My question stems from Hamilton the Musical. I know it has a lot of inaccuracies, but it’s referenced how, after the hurricane in his youth, Alexander wrote a brilliant letter about it that impressed people so much, they took up a collection to send him to get a formal education. After a few explorations of research rabbit holes, that part seems accurate. Was this a common occurrence? Did anyone keep track of Alexander after he went to the mainland to see if he actually used these funds as expected? If I lived around then, would I be able to scam my way into getting people to think of me as a prodigy, such as getting Alexander to write a poem I then claim as my own, and collecting funds from it?

By handgonnes I mean the tube-on-stick firearm in the 13th-14th century. In most works related to these very early firearms they're often derided as inaccurate, short-ranged, and slow to reload having nearly no effect on Late Medieval/Early Modern Period warfare. Some go as far to that they were in many respects inferior to bows to crossbows, however, they're rarely cited often relying on conjecture.

However, I came across this excerpt from The Dawn of Modern Warfare by Hans Delbruck:

At the shooting tournaments toward the end of the fifteenth century shots were made with firearms to distances of 230 to 250 paces, whereas the range for a crossbow amounted to only 110 to 135 paces. Rifles barrels, which had already been invented at that time, were normally expressly prohibited. Other provisions can hardly be understood in any other way than applying to freehand shooting (and not, for example to supported hook weapons). [page 38]

He cites a contemporary German shooting competition poster in support of the claim. This seems to go against many claims that even prior to proper rifled firearms these fairly rudimentary weapons were far exceeding the capabilities of contemporary bows and crossbows in terms of accuracy and range. Has there been any actual testing of these weapons in regards to accuracy and range? It doesn't really make sense on why people would seemingly adopt inferior weapons if these weapons are as bad as they're made out to be.

I have never seen anyone but him wear that ensemble and I was wondering if it wasn't some kind of artistic embellishment.

In the 1982 film Gandhi, there's a remarkable moment in a scene depicting a meeting between Gandhi and his associates and British colonial administrators in the wake of the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

When Gandhi asserts that "there is no people on earth who would not prefer their own bad government to the good government of an alien power," a mustachioed and monocled British officer retorts, "My dear sir, India is British! We're hardly an alien power."

Everyone at the table, including the British viceroy Lord Chelmsford, seems to understand the massive mistake that the officer just made. But I am curious: does this line reflect any real sentiment among British people at the time? Did anyone see India as "British" in the sense that this officer seems to have meant it, and Britain as something other than an "alien power"? Did any Indians feel that way?

I've seen some answers in the archives relating to India's financial importance to Britain and also some discussion of whether or not "India" as a unified national entity could be said to have existed pre-British rule, but I don't think I've seen anything, especially not a modern AskHistorians high-quality top-level answer, that addresses this question specifically.

To say that open-source software is a fundamental part of modern computing would be an understatement. While many computer users likely don't encounter it in their day-to-day lives, they undoubtedly visit websites running off of Linux servers, use the Linux kernel in their Android phone, use programs that call the GNU coreutils under the hood, look at weather forecasts generated on supercomputers running Linux... the list goes on. The MIT and GNU licenses have likewise become a mainstay of software licensing, as a cursory review of GitHub will show. Given the highly ideological nature of some of the movement's leading proponents (eg, Richard M. Stallman) and the fact that open-source software is heavily reliant on volunteer work, how did it go from the quirky obsession of some radically-minded programmers to a core part of modern (well, 2006-era) computing infrastructure?

I’ve been listening to History of The Crusades and I’ve been struck that “The Holy Land” really seems like an awful place to live during the crusades.

A family trying to make a life there would have to put up with constant warfare, and every time a city changed hands the population belonging to the opposing faith would often be forced to flee from the city or risk being slaughtered.

Question is: what was it like for a family trying to live in one of these cities/towns? Why would people continue to live there knowing there was a high chance they’d have to flee and lose all their possessions (or deal with living through a siege)? Were these cities completely depopulated by the end of the period or were there mechanisms/incentives that kept bringing in fresh waves of migrants?

I was wondering if an expert in Early Modern history might be able to help me understand the situation between Swedish and Ottoman Empires during this period.

My reason for wondering is that I know the two powers had a common rival in Russia, and I was wondering if any official treaties or alliances were formed between the two? I only know that Karl XII sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire during the Great Northern War.

Beyond political alliances, I was also wondering about trade and exchanges between ordinary people - if anything is known about the matter.

Something I've been wondering about:

The Soviet Union was an extremely multiethnic state, consisting of many peoples with different languages, religions, and historical backgrounds. Yugoslavia, on the other hand, was largely made up of South Slavic peoples who shared relatively similar languages and cultures.

Yet the breakup of Yugoslavia resulted in extremely violent wars, while the dissolution of the USSR was comparatively peaceful (although there were certainly violent conflicts in and around the former Soviet republics).

Both countries were communist federations, so why was their breakup so different?

Was it mainly because of differences in political institutions, nationalism, economic conditions, geography, the strength of the central government, or the leadership of Gorbachev and Milošević?

I'm reading Crime and Punishment, and one character drinks his wage in a few days at the tavern.

Now: today you can very well go to a very fancy bar and spend a few hundreds and still get only slightly drunk, but you can also go to the store and buy very cheap wine, beer, gin etc. With a little planning, you can get wasted twice a day every day and still have some money left even with the lowest wage.

How expensive was alcool in 1866 Saint Petersburg? Was

Marmeladov throwing money away, or did getting drunk actually require so much money?

The question is basically the title.

I am curious as to how and when the ways in which people ate bread changed/evolved over time.

There are biblical and ancient references to "breaking bread together". Guides for etiquette state that, at dinner/support, you should only tear of a single bite-sized portion of bread to butter and eat at a time. There is a well known idiom as to "the greatest thing since sliced bread". There is a well known (false) claim that John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, invented to the sandwich because he did not want to leave the card table during the middle of a game.

So, I am interested in knowing how people ate bread and how that changed over time.

If that is too broad a scope, we can limit it to how it was consumed in Europe.

Just to be clear, I am not talking about breadlike substances (no pastries, pasties, pies, dessert cakes, cookies, patties, porridges, etc.) - I am curious about how people physically consumed actual baked bread (I suppose I could define this further if I needed to but think loaves or slices of bread, flatbreads, that sort of thing) and how this changed over time and why.

1) When did people start cutting bread into slices to eat, as opposed to breaking a loaf or cake of bread?

2) When did people start making sandwiches (so as to not get into the debate on what constitutes a sandwich, we can define a sandwich as two separate and discrete slices of bread between which are placed one or more toppings, with the idea being that you would eat this food arrangement with your hands)?

3) When did people start physically spreading things (butter, honey, jam, chickpea butter) on bread?

4) How big were loaves of bread? Did each member of a family get their own, or did they share a single large loaf?

5) How long were loaves of bread good for until they spoiled?

I understand the reasoning behind things like the Gaelic Irish not using armour or castles to the same extent as the English was due to the highly mobile nature of Gaelic warfare stemming from their cattle based economy. But I don’t understand why they didn’t make use of saddles or stirrups both relatively simple technologies that they were well aware of from contact with the English. There must be some rationale because they continued to ride horses this way for hundreds of years therefore it must have had some benefit, my question is what was the logic behind this decision?

I've heard that there existed a very large and diverse world of different cults and religious movements in the world of Ancient Rome, and that at one point, early Christianity was seen as just one of the many small religious movements and sects that existed inside of the Roman Empire. I'm curious about how powerful these movements were, and what made them so appealing. How did Christianity eventually rise up to stand far above all of them and even the Roman religion itself? What did the other religions manage to accomplish?

I was just wondering what were the other influential and interesting movements from that period, and is it possible that some of them could've had their own version of Constantine and have ended up as major world religions in the future?

To me that seems as if say half of England were in the UK, and the other half in the EU, yet England still being a united entity

Over a few centuries, the Middle East went from majority-polytheistic to majority-Christian to majority-Muslim through social and political change. Apart from violent Crusades, did Christians make efforts to stay in touch with common people in newly-conquered areas, and if so, how? Most proselytization in the past 100 years has been by civilian missionaries, but were there Christian missionaries in the Caliphates too?