Heol Fanog, Wales. Apparently , the house was built using grave stones.

It was common where I live, North West England. For old gravestones to be re purposed as paving stones for footpaths around church grounds and official buildings. Theirs a few near my house and some sections of the path you can just make out the etchings of the dates and names.

So did people building the houses take the stones directly from the cemetery or was the city wall built with the gravestones?

[removed]

They cleared passages called trails. The Oregon Trail is arguably the most famous of these.

I’ve started reading Montefiore’s “Stalin, Court Of The Red Tsar” and am finding it really difficult to understand / keep up. A lot of names, nicknames, the first few chapters breeze through the war, revolution, Stalin’s rise to power, and it’s hard to understand how the early govt worked. I’ve picked it up about 6 months ago and have restarted the book a few times already.

Is this topic just that confusing or is it me? Is there maybe something else I can read beforehand? I’ve done some research on that early govt on the side and the kind of helped, but the book’s still a bit tough.

Thank you for your help!

This is a little flippant, but actually does have some historical truth to it. Korea got divided up b/c National Geographic had published a map that folded in half along the 38th parallel.https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/how-2-colonels-national-geographic-map-divided-korea-24734

How did wagon trains get to the USA west coast without roads? I can see getting across the prairies and deserts, but the mountains and forests and rivers are not so easy. But nobody is said to have built roads or passages that facilitated that passage. Is it really that easy to take a horse drawn wagon across such lands?

There's a book that came out last year called Devil Land. The author has some other books on Charles II and the English civil too. This book made a few best of lists I saw and I kind of filed it away in my "Maybe check it out if you see it on the remainder table or at the library" list. But it might be something you'd find interesting.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56567211-devil-land

I saw this essay today and thought you might find it interesting: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/world-war-i-jonathan-boff/

I think that's largely a modern phenomenon that we can thank technology for. Before modern communication technology, cultures were, by and large, very regional. But as technology began to allow wider communication, subcultures began to develop. You really saw it with pop culture, as people of similar ages would be listening to the same music, or watching the same TV shows or movies, things like that.

For example, without recording and broadcast technology, Beatlemania would have been impossible.

A lot of the "generational traits" that we see among different cohorts depend on shared culture. And modern communication is what makes that possible.

Southern Italy and Sicily after the dissolution of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies is pretty close. The Sicilian Mafia, Neapolitan Camorra, and Calabrian 'Ndrangheta existed before 1860, but they came into their own in a big way after that point. Yet, even so, they never quite replaced government, nor fully managed to make themselves part of it.

Even closer to what you describe, though, would be Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Define criminals/gangs, etc.

I think that's going to be crucial for your argument. What do you consider criminals/gangs? A lot of political parties would fit very well within a lot of definitions for that, but if you're thinking more Bloods and Crips then perhaps not.

But the factions involved in fifth century Athens and the use of ostracism to make the people feel like they were deciding when it was just "gangs" controlling the demos for their own benefit certainly disrupted power and put influential groups into seats of power (i.e. Themistocles, Pericles). And then there's other issues like just influencing the population through accusations, witch-hunting, and turmoil (e.g. the profanation of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the destruction of the Herms), which allowed for political arrests and trials with the public support.

Sounds like a homework question, so going to try and help but also lead you a bit towards the answer.

So both were divided due to warfare and resolution. Germany and Berlin as a result of the Second World War and Korea as a result of the Korean War.

The Cold War was the period which started immediately after the Second World War and lasted until the 1990s (to put a convenient end date, though you could put it earlier, or much much later to not at all).

The Cold War saw world powers vying for control, and for influence over other nations. These groups tended to unify -- either through actual agreements or just simply convenance -- and to keep it simple we refer to the two sides as First World and Second World.

The First World were the US, and NATO allies. The Second World were the Soviets, China, and their allies. There is also the "Third World" which refers to those unaligned with either side.

See this map for First World in blue, Second world in Red. Look at where Germany is split: how could this create tensions? Look at Korea, how could this create tensions? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World#/media/File:Cold_War_alliances_mid-1975.svg

...because they were divided by the Cold War? The USSR occupied East Germany and created the DDR, and a section of Berlin (which was located within the DDR). Korea was divided between the USSR and USA and the two sections of the country were encouraged to develop in different ways by the occupying nations.

cf. Andrew Roberts and Napoleon.

No, because German historians aren't lionising him. There are precious few 'scholars' trying to rehabilitate Hitler, and they're not German.

It was about 100 schillings for a 48 hour work week. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41831403

There were about 10 schillings to the US dollar according to the article.

If there are, they're kind of going to be fringe historians or popular historians, probably older. The big reason why this doesn't really exist in the field anymore is that historians, through their work, have shown that the world is just too complex for any one person to control history in the sort of way that used to be attributed to people like Barbarossa or Charlemagne. Marxist theories of history have done a lot to show how the vagaries of things like geology can lead to bread riots in France right as the king's finances get exposed that are beyond the control of any individual. And for any individual's actions there are countless other's doing their own actions, sometimes in support, sometimes in opposition, sometimes in totally different spaces or overlapping spaces without concern of other's actions. History is just too complex.

Besides the great man type history, you also don't really see works like Gibbons' The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The kind of history where you develop a grand theory to explain everything is just out fashion and recognized as too unrealistic of a pursuit. Now an academic might try and write a book that covered a topic over a length of time, like maybe US history for some period, or German colonialism in Africa, but it usually won't get more general than that b/c they have enough knowledge to realize the flaws and errors that get introduced when you have generalize more than that.

Some popular historians still write these books, but they're usually used to justify some kind of political goal or worldview and aren't really taken seriously b/c they reason backwards from a conclusion rather than forming a theory from evidence and arguing in support of a theory. They're the kind of books pundits might "write" and promote. They go through a print run and are pretty much never referred to again.

The FDR thing is fairly well known. The recent Ken Burns doc on US policy and the Holocaust is worth watching on this. But during the war FDR faced a choice of putting resources to ending the war or hoping that bombing would have some impact on the holocaust. But there wasn't really any evidence that bombing camps would make a difference. There were thousands of camps and they could just moved populations around and repurpose other camps, or they could go back to the strategies of earlier in the war and just machine gun them down. FDR realized the only realistic option was to defeat the Nazis.

Southern Dems did a lot of stuff to restrict the vote, not just to Black voters. They opposed the 19th Amendment pretty universally, even though Dems in western states were some of its strongest supporters. They also had really restrictive voter laws. The Virginia constitution of 1902 probably restricted the vote to about 20% of Virginia's population.

B/c of the senate and house districting, sometimes it makes sense not to grow your voting base in the US, but to concentrate on restricting votes that you can't control. You can modern equivalents of it now in some states.

How did Germany, Berlin and, Korea become divided and why were they symbols of the Cold War?

Beats me! I think for a couple of laymen having a conversation on the topic, sure. I was asking in the context of academics and professional distinction between them

[removed]

My understanding is that they are. Quick Google search says so but I haven't Dove into any scientific journals on the topic