Hi OP, I took a quick scan through the top-level comments and see that the thread touches on a huge number of subjects. While it's possible that you might get answers to this post, you will likely get better results if you created separate posts for different topics that you're particularly curious about, e.g. racism/eugenics, war/covert ops, industrialization, etc. That way, experts are more likely to spot questions that they know something about (some users have set up automatic alerts that search the OP for certain keywords).