The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton.

Boondock Saints?

Station Agent with the one and only Peter Dinklage.

The assault rifle concept is a bit counterintuitive because compared to the M1 Garand/M14 rifle, the StG-44 has a shorter effective range. The US military wanted to squeeze a "full power" cartridge into an automatic rifle like the M14 to achieve that greater range. We now know that 200-300 meters is the typical engagement range in a modern firefight, and therefore the /.62 mm NATO cartridge is unnecessarily powerful and the recoil is too much for the user to control it during full auto.

Another factor was an obsession with "stopping power", the M16 was derided as a "varmint rifle" because it used a .223 caliber cartridge.

A third factor was the arrogance of the victor, it can happen to every nation. The US military felt that since they won WWII with the Garand, it was a proven winning concept, so they went ahead with the /.62 mm NATO cartridge for the M14 which was essentially a further development of the M1 Garand.

For WWI-era weapons, there's the YouTube channel C&Rsenal, they go on really deep dives through the history and development.

Forgotten Weapons is another good firearms YouTube channel, it goes through the history and function of various firearms, primarily obscure ones.

Already read it, it's great.

I've recently finished David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. It's about the people Kennedy brought into the White House when he won the election in 1960 and they way they handled the Vietnam War. On one hand, it's interesting how so many intelligent and well educated men can be so wrong, but at times it felt like court gossip. I'm don't think any great insights can be gleaned from the childhood of e.g. Robert McNamara. Kind of hard to get through too I felt towards the end.

It's not completely inconceivable that Poland and Germany would have allied, during WWII Germany was allied with "Slavic" nations like Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Poland even partook in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938, annexing parts of it. I think a bigger stumbling block was that Hitler viewed the parts of Poland Germany lost after WWI as rightfully German territory, something that can't be said of e.g. Romania.

I think it was because they didn't need to? It was basically slaves in -> gold out.

At first, Christianity wasn't super successful. There were many other mystery religion in circulation at the time. In the Roman Empire, there was something called "Roman syncretism", various religions were tolerated as long as they didn't disrupt the social order.

Christianity was persecuted at times, but there wasn't a sustained campaign of annihilation over the centuries it took before Christianity became the Roman state religion.

Why Christianity succeeded were other religions failed is an interesting question. Mithraism was another mystery religion that was popular around at the same time, but Mithras was a war god at a time when Rome was consistently getting its butt kicked on the battlefield. By contrast, Christianity was a apocalyptic religion at a time when it seemed to Romans that the world really was ending. So the message of Christianity resonated more with the peoples of the Roman empire I think. Plus it appealed to the broad masses for whom other religions like the Greco-Roman pantheon offered little (slaves and women were more likely to convert in the early days).

Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and gave it favored status in the empire. Once the Christians had become powerful enough the struck out at the other religions, sending black-robed monks to ransack pagan temples and destroy statues. Other religions were ultimately banned, but as others have pointed out a lot of beliefs were incorporated into Christianity (e.g. Christmas was originally Saturnalia) making the transition smoother.

Following the fall of (Western) Rome, the economy cratered and the money that went into maintaining the academies where copies of written works were made disappeared. Books do not last forever, and in those days they had to be copied by hand, an expensive and time-consuming enterprise. The people who were literate in those days were Christian scholars who didn't have much interest in preserving historical and scientific tracts.

When I learned about WWII, figure stood at ~40 million, roughly 20 million in Asia and 20 in Europe (most dead being from China and the Soviet Union).

Estimating these things can be tricky. The perpetrators aren't keeping exact records of how many they kill. In places like China, which was racked by war before the Japanese invasion, the government might not be aware of the exact number of people living in a certain area before it was destroyed by the enemy.

It's also a matter of defining what counts as killed due to a war. Sometimes historians look at "excess deaths" during a period as causalities of war and sometimes they look at a drop average life expectancy as a measure. WWII devastated the economy of the Soviet Union, so maybe it is fair to measure people who died earlier due to not getting health care because of this as casualties of war.

When the (Western) Roman empire fell apart, it led to a precipitous economic, cultural and scientific decline in Europe. Hence the "Dark Ages". This is also why the end of the medieval period is called the "Renaissance" (rebirth), a "rebirth" of the values etc of Rome.

Later historians have tried to nuance the story of the post-Roman period, but the fact remains that there was a great decline.

Both the Republic of China (KMT) and the People's Republic of China (CCP) claimed to be the one legitimate government of China after 1949. So recognizing both wasn't possible. I know Taiwanese independence is a hot-button issue for the PRC, they said they'll go to war if that happens so that's basically off the table.

I also don't think North Korea was given diplomatic recognition by the US, if memory serves the US to this day handles it's affairs with North Korea through the Swiss, they have no embassy in Pyongyang. That might also have been the case for East Germany.

If I recall correctly, the Democrats had to limit the benefits of the New Deal that went to African Americans to retain the support of the southern Democrats.

It was during the 1960s, the Republican party employed the "Southern strategy" of appealing to the pro-segregationist Democrats of the American South as the Democratic party started to support the Civil Rights movement.

Part of the reason for the Democratic party supporting the Civil Rights movement was Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. The hypocrisy of the US treatment of its African American citizens was a popular subject in Soviet propaganda.

I know German POW were enlisted to clear minefields after WWII, both naval and on land. Some fortified buildings like U-boat pens resisted demolition and were left as they were.

Some land on the WWI western front was so severely destroyed that it still hasn't been returned to agricultural use

I don't know of any that would fit the bill before 1932. There was a German 13 mm anti-tank rifle introduced in 1918, but it wasn't fitted with a scope and was not suitable for sniping in any case (due to being too heavy and bulky).

If I recall correctly, the US experimented with a .50 anti-tank rifle, but decided that the M2 heavy machine gun (also in .50 BMG) would fill that role better.

Richard Nowell - Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle is an interesting look at the origin of the slasher craze of the 80s.

Stephen Kinzer- All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror