This is why people don’t dig in Rome. If you find something, the government has to be called in and inspect, do a dig etc. People will literally just cover things up sometimes if they find artifacts

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Wrong God they are talking about Poseidon.

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It blew my mind how cities just continuously pile up on top of eachother. Look at the raising of Chicago or Mary King's Close in Edinburgh. Both are really fascinating especially Edinburgh.

The ratio of military expenditure to national income one year after entry into war was only higher in the Soviet Union (60% in 1942 for SU vs. 40% in 1940 for Germany), Germany expected to defeat them soon, and Germany at that point in time (June 1942) already matched them at 60% in its third year of participation in war. Germany moreover already spent 20% several years before the war started. Not exactly a situation in which Germany was very urgently considering losing a war of attrition.

A major factor is that Germany had occupied countries to exploit, and due to economic blockades had almost full control over availability of raw resources for production. They had those companies by the balls anyway: they could only produce if resources were prioritized for their use. On the output side you can then keep behaving as if business goes as usual.

There are similar input control factors in play for US industry, but more subtly: Dutch colony Suriname was for instance the biggest supplier of aluminium ore to the US, so it was easy for the government in exile to 'prioritize' it for use by US factories that built warplanes. The British government had similar options for regulating industry through its colonial exports to the US. US industry was pushed into war mode before the US government started pulling on it.

what are the least discussed periods of recent-ish history? (18th century?)

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any book recs on the 19th century in general?

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For real? Didn't know that

It would be awfully nice if both of you cited your sources.

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Western Germany and Austria had a lot of small farms. When the men went to war, the women (and the old and the very young) replaced them. They were critical to the supply of food and other materials. From early in the war Germany drafted labour from Occupied Europe for farm work (and much else - they ended with over 11 million slave labourers).

Conservators have discovered that the red ink on the set of 16th century hand-drawn maps of the Spanish Armada’s failed invasion of England is of far more recent extraction. They look integral and original, but all of the red accents — ships on fire, city markers, compass points — were added in the late 19th century to enhance the maps’ salability.

Not to mention that Germany's total war economy drive in 1943 involved things like 1) stripping underutilized factories in occupied countries that were resource-starved from their machinery and tools, 2) targeted forced labour razzias in industrial areas in occupied countries to obtain capable metal workers etc, and 3) using concentration camp infrastructure to run factories (e.g. Neuengamme had 92 subcamps attached to factories, i.a. assembling military vehicles). That's a part of 'full mobilization potential' not considered for the Allies.

Fellini’s 'Roma' features that well :)

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Amor fati

Neptune giveth, Neptune taketh away.

Well, now, that explains a lot. Thanks for that info!

> They say of the acropolis where the Parthenon is...

I hope I wasnt the only one who sang this instead of reading it

Rome is actually on a slight floodplain, so the city was prone to flooding. That brings in a whole load of muck and earth that covers the city. The modern Roman forum had to be dug out of the ground, it's a good sixty foot deep in places. The ground level was basically nearly the height of the temple of Antonius Pius.

During Late Antiquity and the Middle ages. Rome's population plummeted, as such there was no one around to prevent that from happening. No one is going to dig out large buildings when no one needs them to either live in, or to break down and use as supplies to build new buildings. It's how the majority of them survived.

Well, i get that a bunch of stuff got built over, but didn’t they demolish the old stuff first? How do you build on top of these existing structures unless they were already buried— leading back to the question of how they got buried in the first place. I understand with a location such as Pompeii that got buried in a day or so in lava and volcanic ash, but that doesn’t explain other sites that remained occupied.

You make it sound like New New York in the show Futurama, where Old New York is literally just under the surface, decaying with the new city built on top, lol. I know that’s not what you’re saying, but i pictured that in my head.

They simply built on top of what was already there, and everyone else did to. Must have been easier than clearing everything away.