I'm probably being petty and I don't know why it bothers me so much it just seems overdone and unnecessary.

I joined a Marxist reading group a year ago and everyone in it besides me is absolutely adamant that the idea that Stalin was a brutal despot and mass killer is just imperialist propoganda. This girl sent me a podcast by these communists who lay out the case defending Stalin, but I'm not sure where to go to verify or dispute any of their claims.

In the cursory research I've done on the matter, I haven't found a single historian who doesn't have a vested interest in rehabilitating Stalin (communists) who argues that Stalin was actually a benevolent leader.

Is there something I'm missing here? Or am I correct in suspecting that all the people in my Marxist reading group (who I agree with about most other things) have been deceived by their ideological commitments into embracing a demonstrably false view of 20th century Russian history?

It is my understanding that among serious historians there is at least somewhat of a a range of opinions about how bad Stalin was, and about what specific domains he may have been successful in. In your view, what is the most charitable possible interpretation of Stalin that can be plausibly argued for with primary source evidence?

I look forward to your thoughts on this matter.

As I understand Dr. Deveraux's argument here, preparatory bombardments were the critical element to allow attackers to win the "race to the parapet" and take opposing trenches, so defenders relied on a thinly-manned frontline trenches to force the attacker to expend effort and suffer friction to capture the first trenches, where the attacker was more vulnerable to counterattack and the attacker could not repeat the attacks against subsequent defenses. Dr. Deveraux highlights the difficulty of moving artillery pieces over the shell-destroyed ground to support follow-on attacks as a critical concern.

But according to wikipedia, even lighter-calibre weapons like the French 75 had effective ranges measured in several kilometers. Did artillery weapons really need to advance to support follow-on attacks? Were rear trenches really set so far back, when the front trench-lines were often only hundreds of meters from the enemy? Or have I misunderstood Dr. Deveraux's argument?

His coat and armband seem to look like pseudo-nazi garb. But he is studying at Berkley and, being with the Black Panthers, it seems he is supposed to be far left intellectual coded. So why would he be wearing neonazi-like clothing?

https://news.gallup.com/poll/8074/Iraq-War-Triggers-Major-Rally-Effect.aspx?utm_source

On march 20, 2003 the gallup polling indicated 76% of Americans approved the decision to go to war in Iraq.

By the next year in spring 2004, polls still showed 60%+ support for going to war in Iraq as the right decision.

What exactly was the public thinking to support this at the start and for over a year?

Several top Nzis killed themselves with cyanide capsules hidden in their teeth. According to Wiki, this is not really a very nice death. Why did they use this poison and not another one, that is more pleasant?

In "The Knight and the Blast Furnace", Alan Williams uses Vickers Pyramid Hardness as a proxy for how good a material is at resisting penetrators, and the tests he performs in the same book largely align with that conclusion. On p. 5-6 he notes the range of VPH for bronze as 110-270, depending on cold working. On p. 17-18 he gives the range of 100-180 for armor-quality iron (depending on slag) and 180-260 for low-carbon steel, increased to 300-400 for medium carbon slack-quenched and up to 400-500 for medium-carbon, full-quenched, tempered steel of the sort that rich men in the early modern era could afford. In other words, bronze was superior to iron and comparable to low-quality steel.

When I look at bronze armor such as the Dendra panoply or the much later muscle cuirasses, they seem to provide decent coverage in the form of solid plates. For the former, the plates are apparently 1 to 1.5 mm thick, which is very thin compared to later plate armors but pretty comparable to a common 14th century coat of plates, and with the same benefit of partially overlapping plates. Overall it seems either suit would provide good protection against cuts, thrusts, and arrows, comparable to iron or low-quality steel mail against the former and superior (due to solid construction) against the latter two. This armor, while used by "elites," also appeared to be reasonably common enough that most of said elites could afford it.

All that said: why is it that this armor more or less disappears entirely by the mid-late classical era? Bronze is harder to manufacturer and rarer than iron or even steel, averages about 10% denser than either, and requires foreign trade. I get all that. What I don't get is how complete the disappearance seems to have been when these suits seem to have real benefits over the iron and low-carbon steel mail that came to dominate the scene (plus, you can of course just use both). I would think that it'd stick around in some fashion for elites, but by the time Rome becomes a hegemon it gets consigned to the dustbin of history and never comes back. From the earliest point the Middle Ages are then all mail, all the time (plus some scale, with steel plate and transitional armor making its way in for the last couple centuries).

Or does it? Is the above accurate?

What is the actual reason it disappeared so thoroughly? Was it worse in practice than its paper stats made it look?

Harry Truman is generally ranked rather highly by historians and considered one of the better presidents, but when he left office he was very unpopular, even more unpopular than Nixon was just before he resigned. While I understand how some of the aspects in retrospect are judged, I'm a bit confused as to why Truman would have left office with such a low public opinion.

Truman saw the end of WW2 and then saw a successful repulsion of the invasion of North Korea into South Korea. When we hear about unpopular wars Vietnam is the quintessential example, but even that didn't make Johnson as unpopular as Nixon or Truman; so was Korea that unpopular?

And was inflation and the economy really that bad at that point? This is still the post-war economy which is generally considered the Golden Age of capitalism at least from the US perspective.

I've always heard stalin tried to step down 4 times which is true but ive heard the reasons behind it being different. Communists or stalin defenders use it to show that stalin wasnt a dictator and didnt want to rule. Stalin haters say he did this for purely political gain used to see if any people didnt follow him. Im asking which side is more true was there any legitimacy to stalin wanting to step down? And also how could the central committee say no? And if they had said yes what would have happened? Finally was his last attempt any different or perhaps more legitimate since stalin had gotten old by that point and would soon die after this attempt. I would also like any good sources on the topic.

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Apparently DOD is pressing Congress to officially authorize their rebranding. I have seen several articles (like this one! https://thehill.com/policy/defense/6172772-pentagon-pushes-department-war-name/amp/) baldly assert that the Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense in 1949.

I recognize that this is inaccurate on the face of it because the War Department was split into the Department of the Air Force and Department of the Army in 1947; but ASIDE FROM THAT:

Is it more accurate to say that the Department of Defense is descended from the War Department disestablished in 1947 or is it more accurate to say that it is descended from the "National Military Establishment" established in 1947?

I realize this is splitting hairs, but it is getting down to my true question:

Is it in any way accurate to say that renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War while a former Army officer is in charge of it represents the final victory of the Army over their ancient enemy, the Navy?

Are there any legendary/mythological/practical explanations that have been recorded? Was it as regular/unremarkable of an occurrence as it is today? Was it less common because of natural fibers used in clothing?

PS I only have a very basic understanding of static, so please feel free to explain things to me like I'm an 8 year old lol.

I know a lot about the American Side and it seems the only thing Documentaries focus on. I know a copy of the Declaration was sent to Parliament and the King. What I would like to know is how they reacted in the short term. Was it read out in Parliament? Was it ignored? Did they see and know it was coming? Was there a moment of "WOW these guys are serious?" I know that the feeling in England was that the colonies were divided and not all wanted to rebel like in the South. Was there a WTF moment when all of them moved together? I would really like to know because this was really the first time in the world something like this happened. Such openly breaking the link. I don't feel like I have ever gotten a satisfying answer to this

In other words, are we comparing ordinary homes today with ordinary homes in the past, or with the homes of people who were much wealthier?

I am Dr. Joohee Suh. I was trained as a social historian of early modern China with a focus on the history of the body and death. My interest in this topic was originally inspired by Qing-era (1644-1911) stories of undead corpses, and from there I became interested in how dead bodies shaped social practices, interactions, and changes. What I found particularly interesting was the fear of dead bodies lingering in the world of the living to harm them in various ways, which seems to be quite universal across time and space. I hope this book can be both informative and amusing for those who share this interest in death, the body, and how they have shaped human history.

You can find my book here: https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295754925/the-unburied/

Here is the Press's instruction of the book:

When coffins lingered above ground, Qing China reimagined care, kinship, and the meaning of death

In late imperial China, death did not always lead swiftly to burial. Across the Qing empire, coffins frequently remained in temple courtyards, storage houses, or shallow pits for months, years, even decades. These unburied bodies unsettled the social order: they were neither gone nor fully incorporated into ancestral lines, inhabiting a liminal space between presence and absence. The Unburied explores this unsettling phenomenon, showing how exposed remains shaped mortuary ethics and practices across families, communities, and the state.

Drawing on government decrees, criminal cases, epitaphs, charitable records, and popular stories, Joohee Suh uncovers the unexpected social roles of the dead. Families crafted ornate epitaphs to sustain ties with kin whose coffins had no resting place; magistrates and officials confronted disputes over graves and desecration; Buddhist temples and philanthropic groups organized to shelter and inter abandoned bodies. Even as Confucian orthodoxy condemned corpse exposure as ritual failure, ordinary people developed adaptive practices that wove the unburied into moral and social life.

This study reframes death in early modern China not as a stable ritual sequence but as an extended, negotiated process. By centering the precarious fates of the unburied, Suh illuminates how scarcity, migration, and filial obligation reshaped the relationship between living and dead. Original and deeply researched, The Unburied offers a powerful new history of mortality, ritual, and care in a society where the dead continued to dwell uncomfortably among the living.
This study reframes death in early modern China not as a stable ritual sequence but as an extended, negotiated process. By centering the precarious fates of the unburied, I illuminate how scarcity, migration, and filial obligation reshaped the relationship between living and dead. Original and deeply researched, The Unburied offers a powerful new history of mortality, ritual, and care in a society where the dead continued to dwell uncomfortably among the living.

The idea of the portal features very prominently in the cosmology of my five-year-old, and is common in the mass media he consumes. Its features are usually most or all of the following:

• It is a permeable, flat surface, usually suspended vertically, often circular in shape
• It often has a border of some kind around it
• It allows a person to instantly move from one (often mundane) setting to a completely different place, biome, period of time or parallel/magical world
• One has simply to walk or otherwise move through the portal to use it, sometimes after activating it in some way

Now, I know some relatively recent fiction that helped popularise the concept, like the 1994 film Stargate and the 2007 video game Portal. But how far and from where does its origins stretch before that?

Obviously there are related ideas in folklore, like fairy rings, summoning circles and various magical/underground/parallel worlds that can be travelled to and from. There are also other means of fantastical instantaneous travel in fiction from Star Trek transporters to time machines. But the specific idea and form factor of the portal, is there a more decisive origin for that?

A while ago I had a debate with some Americans about the origins of the term Blud - I am from the UK. They argued that the term comes from the Crips and the Bloods, which i think is probably true when it comes to Americans saying Blud. However, I don't understand why English people would use the term Blud referring to the American Bloods. I always thought the term came from Caribbean-English communities, as there are dialects in England that come from multicultural communities like MLE. My American friends absolutely insisted that Brits must say Blud because of the American gang -> who is right? what is is the history of the word? thanks !

Assuming they have the ability to dress appropriately and research appropriate behavior - so mainly from the perspective of language.

I assume some minor oddities could be chalked up to being from a different region or country. But at what point would it become too obvious that this traveler is not from the time period they are currently in?

Also, would there be anything else that might draw suspicion even when their language is still passable, that they may forget or be unable to account for?

It seems strange to me, that Wake Island, a small island with a modest force of marines and a large number of civilians, several artillery emplacements, and maybe a dozen fighters, managed to inflict so much damage on the Japanese

I’m not under the illusion that we could’ve held the Philippines indefinitely

But given the large number of American forces in the much greater resources available, I’m really surprised the Philippines wasn’t able to hold out longer than it did

Part of me wonders if MacArthur got off a little easy for the failure of the Philippines. In particular, the destruction of the Air Forces on the island and the attempt to engage the enemy on the beaches as opposed to withdrawing to Baton earlier.

I don’t know if it would have impacted the Japanese invasion of the islands. or the outcome of the course of the war.

My numbers may be off, but it seems to me that MacArthur had 70 times the forces available to him that at Wake Island had.

Do we have any information from either of them about how they were weighing their options during that and what they would have considered a breaking point?

When I look back in history I feel like it’s kings and queens until we get democracy somewhere in (Greece?). Did we ever see any different political structures?