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I was thinking about how homogenized a lot of modern MMORPG classes have become into these three roles, and remembering how things used to feel different way back when. When I realized that WoW is over 20 years old now, I knew to turn to this sub for an answer! When and with wha…
In modern literature and cinema, the recasting or refocusing of stories onto women often provokes a furious backlash (i.e., some of the reaction to Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey). Was there anything similar when Euripidies wrote The Trojan Women? Was he accused of su…
Brownian motion, general relativity, special relativity, E=mc2. I know WHAT Einstein is famous for and this is not a question about the importance of his scientific contribution. My question is why did Einstein reach a level of such legendary fame that his very name became synon…
In Mozart Reign of Love, Jan Swafford posits that operas and symphonies were a social gathering, often being up to 6 hours long. The music was written such that it was lowkey and allowed people to socialize with occasional big numbers to capture attention. They mention people wo…
Cause I'm aware many people WONT know about the story - despite its ''icon status'' - I'm gonna post it here: On January 24, 1961, Blanc was driving alone when his sports car was involved in a head-on collision on Sunset Boulevard; his legs and his pelvis were fractured as a res…
If marines are infantry detachments deployed from ships, and are part of the navy, and paratroopers are infantry detachments deployed from aircraft, why are they not part of the air force? Edit: Appreciate this might be a bit off-topic from your regularly scheduled programming b…
Hey everyone. I’m a dad who is fairly new to Reddit, trying to make sense of something my adult kids keep bringing up. They’re convinced the U.S. has pretty much run its course. They argue that some empires operate on a predictable "250-year cycle" and we’re officially entering…
My understanding is that all of these regions had Christian majorities before the rise of Islam (though, to be clear, many of them followed extremely heterodox brands of Christianity, such as Monophysitism and Donatism). While the percentage of Christians certainly declined over…
I have been interested in the Second Schleswig War and the postwar negotiations. According to a documentary source citing Magne Lund & Preben Strange’s Fra Altona til Dybbøl, the sequence around late June 1864 went roughly like this: After the Danish defeat at Duebbel, Bismarck…
My understanding (might be incorrect) is that the current image of Zeus having white hair and beard came about during the Renaissance and the actual appearance of Zeus depicted by Greeks and Romans had Zeus younger with darker hair and beard. Of course, with that information, my…
Reading about slavery, it seems like it was common for empires and polities to gain slaves through violence, but how often did societies gain slaves by slaves having children?
The modern upper estimate of dead is 20,000 soldiers; at the time, the reported toll ranged from 28,000 to 40,000. Surely, the people of England had a lot of thoughts and feelings about the sheer death toll of not only knights and nobility, but also the catastrophic loss of life…
My question is inspired by Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, in which Telemachus constantly references the so-called "Zeus's Law" while the suitors-- and Odysseus in sacking Troy, thus earning divine punishment-- trample on it. Watching the movie made me want to know more of the…
For example, would Jesus have preached the sinlessness of prophets? That God is unitarian in nature like Islam tends to preach? How much legitamacy does the Islamic narrative that Jesus' doctrines would have alligned with Islam but not with Christianity have? Does any historical…
Can I just ask him, or do I need to drop hints and try to get him to make the first move? Do I need to convince my parents first? His parents? As a woman, how much choice do I have in who I end up married to?
One thing about WWII that doesn’t quite stick to me is why would Hitler declare war on the US when it was Japan who originally did so? He was already starting to struggle on the eastern front against the USSR at that point, and I get why Hitler invaded the USSR (due to ideology)…
Been playing assassins creed black flag recently (not historically accurate I know) but it got me thinking, what actually ended the age of piracy? And the pirates who made money, were they able to just blend back into society back in England, France, Spain etc or did they have t…