Manorial court records, wills, and archeological evidence suggest that at least some peasants were wealthy enough to own painted cloths, religious icons, silver spoons, tablecloths, brightly colored clothing, and jewelry. The stereotype of dark and dirty peasant hovels does have some truth to it, if you're talking about the poorest peasants, but not all peasants were poor; most were middling and a few were fairly wealthy.

As for colors of clothing, red and yellow were the cheapest colors to produce while black, scarlet, indigo blue, and purple were the most expensive and were often restricted by sumptuary laws.

Medieval houses often used lots of whitewash, including the interiors, which would have made them look a fair bit better than the usual shit-brown huts, and we're finding new evidence of more extensive use of light colours for interiors, including things like distemper which were naturally yellow, or yellow-ish. This would also help the interiors look better when interior lighting was much more limited.

Clothes could easily be dyed bright colours, but colour fade would have been a much more important factor, and of course they tended to see far more wear and tear. There would be vast differences between the clothes of the different classes, with some colours/shades only being available to the wealthy, but even disregarding that, the workmanship and quality of the clothes (and in some times and styles, the sheer quantity of cloth), not to mention the dyeing itself, would be worlds apart.

I don't really understand what you mean:

1.Lee was also going to be put on trial in the immediate aftermath of the war, so I'm not sure how Lee was supposed to defend him, exactly.

2. Lee wrote that he was ill in 1868, and Lee died in 1870, which was the point in time where most of the criticism of Longstreet came to be.

I feel like you answered your question to an extent. It's important to remember, though, that Lee was turned into an almost legendary figure in the south following the war. Longstreet was seen as a villain, supporting Republicans and working with "the enemy". So while Lee may have even defended him in private (I have no evidence he did, this is purely to make a point) those who wrote the histories of the two had motive to not acknowledge it.

• Carlo III, Duke of Parma — Stabbed to death by two unknown men while taking a walk.
• Juan Prim, Prime Minister of Spain — Shot by unknown persons while leaving the Cortes.
• Aleksandr II of Russia — Blown to pieces by a bomb by members of the populist revolutionary group, Narodnaya Volya.
• Sadi Carnot, President of France — Stabbed to death by an anarchist.
• Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, Prime Minister of Spain — Shot by an anarchist.
• Umberto I of Italy — Shot by an anarchist.
• Empress Elisabeth of Austria — Aunt by marriage of the famous Franz Ferdinand; stabbed by an anarchist.
• Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich of Russia — Blown to pieces by Socialist Revolutionaries.
• Carlos I of Portugal and Luís Filipe, Prince Royal of Portugal — Shot by republicans.
• Pyotr Stolypin, Prime Minister of Russia — Shot by a socialist revolutionary, though since the assassin was also an informant for the Okhrana, it's possible that there was a conspiracy afoot.
• Georgios I of Greece — Shot by a man with unclear motivations.
• Eduardo Dato, Prime Minister of Spain — Shot by Catalan anarchists.
• Symon Petliura — Shot by a Jewish poet who blamed him for pogroms during the Russian Civil War.
• Sergei Kirov — Member of the Politburo. Shot by a disgruntled loner with delusions of grandeur, though he was later made to have been acting on the orders of former rivals of Stalin.
• Reinhard Heydrich — Blown up by the Czechoslovak Resistance.
• Ion Gheorghe Duca, Prime Minister of Romania — Shot by three members of the Iron Guard for trying to suppress the movement.
• Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma — Killed by a bomb planted on his fishing boat by members of the IRA.

I can't think of anything involving conspiracy theories on the level of the JFK assassination, but there were plenty of cases of political assassinations in Europe in the past 150 years.

Firstly, there's various Anarchist movements killing high level political leaders around the turn of the 20th century. (This is not limited to Europe, by the way, US president William McKinley is another prominent victim). Several European monarchs and nobles were killed, including Tsar Alexander II and the Austrian-Hungarian Empress Elizabeth. Several non-royal leading politicians were also assassinated, among them French president Sadi Carnot, three Spanish prime ministers: Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, José Canalejas and Eduardo Dato Iradier, and Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin.

(There were also many unsuccesful attempted assasinations, for example on Leopold II of Belgium, the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, Wilhelm I of Prussia and Queen Victoria, but also on Benito Mussolini)

The German Weimar Republic saw a lot of politically motivated terror and assasinations, with several prominent politicians being assassinated by right wing paramilitaries. The killings of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht during the Spartakist uprising in 1919 are actually surrounded by some conspiracy theories, as there are claims that the Freikorps members who killed them had approval from government officials (possibly even president Ebert). Kurt Eisner, the premier of the People's State of Bavaria was assasinated by a nationalist who apparently acted alone. In the 1920s the Organisation Consul was behind several high profile assasinations, including those of former finance minister Matthias Erzberger and foreign minister Walther Rathenau.

The later 20th century saw terrorist assassinations by left wing paramilitary organisations like the German Rote Armee Fraktion or the Italian Brigate Rosse. The RAF carried out several attacks against US and NATO facilities, among their prominent victims were Jürgen Ponto, director of Dresdner Bank, and Hanns MArtin Schleyer, head of the German employers' association in the 70s and senior diiplomat Gerold Braunmühl in the 80s. In 1991 they assassinated Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, head of the Treuhandanstalt reponsible for the privatisation of the state-owned property of the former GDR. This is another case where there are some conspiracy theories, because although the RAF claimed responsibility, there have been claims (by Rohwedder's widow, amongst others) that remnants of the East German Stasi were involved (allegedly because Rowhwedder and the Treuhand were close to finding money sectreted away by the SED).

The most prominent victim of the Italian Red Brigades was former Prime Minister Alberto Moro with a later group in the 90s and early 2000s killing Masimo D'Antona and Marco Biagi, advisors to prime ministers Massimo D'Alema and Silvio Berlusconi.

There were also assasinations (and other attacks) by various separatist/independence groups like the Irish IRA, the Basque ETA and the Corsican FLNC. The most prominent victim of the IRA is probably Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, a close relatuve of the royal family. The ETA assassinated Luis Carrero Blanco, prime minister under dictator Francisco Franco, and more or less his designated successor. The FLNC assassinated Claude Érignac, the prefect of Corsica.

There were also assassinations by criminal groups, like the Mafia killing of Italian judge Giovanni Falcone.

The closest you can come to a JFK style mystery is probably the assasination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in in 1986 which is essentially still unsolved (there were theories about an involvement of the Kurdish PKK, later Christer Pettersen was convicted of the assassination, then acquitted in a second trial)

Another death surrounded by conspiracy theories is that of Uwe Barschel, minister president of German state Schleswig-Holstein, who was involved in allegations about a very dirty reelection campaign with illegitimate attacks on political opponents. His death in 1987 was ruled a suicide, but there have been various conspiracy theories claiming that he was actually murdered (usually to cover up wrong doings during the campaign etc)

The podcast The RFK Tapes might pique your interest. Not European but some very interesting incongruous circumstances.

Have you read Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi? It’s massive, but I’m working my way though it at the moment and it’s really good. I’m still not convinced that a SS agent didn’t accidentally shot JFK in the confusion, but Bugliosi goes through the timeline and all the attendant conspiracies in great detail.

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Now that I’ve had a chance to google a bit, my answer is:

Lincoln. And its NOT close.

If we’re talking just a pure, by the book l, round robin wrestling tourney, your order of finish is

Lincoln 1

Washington 2

Roosevelt 3

Yes they were all athletes and they all wrestled, but their degree of competent was pretty different. Teddy was an amateur. GW was well known wrestler. Lincoln was a highly renowned wrestler.

To make a very hypothetical comparison, just to use context we would understand today,

Teddy would be a guy that was on the college wrestling team.

GW would be a guy that was nationally ranked as a college wrestler. Went to the big tournaments and arguably makes “All-American”.

Lincoln would be the guy people buy a ticket to watch wrestle someone else in a promoted match. He would be true story, actually was the old carnival cliche of the guy that wins his match then calls an open challenge to the whole crowd, dares anyone who feels lucky to come climb in the ring

——

Now, thats just wrestling.

If we say who would win a plain old fight?

All in their prime? I’ll bet on Teddy.

Reason being, Best info I can find, Lincoln and GW were about 6’2”-6’4” and 175-185. Fit, lean, about even.

Teddy was only 5’10” but was likely the heaviest, and based on whst we know about his attention to sports and exercise, it wasnt soft weight. Dude knew the inside of a weight room.

So if we figure Teddy had the short end on reach but had the edge on pure ohysical strength, THEN we add skill.

His wrestling was the weakest if the three but he also boxed and later he did Judo and JiuJitsu reportedly up to 3 times a week.

(Caveat, he had one bad eye from a boxing injury and only picked up JJ after quitting bixinf because of the eye, but for the sale of argument we’re taking all three presidents at the sum of their prime ability)

So TL;DR: Teddy loses the wrestling tournament because hes the least skilled wrestler, but he wins plain out fight, because

Boxing+wrestling+judo/jiujitsu, he’s got more tools in his tool box, deliberate practice working against opponents of different sizes shapes, and a little more muscle on him. Closest thing to a modern mixed martial artist

I would like to see someone with a boxer’s background handicap this fight. Abe’s got the reach and I believe he was a fighter, but teddy has the “rocky” brawler look about him….

Well stained glass doesnt and didnt require regular cleaning, really.

Looking into some Neanderthal culture, it is debated over how much culture they had. Art and other things from them were scarce compared to our cave paintings and jewelry. Some believed they lacked the mental ability to make these and that they copied humans, though the scarcity may have had other factors.

https://australian.museum/learn/science/human-evolution/homo-neanderthalensis/

Are you talking about a Canterbury cross specifically? Because if so, yes, that's strange. I think it's more likely that it's just another similar cross (Cross of St Cuthbert perhaps?). There are a lot of them out there. Rather than specifically the symbol of the Anglican Communion.

Trick-or-treating probably derives from the Medieval English and Irish practices of souling: on All Hallows' Eve, All Saints' Day, and All Souls' Day, people would go from door to door asking for soul cakes in exchange for saying prayers for the deceased relatives of the cakes' givers to lessen their time in purgatory.

Dressing in costumes, otoh, is probably related to the medieval practice of mumming: groups of people in costume going door to door to act short plays or sing in exchange for food. Mumming was strongly associated not along with All Hallows' Ever, but also Easter, Christmas, New Years' Day, and Plough Monday.

Not necessarily, differences would be regional & in part dependent on socio-political conditions and available material.

Rounded seem more common on dedicated warships (at least for Spain,) being able to place more cannons at the front, but the type was never really satisfactory, so there were many attempts to adjust the design to something that would work.

This really doesn't seem like a question for a historian. You can keep, it sell it, really anything you want.

Sell it to collectors would be my guess.

Performance in the 1900s and 1910s isn't going to impact much analysis of them post-World War II.

For why:

1. Ability to raise pretty large armies.
2. After WWII they controlled (or at least had controlled by aligned governments who couldn't afford too much of a breach with them) a vast amount of land and its resources, much more of Europe than any Russian empire ever had.
3. A lot of nuclear weapons and the ability to deploy them at a lot of targets.
4. They had considerable ideological appeal to a lot of the world.
5. They did inflict a lot of casualties on Germans and their allies.

Now it's not as though failures didn't get noticed. In fact, Finland was so embarrassing that they weren't expected to put up a good defense against the Nazis. That they could push Germany back, even if it required a lot of logistical support from the US and came about alongside invasions of Italy and France, goes to show that a weak military doesn't necessarily stay that way if there are the right motivations and it has time to change.

Your question is based on a false premise.

The Russo-Japanese War and World War I didn't involve the Soviet Union (they involved the Russian Empire, which was a very different beast from the USSR); Poland didn't take part in World War I (I think you're thinking of the Polish–Soviet War, a separate war and took place during the Russian Civil War); the Soviets WON the war against Finland; and the Soviets didn't defeat Nazj Germany because of the winter. At most, it can be said that the winter caused the failure of Operation Barbarossa, but that's not remotely the same thing as helping them successfully take Berlin.

That being said, much of the perception of Westerners during the Cold War of the perceived invincibility of the USSR was incorrect, but that had little to do with their military power and everything to do with their economy. Collectivization during the 1930s basically destroyed Soviet agriculture and premiers after Stalin were forced to buy grain from abroad to prevent starvation. These problems were later compounded by the high price tag of the Soviet War in Afghanistan and the cleanup after the Chernobyl disaster coupled with revolts by the Baltic states.