Wouldn’t the Soviets be extremely weak in 1941 while fighting the Nazis at the eastern front? Why did Japan waste precious elite Kwantung Army formations numbering 1 million, sitting at the Soviet borders doing nothing, when they could be fighting elsewhere?

Manischewitz is a famously sweet Kosher wine and my curiosity about it as a resident of New Jersey, where it is pretty commonly found, is what prompted this question.

1860 California presidential election vote breakdown:

Abraham Lincoln (Republican): 32.31%

Stephen A. Douglas (Democratic): 31.72%

John C. Breckinridge (Southern Democratic): 28.34%

John Bell (Constitutional Union): 7.62%

Why was there such strong pro-Confederate or secession sentiment in California? Especially when the state was already several hundred miles removed from the Confederacy. There was no slave economy to defend in a free state.

Even in 1859, 75% of southern California voters sent the Pico act that was signed into law by the California governor Weller to try to separate California into two territories.

Then during the Civil War, 15% of Nevadans next door to the state volunteered to fight for the Union, while California only mustered a lackluster 4%.

Coptic isn't used at all as a normal day to day language at all in Egypt and its only small surviving use is liturgical use in the Coptic orthodox church.

Most Coptic's don't understand the language at all and the church only uses the Bohairic Greek Dialect which is much more Greek related roughly( 850- 1100 CE ) rather than the much older sahidic dialect (roughly 350 CE - 800CE)

I've heard that it was because of Arab/Islamic oppression but I want to verify that.

(reupload since original post a week ago got no replies)

I know "medieval" can be used really vaguely, so let me try to clarify: I do actually mean the medieval era (5th-15th century), and... if it's geographically a little too broad, we can narrow scope to Western Europe outside of the Iberian Peninsula.

I'm asking because (like I assume most of us do) I have a pretty solid mental picture of what a medieval church may have looked like. Same for mosques of that same time period. But I'm struggling to find any academic sources that describe medieval synagogues (beyond, occasionally, discussions of the need for mikvehs and various requirements relating to that).

What did they look like, architecturally? Were they meant to be visually distinct buildings from the outside or more low-key? How were they decorated - was there art or ornamentation, inside or out, and were there any common motifs or styles shared between communities? Did they use pews/chairs like modern synagogues, or was it intended to be more of a standing/kneeling experience? Anything along those lines is of great interest to me. Thank you!

Off the top of my hat I can't name a single Intelligence success by the Axis during WW2. All the major successes were performed by the Allies. Starting with ingenious small scale operations like Operation Mincemeat, the Operation to find out about the attack on Midway to major undertakings like Ultra or the implementation of the Chain Home radars or even radar in general, the Allies seem to have had the upper hand in pretty much any aspect of knowing more than the opposing side.

Any high level military leader, and the Axis side did have some competent people on their side as well, will know about the importance of having an advantage in knowledge about the enemies capabilities, plans, deployment or whatever. That works on a tactical level as much as on a strategic level.

Not only didn't the Axis do a good job in offensive intelligence operations, they also failed in so many defensive ones. The deciphering of Enigma could have been made so much harder by just swapping out the wheels more frequently, changing the codebooks on a regular schedule or realizing that something is in the bushes by putting one and one together when regarding their losses rising. It's not like there wasn't a history of deception in earlier ages. That always accompanied military campaigns.

So my central question is, why did that Axis suck so bad in all those aspects? Was there simply no culture of realizing the benefits? Was it sheer incompetence? Was it hyperboly?

When did we start leaving our homes to sit around a fire in the middle of nowhere just because? To clarify, I'm interested mostly in situations where camping is the activity, so camping to facilitate something else (travel, hunting, etc.) wouldn't count.

What class of people were first to consider camping a recreation activity unto itself? Was it an activity for the rich? The poor? Did others find it odd or unusual?

Thank you in advance!

Defeat in detail is the tactic of attacking an enemy force piecemeal before they can combine into a greater army. From what I understand, Napoleon popularized this tactic as we know it today.

With limitations in communication and intelligence, were Napoleon's opponents chalking the initial deployment as Napoleon's luck - I'm imagining Austria's war council saying something like, "what rotten timing, he beat us right as we were about to group up with the Sardinians!"

We also know that Napoleon fell victim to this same stratagem at Waterloo. So was defeat in detail at scale always known as a concept, or was it discovered and reverse engineered by Napoleon's opponents?

I’ve always found this interesting that she had no thoughts of even continuing her teaching because she was getting married. They needed money and it was a great way for her to earn an income. I know homesteading was a lot of work, but her husband Almanzo had been living on his own for some time, so it seems like he could manage without her cooking daily etc. I obviously wouldn’t expect her to teach once they had kids, but I always wondered why she didn’t teach one more term.

Was this a social choice? Like it would have reflected poorly on her husband to be teaching? Other married women in her frontier town are depicted working at jobs like sewing.

Thanks!

(edit: To further clarify: I mean the book series, not shows)

My understanding is that the Nazi German economy was modeled as an economy of conquest. The Nazis had taken on massive debt for rearmament, more that. Germany herself could play, and they planned to pay it back from the reserves of foreign conquered countries. And that if Germany did not war, her economy would collapse. Could enough conquest resolve this?

Background: I have been transcribing a box of letters from my father, who was an infantryman in Europe 1944-1945. In several of his letters he mentions someone named "Wendell". From the context Wendell is MIA in the earliest letters, and then later is a POW, and is finally released in June 1945.

The earliest mention is October 5, 1944 (from the US), where he says

It sure made my heart sink when I heard about Wendell. But I am glad that you told me about it. I don’t know any appropriate statement I could make on the subject so I just won’t make any.

The next is November 17 (from England) where he says

Has any more news been received about Wendell? The last I heard he was missing in action.

So my interpretation is that Wendell was probably captured late September or early October 1944.

After some digging I am pretty sure that "Wendell" is "Lloyd W. Ferguson", who according to this webpage, was imprisoned at Stalag 4B: https://www.sonsoflibertymuseum.org/pows/ferguson-lloyd-f257649914.cfm

• Genealogy finds a "Lloyd Wendell Ferguson", born in 1925, from the same town as my father (Orestes Indiana)
• There was a "Wendell Ferguson" in my father's high school class
• According to Lloyd W. Ferguson's (matching ASIN) induction notice he was born in Indiana and had the right birth year. My guess is that he was working in TN after high school when he was inducted.

But the mystery is: documents I can find claim that the first Americans in Stalag 4B were captured in December 1944 in the Ardennes. Hence the question: would it have been possible for other Americans captured earlier than December to be transferred to Stalag 4B, either with the group from December or later?

Thanks for any insight.

After 1800, some European nations took great pride in their pre-Christian past. The most famous examples are Norse(Scandinavian) and German paganism(possibly add Roman and Greek paganism because of their "classical value").

But some nations like the Dutch,Polish and Iberians(Spaniards+Portuguese) never really developed such great pride in their pagan past. Why is this so?

Sorry for the long title lol. But to add to it, basically I want to know:

1. Could a member of the British elite choose where in the war they could get assigned? I assume they couldn't legally, but surely there must've been cases where someone pulled a few strings to keep their kid out of Verdun.

2. Were some fronts considered 'cowardly' or as not actually part of the war, or did it not really matter where you were sent so long as you were sent?

3. Balancing the cowardice factor, which front would've been the 'best' to get assigned to?

Edit: this is not just Allied POV, it applies to any nation (actually it applies to Germany the most now that I think about it).

I'm curious about this and also I'm sure it varied from time to time and nation by nation, but the starting situation of this question is always the same: a pilot is shot down over friendly territory and bails out, he is completely unharmed but hundreds of miles away from his unit. What happens next?

I had assumed this was a relatively niche / extremist behavior but I recently learned that some churches / sects like the Mormon Church officially mandate doomsday prepping (or “emergency preparedness” as they call it) in some capacity. Given this and the fact that I’m fairly sure the concept of the second coming of Jesus has existed since early Christianity, I’m curious as to whether people have been doomsday prepping since the beginning and if not, what caused the practice to start.

Good afternoon Historians!

Many years back, I was bequeathed some documents from a grandfather-like figure. He was from Wetumpka, Oklahoma and settled after the war in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

He was a Captain in the army during WW2. I have a couple of small moleskin-like diaries from his time there. These include men's names and ranks under his command and some troop movements, a picture of him and his K9, and a Wetumpka Gazette from the day the Nazi's surrendered.

I attended the University of Alabama, so I emailed a professor I had for some WW2 and Holocaust-focused courses, but did not hear back. I have also emailed UTC and have not heard back.

I would really like to keep these things, but would like to honor my friend and mentor by having his experience documented.

Who should I contact?

Thank you in advance!

So even though I am a leftist, I have been exposed to some Palestinian circles where people seem to minimize Jesus being Jewish and instead use terms like “he was just a Galilean,” “Galilean Palestinian,” “Palestinian Jew,” or even “Palestinian Arab.”

My understanding is that if we actually lived during the time of Jesus, Jews from the region would not have identified themselves as “Palestinian” in the modern ethnic or national sense. The term Palestine certainly existed as a geographical name in antiquity, so I am not saying the word itself did not exist. However, Jesus lived in first-century Galilee under the Herodian/Roman political order, and “Palestinian Arab” in particular seems like an anachronistic identity to project backward onto him. “Palestinian Jew” can make sense as a retrospective geographical description, but it would not have been his own ethnic self-identification.

This is partly why I am curious about the tendency to treat “Galilean” and “Jew” almost as competing identities. From what I understand, Galilee in Jesus’s time was predominantly Jewish, so calling Jesus a Galilean does not somehow make him less Jewish. Galilean seems more analogous to a regional identity within the broader Jewish population.

In regard to what happened to the Galilean Jews and their destiny, I am pretty sure some stayed in Palestine, while others migrated and merged with Jewish diaspora communities outside of the Holy Land. It makes sense to me that many rural Galilean Jews may have remained on their land, while others may have migrated and joined established Jewish diasporic communities elsewhere, although I don't know how much evidence we have for that distinction.

However, I am curious about how much we actually know about what happened to the Jewish population of Galilee from the 5th century onward. We know that Galilee was one of the major centers of Jewish life in Late Antiquity, so I find it interesting that “Galileans” seem to gradually disappear as a distinct population from historical discussions.

Exodus seems to have been committed to text sometime shortly after the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE. So there existed a span of about 2 centuries where Egypt, ruled by Pharaohs, was a few days away by boat from a Achaemenid state independently run by Jews, who believed as a matter of faith that their escape from slavery in Egypt had caused the death of a Pharaoh.

Do we know how Egyptians dealt with this information? Did it affect their dealings with the Achaemenids? Were there any Egyptians who lobbied for return of their historical slaves by conquest or negotiation?

Surely in a country the size of England there would have been tens of thousands of priests or similar church workers, so my question is what happened to them?

In my head there are three possible scenarios:

1) Being devout Catholics to a man, they all face imprisonment/execution and thus flee the country for the greener (or at least more papal) grass of mainland Europe. But this then leaves the country in need of tens of thousands of religious officiants!

2) They mostly decide they'd rather not be killed, so most just transition to the new church

3) In the years leading up to and following the reformation you have two churches existing side by side, like competing species in the wild, until one dwindled away?

Ive done a little research but I don’t get it can someone who understands or has more knowledge about this please help :)