The process can vary from outright suppression of an indigenous language to adoption of a language seen as more useful (e.g. more widely spoken) or conferring higher status. Trade, urbanisation, public education and mass media each accelerated the process and offered dominant groups new means to drive the process still further.

Tell-tale signs of forced assimilation might include withholding education in an indigenous language or denying access to public services or employment for its speakers (unless there really weren't the numbers for it to be a viable proposition), or suppressing or penalising its publication or broadcast. Promotion of a non-indigenous religious model or perception of the past are also used to erode traditional allegiances and identity.

Another top-down approach is of course literal colonisation, settlement of speakers of the privileged language, often with economic advantages (e.g. land grants, government jobs or contracts), forcing native speakers to adopt the dominant tongue for work or sometimes even making them a minority.

It isn't always coercive or associated with migration, and sometimes the "metropolitan" language is itself partly assimilated into a pidgin or creole tongue including indigenous elements: the most widespread lingua franca drawing on different elements is probably Swahili, grammatically Bantu but with large borrowings from Arabic and spoken far beyond the former area of Arab dominance: in Europe, Celtic cultural expressions are similarly thought to have spread ahead of any movement of people or change of ruling elite.

Mainly cereals - for food and spirits alike: in eastern and north-central Europe that would have meant predominantly rye. In the west and south wheat was the preferred foodgrain, though barley and oats were also consumed, especially among the poor (wheat being more expensive): barley was of course also used for beer and oats as feed for horses and oxen. Just about anything that might me made into booze probably has been at some point, though potatoes never really took off as source of spirits even when they were Ireland's staple food. Vodka's still predominantly made from grain, though now maize or rice get included, the first an introduction from Mexico and the latter little known outside southern Europe until the last few centuries.

Eye-opening and a valuable antidote to notions of the Mongols ruling over a devastated and depopulated land. Of course the new Emperor is partly doing sound politics, blaming bad officials rather than the overthrown court - there's an old injunction about not being too negative about your predecessor, lest your denunciations undermine the status of the office you seek to hold.

The communications for external consumption are interesting too, offering a rather different evaluation. But Korea and Japan each had their own beef with the Mongols, so here distancing yourself from the old regime was good statecraft. Might there also be a hint (less subtle in the Japanese case) of "Remember those fearsome Mongols? Well I'm the guy who defeated them!"?

Which is the "true" version of his thoughts? It's notable that even in the external letters he blames disorder in the last Yuan reign rather than the dynasty as a whole: Mongol and Han ways may be incompatible, but there's nothing to contradict the domestic account of the Yuan as a legitimate though "barbarian" dynasty that had outlived its usefulness by no longer being able to rule.

In German-occupied areas they were generally interned as enemy aliens, much as happened to Axis nationals in the UK, though those on a particular nazi hate-list faced greater danger. The internment camps seem to have been more civilised affairs than those for nazism's perceived racial or ideological enemies, subject to Red Cross inspection with some inmates being released after a period of incarceration, notably men over 75 and women over 60: there's a study of women in the Besançon and Vittel camps here.

The US Department of State further complicates matters by offering an area of 45,000 sq mi agreed at the end of 1853 before the final reduction to 29,670, while wikipedia suggests that the chosen package initially came to 38,000 sq mi.

There may be a confusion among the various parallel alternative packages Gadsden was authorised to negotiate, the biggest option ($50m) including Baja California (55,360 sq mi according to wiki). So could that be where the higher number comes from?

Why State should give yet another size remains a puzzle, but its 45,000 sq mi could relate to that envisaged in the original $15m proposal for that section of the frontier before successive reductions to 38,000 or so at the signing and the eventual $10m for 29,670 sq mi.

Four numbers, four different areas of which we know one's right. But the 55,000 does seem out of line with all the others.

You misheard, it's plain old Führer, a reference to Phibun's borrowings from European regimes of the period. I'd consider him more comparable with Mussolini than Hitler, but such inspirations weren't uncommon among nationalist stongmen or authoritarian movements of the global "periphery", generally inspired more by fascist models of superficial national unity enforced by top-down discipline than by the rabid racial mania epitomised in Berlin.

I think it's potentially a big deal in broadening and deepening our knowledge, but I'm less convinced that it's about to upend history as we know it. My impression (and correct me if I'm wrong, I may be overlooking something) is that where evidence has been found for more intensive development than previously identified, it's been among cultures that were already known to have a fairly developed organisational capability, indeed that's often what drew the researchers to the site: the revelations seem to me to be quantitative advances (and important in their own right) rather than an overturning of existing perspectives. Angkor springs to my mind, its urban core found to have been bigger than previously thought and more intricately connected with the surrounding zone of intensive cultivation, but still not the the vast megacity imagined by some: the new information requires us to imagine a more ambitious scale and a more sophisticated regional supply network, but doesn't consign previous perspectives to the scrap-heap.

I actually do think there are towns (or perhaps we should say strongly clustered differentiated settlements) out there waiting to be found in unexpected places (indeed even where they're abundant the distribution suggests we're missing lots), but the ones I have in mind are modest local centres and trading posts strongly integrated with the adjacent territory or with more distant similar locations, which I find more interesting than the higher-profile tribute cities or ceremonial complexes that will doubtless also turn up, because it's the less ostentatious sites that rely on exchange rather than status, hinting at an active economic role and greater regional complexity.

Either way, it's an exciting technology. I'm happy with whatever turns up, even if it's nothing: a negative finding is itself a positive addition to our knowledge (and in fact I wish they were more fully reported: knowing a location's devoid of any unusual feature that might have been there tells us something of value even if it doesn't make the headlines). Let's see what turns up, it's all good stuff. But I'm not expecting any wholesale undoing of our current broad picture: just more to go on will be fine.

Remarkably the Project cost only nine days' worth of Federal spending of the period, such was the scale of the country's wartime mobilisation. In the event, the bomb wasn't needed against Germany, but could the US take the risk of foregoing its development?

Would US jets have changed the outcome? Germany's various projects didn't, and even with a major US development effort it seems unlikely that successful fighters would have entered service in large numbers before aerial superiority was achieved anyway.

The controversy surrounding the bomb's eventual use may make us question the desirability of its development, but the outcome wasn't so clear in 1942 or 1943 when a major diversion of effort into other weapons would have to have been initiated. But it's an interesting question. Might other avenues have been more useful? That inter-Allied bugbear of landing-craft springs to mind.

I'm sadly the last person to ask about careers! My guess though is that if you're undecided geography might offer better prospects as being more visibly relevant to international relations and business (history is of course also valuable for both, but I'm not sure it's widely perceived as such) - and of course an environmental component would be useful in our times. An environmental, economic & human geography mix incorporating change through time might be a way to go while you weigh up specialisation options.

You might be better off taking that query up with a geography subreddit or board (or some academics if you can get your hands on them), unless there are any hereabouts with experience of both fields. The whole world of work is a formidable challenge, and who knows where it's headed? In your favour at least the baby-boom intake is retiring from the scene and AI isn't yet smart enough to replace them. Good luck in whatever you choose.

France occurred to me too: we tend not to recall what a close-run thing it (repeatedly) was. Germany (like Italy) seems a bit well-trodden, but could be interesting with a non-Prussia (or non-Piedmont) focus. Austria/Austria-Hungary's always fascinating, and this period encompasses the whole 1804-1918 empire. Spain & Portugal would be a bit more "out there" and are quite a challenge, but they're potentially rewarding and less vast than Russia's rise at the other end of the continent. And of course there's always the familiar rise of representative government in Britain and national aspiration in Ireland as in Poland or the Balkan lands.

Further afield, it's the "crisis" of the Chinese empire - but how much of it was home-grown, how much exogenous? It's the period of British supremacy in India and the first stirrings of modern nationalism. For Latin America it's the era of independence, export-led development and the rise of US hemispheric power. In Africa it's the period from the end of the Atlantic slave trade to the start of the full-scale colonial scramble: how were they linked, and what happened in between? Globally the century sees perhaps thirtyfold growth in international trade and the rise of gold to monetary hegemony (and the first signs that it may not have been such a brilliant idea after all). And it's the great age of European industrial & population growth and emigration (the last however mostly from the 1840s) - though others too were on the move. And of course it sees the rise of secularism, science and challenges on class, race and gender, though these were all foreshadowed in the 18th century and sometimes the 17th.

A fascinating century, then, with considerable unity but in some respects marked by a new dynamism from around 1850, yet it's arguable that we didn't truly emerge from its shadow until a century later - but that's anther story lying outside the chronological range.

It was very much a history of post-Roman western European high art and elite thought, though, except perhaps the final episode when he had to contend with the industrial age. Clark himself had qualms about the title, seeking to emphasise the A personal view subtitle. It's really an account of only one or two socially quite narrow strands of the historical experience of one region of the world, as which it doubtless still ranks highly but it can't claim a wider perspective (and indeed didn't, apart from the unfortunate title).

For a general introduction I'd say Felipe Fernández-Armesto's wider-ranging Millennium series is a better place to start: it doesn't cover the millennium before, of course, but then Clark skims over it in just his opening episode so the chronological difference isn't so great, whereas the thematic and geographical one is vast. General histories are inevitably unsatisfying, but I thought Millennium was a cut above the rest for all its popularising style (then again, we want history to be popular, so who am I to complain?): the book's more rewarding.

Me too, I despaired of catching up for a time but eventually managed to update my ancient family tree. The constantly-shifting sands are part of the adventure: I'll never see a final, definite answer but that's fine, it means more challenges ahead to keep the field alive.

I just realised I forgot the hobbits. But as the experts seem unsure where to put them I don't have to worry just yet. :)

The determinations can be necessarily close calls when sometimes all you have is a jaw or a foot, and some are questioned: H ergaster (mentioned in the article) and H rudolfensis spring to mind. But the fossil record helpfully seems likely to throw up more "classic" than intermediate specimens because it's the former in which adaptation to their environment and way of life are more fully developed: nature abhors a half-adapted population. In practice a truly intermediate form unclassifiable as one or other known species would be more likely to be labelled a newly-discovered species related to both of its neighbours: out of the tangle a clearer picture seems to be evolving than was available only decades ago, though our classification of discrete human species may emerge blurrier than in the past when we had a few australopithicine types, H erectus, H habilis, H heidelbergensis, neanderthals and us and little else that I recall.

... and four months earlier came the Journal's part in breaking Evangelina Cisneros out of jail as the innocent victim of a Spanish officer's advances. Her account broadly supports the paper's case (though not necessarily the more lurid accounts) , but Hearst would doubtless have been mortified by her Havana military funeral 72 years later as a heroine of the independence struggle.

Yes, I think that's a helpful way to to think about it: either scholar might in theory undertake either study, one taking history as the starting-point, the other geography: the geographer might take a longer-run approach, studying how location, urban form, economic specialisation, regional linkages and social structure shaped Boston's political character, but that too could use the 1770s as its focus.

Environmental history's another growing field intimately related to both traditional disciplines and particularly with population/economic history and historical geography, and now enriched by increasing application of techniques like pollen ice-core & tree-ring analysis which may yet supplant earlier approaches in some contexts. I'd say that where history starts from human populations in or over time and historical geography from the physical context, environmental history's more explicitly about the interaction between the two: the same might be said of historical geography too, but there the focus tends to be more specifically on the impact on the human populations concerned.

My historical geography texts tend to be rather old and my economic geography ones older still and more narrowly-focused, contemporary rather than specifically historical treatments clustering mostly the first half of the 20th century (when we get the first modern studies), so I hesitate to recommend any. NJG Pounds' Historical geography of Europe and its successors are perhaps the best-known, but there's also a later Oxford multi-author work of the same title bringing together both geographers and historians that I must get my hands on. I don't know of anything similar for the US, for which I tend to use economic & demographic studies and the census record: perhaps the phenomenon of the shifting frontier has worked against more general treatments integrating both disciplines.

Most scholarly history today tends to reach far beyond the old "kings, queens & wars" narrative, delving into social, economic, demographic, cultural or technological development rather than just the headline political and military upheavals. But the way we compartmentalise the subject leads to such approaches often being shunted off into discrete realms of economic history, social history, cultural history etc, so that the undifferentiated "history" that's left can end up looking suspiciously like those kings, queens & wars that we though we'd escaped. And the problem's accentuated in an audio-visual format that thrives on drama and visual impact - TV history shares many of youtube's limitations, and even radio can be an unsatisfying medium.

MeatballDom's reply usefully points to a rewarding approach: rather than trying to bite off too much, looking at the context of a specific event or process from different angles can shed new light on it: "So x happened. What was happening with population, economic activity, technology or social relations that might have contributed to x happening in the way that it did and having the consequences that it did?" sometimes the continuities can be as revealing as the transformations: if w didn't change, something else must have caused x to happen. Sometimes that will mean setting your topic aside for a moment to explore wider or longer-term developments and conditions in connection with a particular theme. Another approach I find valuable (or a variation on the same approach) is to look at the behaviour of narrower geographical areas within your study area: great events might have played out on a national or international stage, but their impacts were experienced locally, and often in different ways, and how different areas responded in turn fed into wider development.

Without knowing more about your particular interests it's difficult to offer any specific recommendations: general histories tend to be unrewarding because they'll inevitably focus on some aspects and overlook others according to the author's focus or taste. For youtube presentations, I find academic lectures and panel discussions the most useful - the second especially, as it offers multiple perspectives and highlights areas of scholarly disagreement. But at some point you're going to dragged into the books and research papers, many of which are available online - and that's where you'll find in-depth answers and infuriating new puzzles to solve.

The republic's had lots of breaks - First Empire and restored monarchy in 1804-48, Second Empire in 1852-70, Vichy and occupation in 1940-44 - each drawing support from an anti-republican element that might have prevailed but for its internal divisions (Emperor? King? - and if the latter, which of various rival claimants?). Even amid the Revolution, monarchist candidates won most of the seats at stake in the legislative elections of 1795 and 1797. A large part of the population hoped if not for the Revolution's undoing, at least for its more orderly governance.

Reaction to Bonaparte's coup and subsequent elevation was thus muted: here perhaps was an end to the chaos of the 1790s, and even his assumption of the rank of Emperor was partly aimed at preventing a future Bourbon restoration by incorprorating the hereditary principle in favour of a new dynasty, securing one of the Revolution's acts by unconventional means. He could for a time be all things to all Frenchmen, or at least most - much like that motto, itself open to various interpretations and simultaneously satisfying radical sans-culotte and respectable bourgeois alike.

Degrees of peasant obligation varied even within the manor or village: while in theory everyone was subject to someone else up to the king, in practice a significant rural minority were free of most or at least some of the more oppressive burdens of villein status, though still subject to universal charges,

Crucial to the system (though much abused) was the role of "custom": a lord couldn't just change the arrangements without a legal cover, and the evolution of estates through successive periods of greater or lesser unfreedom meant that neighbouring holdings might operate under quite different terms, while the need to people newly-reclaimed land with capable tenants might result in milder conditions even as manorialism matured.

Was there a link with market exchange and prosperity? I'd say yes, because when we can identify economic divergence among western regions it's in the areas of least oppression that we later tend to find the economic frontrunners, Holland with its extensive reclamation from the sea being of course the most striking case.

Having more time to attend to your holding and having to surrender less of your produce or limited cash seem likely to have stimulated innovation and commercial engagement. The reverse may paradoxically have applied in a later period when taxes are said to have acted as an incentive to greater effort and output, but at this stage of modest surpluses the development of a commercial sector and freedom to adopt new techniques were probably of greater value.

Indeed, I remember encountering as cause of death the single word "Teeth" in London's 17th-century Bills of Mortality - around 6% of deaths as late as the 1690s.

Neither Moscow's declaration of war nor the bombings ended it: even after Nagasaki and the USSR's invasion of Manchuria the obstacle remained the position of the Emperor which had been omitted from the Potsdam ultimatum, contrary to the advice of key Truman advisers. It was the US clarification of Aug 11 that "the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers" that made surrender possible by implying the throne's survival, even if shorn of its former powers.

You'd need to define "medieval". For some of us in its broader European terms it's the 5th-15th centuries or thereabouts (in which case not much happened between the first-named episode and the later period, because one begins the other, although of course it's never as straightforward as that); for some though it's a narrower period, e.g. the 11th-15th centuries (though even the 14th-15th centuries sit uneasily alongside the preceding "high middle ages"), in which case you'd be asking about what used to be labelled the "dark ages" and the Carolingian and subsequent period.

For the period immediately following Rome's fall (which only ended the western empire, the eastern surviving for another millennium) in the west is the ongoing migration of Germanic peoples into former Roman territory and the establishment of regional kingdoms under various forms of social organisation that would in time evolve into "feudal", manorial or seigneurial hierarchical ties of obligation underpinned spiritually by the spread of Latin Christianity. In eastern Europe it's the survival and temporary recovery of the eastern or Byzantine empire and the westward movement of Slavs, Magyars and others. Along the way we get the revival of money in the west (silver far more importantly than gold), trade and towns, though the big growth comes from the 10th century.

For most of the world, the periodisation's of course largely meaningless, and different start and end dates have to be used for any parallel concept. Even in Europe it's a shorthand, but a useful one provided we're aware of its limitations and the lack of unanimity over even what period's being referred to.

They're both closely related, or should be (at least so far as human geography's concerned, but physical geography and the distribution of resources are just as relevant to history). But geography (other than historical geography) concerns place while history concerns time or evolution through time, which of course occurs in geography but usually in a longer timeframe.

As far as history and human geography are concerned, I'm very much for linking them as closely as possible: neither's complete without the other. We don't waft about independent of place an more than people and their creations (societies, cultures, institutions) just happen to be where they are: the interactions are fundamental and fascinating in their own right, whichever the discipline.

In fact I'd say England was special: why it should have been so remains shrouded in mystery, but that it could engorge Scandinavia with more money than raiders knew what to do with and then lured Norman rulers even at the expense of their powerful Continental duchy suggests there was something of note going on there.

This isn't to invoke any spurious English exceptionalism: any country's only as special as its resources and characteristics make it in the wider conditions of a particular time - but you can see even in this early formative period indications that there's a capacity that seems not to have gone unnoticed even among contemporaries.

Research in the past half-century on the origins of later British growth has tended to push the start back well beyond the onset of the classic period of industrial prosperity and imperial expansion: I think we can see the beginnings at a very early stage, even as the country struggled to keep up with the sophistication or military prowess of Continental neighbours.

England was long attractive to conquerors or raiders for a variety of reasons, from its resources (notably its productive agricultural land and minerals, attractive to Romans, Anglo-Saxons, vikings and Normans) to its strategic importance as a large offshore island with extensive Continental interactions and close to its southern neighbour (and potentially too close for comfort, a particular concern for Caesar after his conquest of Gaul, with which southern Britain had substantial affinities - though it was left to Claudius to expand the Empire beyond the Channel): Norse raiders were conversely drawn to its proximity and extensive irregular island coastline, a vulnerability in the face of seaborne attackers ( and btw for them it was across or sometimes down rather than up, so climatically less unappealing than for Roman soldiers with the misfortune to be posted there.)

The country's economic condition in this millennium is somewhat puzzling: that it exported grain under Roman rule and provided viking raiders with enormous treasure suggests that it had productive capacity to spare even with the limited technology of the time, yet was at least by the later period already a place of notable wealth. That it seems simultaneously to have been under-exploitated yet capable of yielding a surplus may offer a clue to its subsequent ascent as well as its attractiveness to invaders.

The country passed through various forms of administration - from a patchwork of local kingdoms or chiefdoms and then a Roman province under successive governors and occupied by 40-50,000 Roman troops and again a patchwork of post-Roman and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, to a unified realm from the 9th-10th centuries (for a time in the 11th under Danish rule) to a Norman kingdom notable for its centralisation under the crown, another source of its later power even as royal fiat gave way to parliamentary government, most notably from the 17th century when a king ignored his legislature and rather lost his head. Regional identities (and accents!) persist, but with none of the political continuity that characterises Continental provinces and regions.

The big facts though in modern England are industry and Empire, both mostly or wholly gone but casting a vast shadow. Early factory mechanisation made Britain (as the state now was) the world's economic frontrunner from the 1780s until the emergence of more dynamic rivals from the mid-19th century, and while its economy is today (like most of the developed world) essentially a post-industrial one reliant mainly on services, the abruptness of the earlier break transformed society and disrupted its traditions more thoroughly than probably anywhere else. A "deep" England survives in some more rural parts but for most persists only in period TV drama. This is a modern nation, for all its nominal adherence to (largely likewise re-imagined) pageantry invoking earlier times.

The other thing that hasn't gone away is the phantom of colonial empire in which Britain used its industrial might and wealth to impose its rule over at one time a quarter of the world. The loss of bygone power and prestige still provokes bewilderment and sometimes resentment among a (mostly but not exclusively older) segment of the population and hangs over political life: it's not omnipresent, but you'll encounter it. Race is reassuringly less of an issue than in some societies, England's insularity and innate conservatism being tempered by its modern reality and centuries of global exchange. But Acheson's observation that "Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role" remains relevant.

For a good place to begin the story I still recommend PH Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England, after which it's probably best to trace developments thematically (society, economy, political evolution) unless you want to tackle the multi-volume Oxford History of England (two series, the old now being replaced apart from its first volumes of which the updated two-part vol 1 and Stenton's revised vol 2 remain important for the first millennium).

Crochet's an interesting one, to my surprise only emerging as a discrete form in the early 19th century but with antecedents in 18th-century Scottish knitting and French embroidery. So that's something I learned today!

So you've nothing coherent to add. Oh well.