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What are the primary sources for the Mongol sack of Baghdad?
It is generally accepted as fact that when the Mongols under Hulagu sacked Baghdad, capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, they destroyed all (36 libraries) including the famed House of Wisdom, and either burned, looted or threw all the prized books in…
Harut Marut
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How were the West Berlin air corridors negotiated?
This grew out of a question I asked on the Politics SE, which I'm moving here because it's tangential to that question.
As far as I can tell, after World War 2, the Western powers negotiated air corridors with the Soviets to travel to and from West…
Allure
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Have Germans expelled from Eastern Europe been re-enfranchised?
After World War II, large numbers of ethnic-Germans who had lived in Eastern Europe were expelled - by the local (post-Nazi-occupation) government, by the USSR and even with some Western power involvement; some just fled due to local violence /…
einpoklum
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Was a bomb or shell ever dropped directly down the funnel of a warship?
I was surprised to learn in this awesome video about the USS New Jersey that the funnel on an Iowa-class battleship is not a straight line, there's a bit of a zig-zag in it. The idea was that, unlike with a straight funnel, a bomb could not fall…
Ryan_L
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What is the earliest recorded female name in history?
There is already a question that gives various possibilities for the first name that we have record of in Who is the earliest recorded person?, but most seem to be male figures. What is the first recorded (and confirmed to be) a female human name?…
Moritz
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What was the policy on academic research being published beyond the iron curtain?
If a little background to my curiosity were to help: when I was studying logic as a philosophy student, we covered the topic of defining probability, where we looked at Kolmogorov's axioms of probability. Of historical interest, Kolmogorov was a…
fruitless fruit juice
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Why are some later Mayan scripts unintelligible to archaeologists, while earlier ones can be read?
Many of the [Maya's] greatest cities emptied, as did much of the countryside around them. Incredibly, some of the last inscriptions are gibberish, as if scribes had lost the knowledge of writing and were reduced to meaningless imitation of their…
Ne Mo
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How do we know this bust is Aristotle?
The Wikipedia page of Aristotle has the following image of him:
How do we know that the bust represents Aristotle? For example, some ancient writers describe him as having small eyes, which is contrary to how he is represented by the bust?
GEP
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When did one-way mirrors become widely used by police?
Watching the BBC TV series "Life on Mars", the premise of which is that a time-travelling cop from 2000s England is transported back in time to the 1970s, where he is continually confounded by the politically-incorrect nature of policing at that…
Statsanalyst
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Why did it take so long for the Germans to develop the first tank model in World War I?
World War I still featured a lot of trench warfare due do a lack of mobility that placed an advantage upon the defender. When the British managed to invent the first tank, that seemed like an important advance in warfare:
The British developed the…
Alexei
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Did line infantry units have designated marksmen?
I've found the picture below on the TotalWar game series forum, but doing the reverse image search, shows that it is actually quite popular (however, I couldn't find the author or the title):
It depicts a Prussian line infantry unit marching…
Yasskier
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Why did the USSR have two sources of currency?
An inscription on the 1, 3, and 5 rubles notes says that it is a State Treasury Note (Государственный Казначейский Билет), and that it is guaranteed by the entire property of the Union of SSR (обеспечивается всем достоянием Союза ССР).
On the other…
user58697
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What are the hay effigies in this Japanese movie?
I am moving this question from Movies.SE in hope of getting the answer here
The movie The Blind Swordsman Zaitochi (2003) takes places somewhere in a small town in Japan, probably around the 19th century (one of the characters tries to shoot using a…
Yasskier
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Did a fallen-out red signal lens ever cause a railway accident?
The Straight Dope (Cecil Adams, 1986) writes:
When the first primitive railroad signaling devices were developed in the 1830s and 1840s, red meant “stop,” green meant “caution,” and clear (i.e., white) meant “go.” This system had several defects.…
Quuxplusone
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What kind of labor was used to build the Egyptian pyramids?
Most people believe the pyramids were built with slave labor (or at least it seems that way). This notion is perpetuated by movies; the building of the pyramids often evokes images of ancient Egyptians whipping slaves as they move boulders.
But how…
Orion
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