In movies they always have red vs blue uniformed knights (or something similar) and from what I understand this was not accurate at all for the time period. Since the feudal system had knights from different areas who often supplied their own equipment and often dressed differently from each other, how were they able to tell each other apart during a battle? I know they used banners and flags, but I imagine this wouldn't be practical to hold onto while fighting. Was it very easy to distinguish your allies from your enemies during a large and bloody fight before uniforms became the norm?

In the period mentioned since the Labour Party was formed, they only managed to win a majority in 6 elections (with the final being Blair after 18 years). In the same period, the Conservative Party has managed almost double this.

When Labour was supposed to be 'for the working man', why is it that they struggled so much to win General Elections? It took them up until 1945 to finally outright win an election when it took WW2 to make this happen.

I also noticed that more often than not, when there is a higher voter turnout, the Tories seem to win.

Was the UK population just more centrist than anything and Labour have traditionally been too leftist/radical?

A different way of phrasing my title question may be, what caused Labour to win the few elections they did manage to win? Is it just sheer discontent at successive Tory governments? Or were successful campaigns just based on particularly popular policy proposals?

I'd be interested to see if there have been any studies on this

I often hear of people reminiscing and then desiring to live in historical time periods some decades in the past. Some wanting to live through the 1920s, others the 1960s and so on. One hundred years ago, are there records of people dreaming about living in the recent past as well?

Aristotle got many things comically wrong, like heavier things fall faster, or that everything could be made of 4 substances

Most of his hypothesis could have been easily disproven by simple experiments but the explanation I've always heard about this is that the greeks thought that experiments were manual labor, and manual labor was for slaves, hence they could only limit themselves to thinking

However that explanation seems... way too simplistic, it seems that there should be more to this

I’m reading through Orlando Figes’ A People’s Tragedy and can’t quite grasp what a zemstvo is or why it was originally created.

Yesterday me and my friend had an argument about viking axes. So there are couple of points that we made and couldn't find a final answer. 1 - He said the axe was a common weapon is it correct? 2 - That the axes were used as throwing weapons. Why wouldn't go with a javelin for that? Isnt it a lot easier than calculating the spin of the axe? 3 - Axe is equal or advantageous than spears mainly because you can hook the spear and get close or just break the spear with the axe.

I am googling for a half hour but about this question I found only answer that the Cyrus the great destroyed the Babylon. But this is not true for sure(because Alexander the great reconquers it after 2 centuries) And what I wonder is that after which period of time or what events caused that Babylon is ruined and inhabited today?

This is my first post here, hope I am clear enough. Thanks in advance

There are several occurrences of the word "spangabryjna" in the Old Norse sagas. In the Sverris Saga, Earl Erling is described as wearing it to the battle in which he's killed. In Hakkon Hakkonarson's Saga in the Heimskringla, Gregorius survives a wound because he is wearing spangabryjna. In the Laxdaela Saga, Helgi describes an enemy as wearing spangabrynja.

All three of these sagas, and throughout other sagas, armor is continually described as "brynja", rather than "spangabrynja", except in these three cases, written several decades apart in the early 1200s.

I've seen theories ranging from lamellar, scale armor, or early coats of plate, but there's no archaeological evidence of any of these.

In the view of expert historians, what might the term spangabrynja refer to?

Both India and China are very large countries with enormous populations, but why is it that India is home to so many distinct cultures and languages while China is almost entirely Han Chinese? Their populations each center around flat, fertile river valleys which without other geographic barriers tends to lead to homogenization. So why is it that India still remains so diverse today unlike China?

I watched the movie Bitter Harvest last week and at the end of the movie I was absolutely blown away at the claim that 6 to 10 million people were starved to death by the Soviet regime under Stalin. How do they come up with these numbers and are those numbers accurate?

You often hear the Persia outlawed slavery in their empire. If that is true than how did their economy work when every economy of the time was a slave system economy? Was it proto-feudalism or proto-capitalism?

I'm not very privy to all forms of Germanic Paganism, but I know Norse Paganism mentioned that Ymir's blood flowed from his body to create the ocean. While learning more about the Storegga Slide I thought to myself, could this possibly have a connection to that myth?

Because there were obvious survivors many oral stories must have been carried down generation to generation, eventually transforming from experience, to story, and then myth.

My question is, has this ever been debated before? I don't think me to be the first person to think of such a connection but my head is forming a connection between this example of raw power of the ocean to begin the formation that the power could only be that of a god, and thus the myth of Ymir slowly came to be.

Any incites on this would be great to read about. As a student of Anthropology I take great interest between real world event's and how they morph and change culture's.

I was reading Richard Evans’ The Coming of the Third Reich and came across this passage:

But the few trials that did take place, in Leipzig, before a German court, almost uniformly failed because the German judiciary did not accept the legitimacy of most of the charges. Out of 900 alleged war criminals initially singled out for trial, only seven were eventually found guilty, while ten were acquitted and the rest never underwent a full trial. The idea took root in Germany that the whole concept of war crimes, indeed the whole notion of laws of war, was a polemical invention of the victorious Allies based on mendacious propaganda about imaginary atrocities. This left a fateful legacy for the attitudes and conduct of German armed forces during the Second World War.

This seemed deeply surprising to me- why did the allies, particularly the French and Belgians, not pursue any further action, assuming that this was an available option?

It appears that after the allied governments established the Commission of Responsibilities, which concluded with recommendations on blaming the war on the central powers and to prosecute suspected central power aligned war criminals, the German Government were simply able to refuse further cooperation and instead opted to prosecute a significantly downsized list of individuals on their own terms.

This appears to be in complete contrast to how much say Germany had on the Treaty of Versailles, so what exactly was going on here when it came to this relative leniency?

Thanks for your time!

Well, this might be an awfully specific question:

Would anyone happen to know (I doubt it) where exactly our familiar six-sided dice with—the important part—dots arranged in the very same pattern we still use today to indiciate the numbers one to six originated?

After all, dice, as even our favorite source Wikipedia (coughcough) will insist, are quite an ancient, and widespread, phenomenon.

This just crossed my mind after having seen a Japanese drama series taking place in the 12th century, where they used dice that looked pretty much like the one’s we use today. And indeed, I was able to find photos of excavated dice, made of stone, from that time (in today's Fukuoka prefecture) which used the familiar pattern of dots to indicate the numbers one to six (incidentally, these dice were used for gambling games and for boardgames).

I find it fascinating that a thousand years later and on the other side of the globe, I am using the exact same design.