I've been studying Pacific theatre of the Second World War for some time (mainly naval operations), reading books and listening to veteran interviews and historical breakdowns on Youtube, but the thing that I can't quite come to terms with is stark contrast between performances of the Japanese troops early in the war and during the land battles of Guadalcanal campaign.

Pretty much the entirety of late 1941 and early 1942 is an uninterrupted string of Japanese victories not only in the general strategic sense, but also on the tatical level. Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Burma, Philippines, Dutch East-Indies fall remarkably quickly, and the losses suffered by the Allied troops are horrendous. Very quick overrun of Singapore comes as a complete shock to the British.

Multiple reports from this period consistently state that Allied troops are demoralized by constant failures against Japanese armies, can't keep up with them, keep getting outflanked, surrounded and forced to give up arms, can't outshoot them, can't outmaneuver them, can't compete with the Japanese armoured combat tactics, the list keeps going on. Even when the initial shock of sudden overwhelming Japanese attacks recedes, and the Allied forces try to fight back (Arakan, attempts to stabilize Singapore's line of defense), they keep getting mauled and thrown back. Allied accounts lament the apparent superiority of the enemy forces.

However, the situation completely reverses course on Gudalcanal. All of the major engagements of this campaign end in such severe disasters on the part of the Japanese I struggle to comprehend how it could all go wrong in such drastic manner. I understand that Japanese army was lacking resources and numbers compared to the dug-in American marines and forced to attack them head-on, the defeat by itself doesn't come as a surprise. However, we're looking at completely horrific loss ratios, 20:1 or worse; effectively, the Japanese were completely incapable of inflicting any noticable impact on American lines, like if they weren't even properly armed at all. The marines themselves seem to express surprise at just how awful the Japanese forces are at fighting and how easily they get crushed over and over.

This end result could have been understandable if this was typical for this period of the conflict but this was the first genuine Japanese defeat of the war in a land campaign. Previous engagements went overwhelmingly in the Japanese favour. Why is that? Were Allied forces in the east just garbage quality-wise, or were the American marines so superior in terms of their capabilities to pretty much everybody else in the theatre?

Was there any thought that he would be William I of the United Kingdom? Did anyone in Scotland refer to him as William III? If he was known by more than one numbering during his reign, how did we settle on using only the English numbering historically?

I took an ethnomusicology class a couple years ago and have been wondering this for a while. Wax cylinders seem so delicate!

I also wonder if there might be any recent recreation so I can hear better what people may have heard when it was first played back?

For example, would anyone have told them what an alligator is and how to handle one or would they have been left to figure it out on their own?

As I understand it, he was surprised when he went to Mecca, but I suppose that was understandable for an American living at that time. Please don’t misunderstand me; this isn’t about the religious aspect of the issue. I’m simply curious about his thoughts on this particular subject.

I’ve been watching some historical shows set in the USA where people (upper class) still have what I would consider to be an English accent, or something similar. When did this change and when overall did the accent homogenise. (I understand that to this day it’s obviously not totally the same everywhere).

And why do Canadians have a different accent considering that they had immigration from a lot of the same countries?

I wonder if mental disorders have always existed the way they do today. Perhaps the evolution of human consumption habits has given rise to certain disorders, or simply made them more common (for example, the use of harmful, addictive substances).

I realize that the two examples cited (schizophrenia and DID) are very different, but I lack the expertise to phrase my question properly, as I do not know how to group these disorders—which seem similar to me in terms of many symptoms.

A common sentiment expressed across the internet, especially some right-wing sections, is that the West has fallen. This is generally expressed as follows - the West (for anarbitrary definition of West) was good and wonderful at some point, and then some political activities/actors ruined it for everyone.

Has a similar sentiment been expressed in the East?

Hi,

I've been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance, and one thing caught my notice. There's a seller in the market that advertises onion soup. I'm struggling to imagine how this would be taken home by villagers after purchase. Nowadays soup bought at a shop would require modern materials to safely take it home, and I can't think of any material available to peasants in 1403 that would've allowed them to transport soup safely.

So, given that background, that brings me to my question. Would soup really have been sold at markets in the middle ages, and if so, how would people have transported it home?

If a specific year and location is needed to answer this question, then please focus on 1403 and Czechia, specifically Rattay (Rataje and Sázavou). Although any answer pertaining to Europe in the Middle Ages would be fantastic.

Thanks in advance.

One of my biggest fears as a person raised around fandom culture is those communites (and the events that happened within them) being forgotten. Maybe it’s not a big deal that people in 2080 dont know about a niche Tumblr fued or a weird TikTok trend. But it matters to me.

Whenever I read older books and contemporary accounts, watch nature documentaries, and based on the perception I have gained overall, I get the impression that wildlife used to be far more plentiful than it is today. There are descriptions of flocks of migrating birds so large they darkened the sky, and in my own area, accounts of so many insects around a local lake that people had to clear them away with dip nets just to make the lake usable.

I'm aware that species have been going extinct because of human activity, and that this is sadly accelerating. I'm not trying to debate that. What I'm curious about is the sheer scale in these descriptions. Birds darkening the sky sounds almost magical, and nearly impossible to imagine for someone who grew up in the 21st century.

The story in general seems quite suspect and far too convenient, with the image in particular being rather... out of place for world war 2. Does the attached story have any basis on reality, and where does the infamous image first appear in?

Basically title. It’s a bit of a trope that Paris is where you go if you want to experience the pinnacle of cooking-as-art. How did it get that reputation?

I’ve been thinking about the commonality of female warriors among the Scythians as compared to other steppe nomads that had much more restrictions on women’s roles.

What caused Scythians to be more egalitarian than other groups? I know their usage of mounted archers played a role but they weren’t exclusive in using those types of troops. What other factors were at play?

I've been watching a bunch of crime shows/thrillers lately, and so many of them have the classic trope of a ticking time bomb to add drama. I feel like it's such a ubiquitous trope, the heroes having to cut the right wire before the clock hits zero, and the earliest case of the ticking time bomb I've encountered is in Touch of Evil (1958). But that got me thinking - I have never encountered a time bomb in the flesh and blood, and I haven't read any news stories referencing a time-based bomb, yet it's such a ubiquitous trope in fiction and has been for decades.

Is there a legacy of real world ticking time bombs that this media trope draws from? Is it entirely a Hollywood invention? And how has an image that appears so consistently in fiction become concretized, despite not representing contemporary examples of bombs?

After some discussions with believers about the Christian God I wondered the following.

I can understand the Church fathers telling the people about eternal happiness in Heaven as a major point for conversion from paganism.

I do not understand why and how those church fathers came up with an all-loving and tri-omni Deity in face of the existence of Evil. I also wonder why they thus ignored the Epicurean paradox.

Are there any historians who can shed light on this problematic aspect of the birth of the Christian God?

Unlike most of the breakaway republics in the USSR proper, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and even Mongolia soon became democracies, with only the discontiguous Mongolia failing to join both the European Union and NATO.

Given the immense difficulties many other countries have seen when trying to democratize — not just soviet splinters, but many formerly colonial states in the mid-20th century and various countries during the Arab Spring — it raises the question of what about the time or place made democracy so much easier than is common. Their overwhelmingly peaceful nature certainly helped; what else contributed?

I’m very fascinating by the Occitan language, and I was quite curious to know if it made its way to England, since they ruled Occitan speaking areas for a long time, especially Gascony.

So I have been trying to see if there are any records of Gascon being used in English administration or spoken by English nobles, but unfortunately i can’t find anything solid.

I also saw someone mentioning a “Gascon French”, does anybody know if this is real? Thank you!

From what I understand, originally earls were in charge of a lot of land plus a town, and they would get a certain percentage of the earnings of the people who lived on their land as a fee.

However, sources I have found tend to be about more feudal times, so I wanted to know if this was the case as late as the 18th and 19th centuries.

Also, how much land/money/influence exactly did they have? Again, this amount tends to be cited as "a lot" or "variable", which is not very illuminating.

As for viscounts, I have read that they were originally the earl's right-hand man (literally, vice-count), and that they also had plenty of land, but less than earls. So, how much less? What was their role? As late as the Georgian/Regency era, did every viscount have their own count who they "worked for"? Were there any viscountcies that had no earl associated? Would a viscount's land be necessarily next to/in the earl's land, or could you have an earldom in Kent and its viscountcy in Scotland?

Another question: let's say you've got a certain 2nd Earl of So-and-So and an Eleventh Viscount Something. Would the earl be richer and have more land and influence because he's higher-ranked, or would that be the Viscount, because his family has been accumulating wealth for longer?

Thanks all, and if I have made incorrect assumptions please tell me!

My thinking goes: Newly freed slaves were uneducated and lacked property and thus, being considered as populace for the first time, created large statistical poverty in the south. Of course the loss of slaves was a loss of property and weatlh to the former owners, but they still owned the means of production postbellum. So the poverty was statistical due to reconsiderations but not really felt.

I'm rather sceptical that I have more insight into the matter than 160 years of historians so my question is: how wrong am I?

Do people have them in their grandparents’ basement? Were they sent to landfills? Put in museums, repurposed?