I'm currently finishing up Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking," and am thoroughly enjoying the way she paces out the events that took place. I'd like to transition right after into more Chinese history, particularly that of its civil war and the eventual retreat of the ROC to Taiwan. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

I keep seeing this clip on social media of an AI translation of Hitler talking about invading Poland. In this clip he says things like “I asked the Polish to surrender five times” and “I told them to evacuate the woman and children” (these are rough quotes not exact). I am wondering if this speech rings a bell to anyone, because after seeing short clips of this “speech” by Hitler on Tik Tok and insta reels I have been totally unable to find him saying this in any of his speeches. I am wondering if this could be a made up clip, or a little known speech. Any ideas?

Who was Seca Pata Seca, was he a real person or just a myth? It is said that he was over 6 foot tall, possibly close to 7 ft but can't confirm, muscular, alpha male, strong, bulky, similar to Mr. Universe bodybuilders, basically he is considered the GigaChad of all GigaChad's. So my question is, did this guy really exist or it's just some myth? And what exactly was his significance in history, why is he so talked about? Why is he so significant in popular culture? He is often connected to memes etc. I take it he was a slave of some sort? Was he a slave in the US? What was he used for?

So Moses is and was a big deal in Judaism, and people tend to name their kids after famous people/heroes, and while I see people named Moses in the common era (CE) I can't seem to find any other Moses' from before the 1st century (BCE). So my main questions would be how popular was the name among jews before the common era?, are there any other people from before the common era with that name? (excluding the Moses from the Torah) and if the name is rare why would people refrain from naming their kids after a famous hero from that culture?(specifically a jewish culture where the Torah was integral so around the 6th century BCE and after) Thanks!

hey guys… i may sound pretty slow but i just wanted to ask right. i know helen keller flew a plane and wrote a book but.. how? like how did she know what the words meant, how did she know literally anything???? i know she was also engaged but how did she know they were proposing? how did she know what any words meant??? sorry i just need answers, it keeps me up at night.. like maybe is understand now but they didn’t even have sliced bread during this time but this blind and deaf women flew a plane???????

I understand that it was the most honorable way to die and reserved for only wealthy and respectable people of society but why? I mean there were other less gruesome methods of death 😭

Not Colombia, Columbia. It feels like I keep seeing this word thrown around a lot, but I've never actually seen it used in a context that makes sense. Washington DC is District of Columbia. So does that make the United States, or North America, the elusive Columbia that everyone seems to agree is a thing that actually exists? I look up Columbia on google, and the closest I got to an answer is Miss Columbia, which is a personification of Americans and the new world.

...okay. Does that mean Columbia sportswear is also a personification of the new world? Seriously, what is this stupid noun, where did it come from, what does it mean, and why is it used so often? Thanks guys.

Hello! I am researching to put together an enlisted man's uniform from the US Shipping Board during World War One. Did merchant sailors get the World War One Victory Medal regardless of where they served?

I been curious about Indian medieval history and a casual google search doesn't give many sources. I would prefer a video series but I am okay with reading a book aimed for casual audience. I want to run a low fantasy campaign set in the region and era, and I want to learn as much as I can about it! All help is appreciated.

First time poster, long time reader of historical biographies.

Having prior read Trotsky and Lenin, I’m currently reading Robert Service’s biography on Stalin. I’m not a historian, nor trained in dissecting biographies of this scope.

For those familiar with his works, what sort of criticisms do you have of Robert Service’s work?

In the mexican region of nuevo leon there is a strong jewish ancestry evident in cuisine, surnames, etc

That population is now well integrated into mexico and has a strong catholic religiousness

How did this kind of conversion happen, did it start as a fake conversion to catholiscism to hide their jewish ancestry until their descendants integrated into the population

Before the 1990s, Ukraine was part of various empires. During this time, do historians consider Ukraine to be a settler colony?

Perhaps my more general question is what is the historiography of extermination camps themselves, or the overall academic study of them? That murder can be seen as an end onto itself, like a cult of death, to such a degree that institutions are set up in order to realize that end, is a truly beyond the pale, exceptionally malevolent thing to do, so I was curious about a historian's perspective on them.

I was watching Moana because my niece wanted me to take her to watch Moana 2 and it made me wonder how did Polynesians find their way to unexplored islands? Did they just set off and hope they'd stumble close enough to an island to start seeing clues that there was one out there? Or is there some kind of current or something in the Pacific that leads to all the islands?

For some reason this popped in my head last night and I found siege ladders, towers, and ramps as some built methods for assaulting walls. Were they just too complex for similar results when ladders were relatively simple to throw together a large amount and were easier to replace and were also used in siege towers?

Apparently, coconut palms grow in quite a lot of the Ryukyu archipelago (with "wild" (self-sowing) populations on the Yaeyama and Miyako Islands - yeah, I know it's an Instagram post, but...). Yonaguni is at the same latitude as Taiwan, where coconut palms grow well, albeit without a long tradition of cultivation by most of the latter's surviving indigenous Austronesian peoples. (Because most of them live at high altitudes, where you can't really grow coconuts, while most of the coastal peoples were assimilated centuries ago.)

I have been informed that the Miyakoan word for "coconut" is a loanword from Middle Chinese. Perhaps the word displaced any previous words for "coconut"?

Do the Ryukyuans have a long tradition of cultivating coconuts/producing coconut products?

The other day i was seeing a lecture of a Spanish Professor and She mentioned that Tiberius at least seemed to have held Republican beliefs in a period of his life and that seemed to be one of reasons why Augustus was hesitant to make him his heir. She mention a few anectodes, but i only remember the one when Tiberius looked down on the way senators treated the Imperial Family.

A couple of days ago I visited Ghent as part of a work outing. We did a city tour and our tour guide touched upon the subject of the Reformation in the Low Countries, and when one of my English colleagues remarked about how the locals must have been worried about Henry VIII's abolishment of papal authority, and the dissolution of the monasteries. Our guide replied that, no, it was barely a factor on the continent, far more worrisome was the spread of Calvinist ideas, being far more radical than the comparatively moderate Anglicans. My colleague kind of balked at this, and we discussed it later over dinner.

I venture the guide wasn't entirely right, as the modern idea of Anglicanism as a more moderate Protestant tradition that is in outward appearance still quite close to the Catholic church would have only really developed much later, but I would imagine that at least the Low Countries, being part of the Habsburg sphere of influence, would have most likely been far more concerned with developing conflicts in the Empire (such as the Peasants' and Schmalkaldic wars) than whatever was happening across the North Sea.

What's a good way to frame this?

I'm well aware that the fastness of the fall of the France during WW2 was shocking for most of the world. But the weakness of the French Army must have been know by at least some circles. So I may ask: did anyone had predicted how fast France would fold before the invasion?

I ask from an English or Northern European context, not as extreme as the north and South poles. How were days thought of when sunrise and sunset were so different from how they are in summer? What were the cultural/religious explanations for this? How did this affect societal behaviour as a whole?

When did Viking culture appear in Scandinavia ? Who was there before them ? Was there a culture before them ? Also did they have any run ins with the last of the Romans or were even their continental territories too far north ?

People often think of the idea of a pitched battle with volley fire as idiotic suicide, which is not correct for its own reasons, but I am wondering how often pitched battles between sides with muzzleloading firearms were, organized in a big formation like a line, tercio, square, etc. If essentially no casualties were taken, maybe a coincidental skirmish, then I don't count that.

My great great grandmother was a well to do French young woman who married a poor Mexican in the early 1870s. Her father with terrible timing migrated from France to Mexico to try his hand at becoming part of the new elite two years after Maxmilian of Hamburg became emperor of Mexico... less than a year later Maximilian was executed and he went from imperial emigrée with prospects to middle class immigrant with a young family needing to make ends meet.

He started a business extending the magnetic healing qualities of "hydrotherapy" to the upper classes in his city. His two daughters operated a pump that pushed water up a tube and then precipitated in a powerfully restorative way upon the heads of his exclusive clientele. It turned out to be nothing more (or less!) amazing than a shower. This would have been around 1868, before the shower was incorporated into the French army and popularised among the upper classes, but after the invention and commercialisation of similar or identical technology.

He was clearly not an inventor of the shower, but was he, and by implication, Mexico, at the forefront of the commercialisation and popularisation of this technology? How familiar, novel, would the concept of the shower, as hygiene or, given the marketing, more likely as hydrotherapy, have been to upper class Europeans?

Why were Roman or Carolingian never able to reconstitute themselves while Chinese empire collapsed and reconstructed itself many times? Is it something about western empires that prevents that? Is it something specific to China?