to stop authoritarians from holding office and more to take a temperature of the sentiments of all the states, or was it just a racist tool that we should abolish?

Recent political developments in US politics have people asking if a coup is a possibility for the country. Experts often point to the military's apolitical tradition as one of bulwarks against such a possible scenario.

My question is, why wasn't such bulwark able to prevent the Civil War? How were the Southern states able to persuade parts of the US military to join them?

Considering how much higher they are than every other country, was there some record keeping shenanigans going on?