I am a History undergrad and originally picked the major because I was passionate about the topic. I quickly got caught up with life though and ended up not learning much during my time in university and ultimately ignored my original passion for the subject. Recently through some podcasts and a growing interest in geopolitics, this passion has been somewhat reignited and I'm looking to bolster a broader knowledge of the subject.

I'm looking for book recommendations that are history essentials. Magnum opuses that everyone interested in history should read, both classics and more recent works. Thanks!

This is honestly a very good question. The US has no official religion, and yet it’s more of a theocracy than the UK in practice. I believe it has more to do with actual practice than anything else. A “pure theocracy” basically says that the monarch is divinely selected. In a way, this used to be the thinking in many parts of the UK, although I don’t believe it has ever been known as a theocracy. The UK now has religious freedom, and as far as I know, there are very few religious laws handed down from the monarchy. So you could argue it’s a theocracy by a literal definition, but not in practice. Being head of the Church of England is primarily a handed-down tradition, with very little power over religion overall.

Given that the King/Queen of the UK is also the head of the Church of England, why is the UK not considered a theocracy?

Based on the qualifiers lf being a land owning, nobility class trained in combat, I would say India had the Rajputs, who can definitely be seen as Indian"knights". Also, although more Nepali than Indian, I would maybe add Gurkhas here too.

Is there an Indian equivalent of a Japanese Samurai or a European knight?

Why hasn’t AI solved this!??

Yes my bad thats what i meant. Thank you, i understand it's a bit of a hypothetical question.

If none of those, perhaps an Alchemical Manuscript. They used tons of allegory and code.

So in 1943, Germany had about 240 uboats, of which 118 were operational at sea, which was apparently their peak number during the war. How do you suggest they monitor the entire northern Atlantic like that, though? They were not reigning supreme in that sense.

Japan invaded China years before WW II, in 1937 Your premise in that sense is not correct. If you mean, prior to WW II, would depend on if & how China got out of its civil war & how the USSR/USA took up position.

That's very interesting, I'd basically just dismissed it as a fraud at this point!

I do wonder what the hell it's one about though, you got any good bets?

I always thought it might be some sort of esoteric manual given the waxing and waning fortunes of such material, writing it in code would probably be of use to anyone who knew what it said

Yes, there are still thousands of letters of physicians and scholars scattered in archives through Europe that have not been indexed. I believe that there might be a letter out there where Carl Widemann or someone else is mentioning the manuscript who certainly already looked interesting to a 16th century scholar. I spend almost two years and tracked down a lot of previous unknown letters but without any direct mention so far.

No, really a LOT of statistical analysis on the writing has been done in the last year which rule out that the text was just meaningless gibberish. It has properties of a language, but it could either be an an unknown language, an unknown short hand system, an unknown cipher or a mixture of these (the latter impossible to crack).

Analysis of the book binding, the illustrations and some color annotations in German narrow down the area to the wider Alpine region. Could be southern Germany, northern Italy, hard to say.

In my opinion the content is much less spectacular than most people think: A recent study shows that is probably dealing with "women medicine", i.e. fertility, abortion, sexuality etc. There a numerous examples that these topics have been censored or encrypted in manuscripts of the time.

If during WW2 Japan limited their aggression to Manchuria without advancing onto China, could Japan have kept Manchuria?

WW2 Questions:

Did the Soviets ever bomb, like Britain and the US did, German cities? If so why do we never hear about it.

How did the Germans not discover Churchill was on a destroyer to meet FDR off the coast of Canada in 1941 when U Boats reigned supreme? If not occasionally sitting off the coast of the US, and Canada? Wouldn't a small fleet, not protecting anything, and heading in the wrong direction not raise suspicions?

Congratulations, that's really cool!

I've got to ask since you've studied it more than a little I'm assuming, do you think it's a fraud?

[removed]

Really interesting!

So assuming it really belonged to Leonhard Rauwolf... his life seems fairly well researched (just judging from Wikipedia). Do you think there's a chance to trace the ownership of the manuscript even further?

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

Thanks for proving you know nothing of the Caucasus or ancient literature.