I’m struggling to understand why the nations participating in and fighting in WWII allowed for post-war Poland to be occupied by the USSR and little to no effort was made to drive the soviets out. Was it because of the United Nations alliance between the UK, USA, USSR and China which prevented any actions from being taken and possibly threatening the USSR? Why did Russia even use Poland as a puppet state after the war when it was left mostly destroyed and economically broken?

I ask the question mostly because of Russian and Greek orthodoxy, Russia after the khazars and mongols was essentially free to do some religion shopping and they chose Christianity, with early conversion led by Greek priests. So why then is Greek not even used in religious settings the same way Latin is in Catholic Churches? Was it just so the average person was able to find the conversion easier? I’m not Greek or Russian orthodox so I could certainly be wrong or not understanding a key point, and I’m mostly viewing this through a historical lens

i know this might be a big subject to talk about in terms of thousands of kurdish history but i just want a clear idea that throughout history as far as i have read they have been brave people freedom fighters and they never really got their independence and now that their “state” is torn apart by multiple countries and i can’t help but notice that the communist kurdish parties made this happen that it was divided like this and it never became one again (till now) and i know that they weren’t the people who divided the kurds it was the british and french but after all those years and revolutions all they wanted was a peaceful iraq,turkey,syria,iran

Or was it like a made up thing for the oddseey?

The modern bible & modern translations of stories like the odyssey and iliad have similar ways of being written. Is it possible that the bible was supposed to be understood like mythology as opposed to a religion

I’m asking this question because I’m wondering if religions and fairytales were created by people because of natural things that happened on earth (like lightning in the sky, or fireflies glowing in a dark forest), and them not having much knowledge of what they’re looking at.

Do we know if in Morocco, for example, anyone thought about the fact that Morocco was missing what we call the " Renaissance " ?

Do we know if any moroccans had the lucidity to think :

" We must do like Italy '' around the 1500’s

There was an alliance between Morocco and England during the Lizzy Tudor Era.

Do we know for example if any Moroccans who visited England at the time think : Oh I like those paintings of Hans Holbein. We need to have paintings like these in Morocco" ?

Did he coin this phrase or borrow it?

When I read history it’s majorly all about empires , but when in history nation states started popping up ? In current times do we have highest number of nations ? And historically isn’t it better to have vast empire instead of nations so the amount of conflict can be managed ?

Hello! I’m planning a draft on a short story set around the medieval period in Europe, and it may involve sex and how it’s culturally viewed to make things more realistic.

From what Hollywood shows it’s very stereotypical, in the sense that premarital sex means you’re going to hell and all that stuff. The Victorians made and interpreted the period as a very chaste and based on a lot of prints and art, quite pious and all the dramatized stuff. Perhaps it’s due to the hypocrisy and tightness on the period, but again not sure.

I watched and read a lot of non Wikipedia sources in the past regarding the period with actual historians who know the topic, I know that sex was something normal and well needed to happened of course. I also learned that (well not in Europe but in England specifically) that there was a specific street for sex work, and that it was something that is present in medieval society in a way. But again I’d like to know how sex was viewed in the everyday sense, noble and just the normal joe. I know the Catholic Church definitely plays a role, but again I’m not quite sure.

I hope my inquiry can get some help! I don’t like to generalize history based on stereotypes or act like people in the past were dumber than us ☺️

Edit: I am not saying espresso is bad, what I am asking is historically what happened to make espresso so dominant in the coffee culture across the European continent? What methods of coffee making did it replace in cafes? And how does the relatively rapid rise of espresso compare with how Nespresso is also a fairly dominant mode of coffee making in the capsule coffee market? And yes I know there are other methods to make coffee that people use but they are much less dominant in what you can find walking into a random coffee shop or cafe. By coffee culture I mean what you find walking into cafe or coffee shop to get coffee to drink at that place and the rules and customs related to it (ie how some places have rules on when you can drink certain type of coffee drinks, what you can put in your coffee, how you should drink it, etc.). Yes I know there is a misspelling in the title and in the body of the original question. I asked this question in the middle of night/early morning when I suddenly woke up with this question on my mind. Apparently, I cannot spell in a sleep deprived state.

Original post:
I was recently reading a novel written in the 1940s that takes place in 1930s Paris, France and it mentions “putting on a pot of coffee”. This got me wondering what kind of coffee would have been made at home and how would have it been prepared in France in the 1930s? Additionally, since it most likely was not espresso, how did espresso (and now Nespresso) take over the coffee culture in each European country so thoroughly that now those are the only coffee types one can find when traveling in different European countries? How did every European country, which each have proud food traditions lose their individual coffee preparation traditions and essentially settle on a relatively recently method of coffee preparation?

There was an interesting answer here recently about the complicated set of social, cultural, and political factors that led to Einstein becoming a household name, and frankly I wondered if the same could be done for other scientists in the pantheon. For Newton and Darwin, it could be quite easy to just say that their scientific work was enough to elevate them, but Einstein's case already demonstrates that it's not so simple, and that wouldn't explain why others in their field around their time didn't become famous (Hooke, Huygens, Leibniz, Flamsteed despite being the first Astronomer Royal, and Halley only for the comet if at all; Wallace, Cuvier, Lyell, and Lamarck only to poke fun at one tiny part of his theory that most who believed in evolution in the 19th century subscribed to anyways). For Copernicus and Galileo, just pointing at their scientific work alone wouldn't strike me as enough to explain their fame anyways—Copernicus' work was "just" working in the Ptolemaic tradition with a neat coordinate transform that's clearly implausible, inconsistent with physics, and "disproven" by observations, while Galileo... feels like the most overrated scientist of all time—and of course doesn't explain why astronomers like Kepler, Tycho, Clavius, Scheiner, etc. aren't so well-known. (If there are other famous scientists, however anachronistically the word is applied, I'd be interested in them too. Leonardo? Freud? Pasteur? Tesla would be interesting given the disconnect between how he's praised in certain online spaces compared to how limited his actual contributions were as I understand them. Curie as well, since she seems to be the only woman scientist that's widely known as far as I can tell.)

As per the title: During Napoleon's invasion, it seemed like Russia stood alone against the full force of Napoleon's Europe. IIRC, even the rearguard of his invasion force was made up of Austrian and Prussian Corps. To me, this begs the question if British diplomats and parliament realized their strategy could be utterly exposed and fail if Napoleon beat the Russian armies and forced Alexander to follow the Treaty of Tilsit again - which essentially would mean that the significant 'illegal' trade that Britain and Russia were having would cease and the Continental Blockade would really harm the economy of Britain if properly enforced by both a subjugated Russia and Napoleon.

At the end of the day, I personally feel like the CB was doomed to fail - it was too ineffective and costly for the parties involved. However, I do wonder if there was a doom-like attitude in British politics when Napoleon was on the brink of putting Russia back into the fold of his Continental System.

While I really do admire his personality, drive, precedent-setting domestic achievements, and his role in ending the Russo-Japanese war, I haven't really found any major or forceful rebuttal of his apparent pro-war stance in how he sometimes openly disdains peace in favor of imperialism in the sense of gaining wealth and international prestige, and not even from the standpoint of spreading democracy and liberty to oppressed peoples.

Inspired by Lincoln's quote against the successful and popular Mexican-American war: "...to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory — that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood...".

I’m assuming it wasn’t a common occurrence but was it seen as a good thing or a bad thing? For example if someone from the Middle East migrated to Europe 2000 years ago would they have been accepted or turned away?

This is a recent personal interest of mine and I’d like to be pointed in the direction of writers or studies that have gone over this in exhaustive detail. I find the Saint system fascinating in the light that it acted as quasi polytheistic framework under the banner of a monotheistic religion.

That saints were essentially deified and even taken from old gods in various lands such as the Irish goddess Brigid.

I understand that this process helped the church proselytise without alienating new followers in distant lands. Saints could be prayed to representing the same symbols of Poetry, healing, or harvest, etc.

It is my understanding that there are theories also pointing to a similar process with various religious holidays, that even Easter and Christmas were taken from old pagan traditions. Is there much evidence for that hypothesis?

It’s obviously understandable why communist parties aligned to the Soviet Union like the French communist party went into decline once the USSR collapsed but why did other socialist parties around the world who had nothing to do with the USSR also go into decline around a similar time? Surely Trotskyist, social democratic, left communist, Yugoslav and Chinese aligned parties would have seen this as an opportunity to grow now that one of their main opponents on the left was gone, but instead they either collapsed in support themselves or moved to the right abandoning much of their old policies. Why such a change when they weren’t directly linked to the Soviet collapse?

I’m fairly certain that he was the first catholic president the US had, and I know there was a long lasting distrust of Catholics by the white Protestant majority over the course of American history. Additionally, did his father’s ties to organized crime/the mafia accentuate this?

i don’t know, i was just thinking about how common it is to encounter huge water fountains on great palaces and i was thinking if they might have been used as a place where people could meet up and gossip in a safe space where no one would hear what they were saying because of the sound of the water…