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Heraclius should be up there for managing to hold together the Byzantine Empire while under attack from so many fronts and leaving it a core from which they could rebuild. If I remember right, he was also the one to implement the system of the themes. Depends on who you listen to. The earlier view ...

For number 2, whichever Han emperor it was who first implemented Confucian doctrine (either Han Gaozu or Han Wudi, I think), which served as China's fundamental state ideology for the scholar ruling class into the 20th Century.

I myself haven't run across any especially in-depth books on the war, certainly not of the military course of events. You may find Herbet Bix's Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan helpful for information related to the Japanese side. For the Communist Chinese, you might find a first-hand account...

Is Antony Beevor's latest book The Second World War worth picking up? I liked his previous works ( Stalingrad , Berlin and D-Day ), but I'm not particularly informed on how well regarded he is as an author. I haven't read it myself, but I generally find that a good way to judge a WW2 history is to ...

What's that? TOR's single-player campaign, the only part worth playing, is going to be free? *cancels subscription*

Just out of curiosity. Say someone else had been put in power instead of MG. And that someone else chose not to attempt all those political and economic reforms. How would things have turned out than? I recall that Stas on a couple occassions has argued favorably that the kind of reforms pushed by ...

Economic problems only set the stage anyway, otherwise the post-soviet regime wouldn't have survived the catastrophic disintegration of the economy. The Soviet Union suffered what amounted to a political demoralization following glasnost that left it largely incapable of responding to nationalist as...

TheFeniX wrote:1. Turn on autorun.
2. Hit "b" (or whatever opens/closes your inventory) at a fairly rapid rate.
3. Post results.

No result, or at least no discernable framerate drop.

You know, it's kinda for reasons like this that there's a book recommendation thread at the top of this forum... For the Soviet Union, Stephen Kotkin's Armageddon Averted is probably the best short overview of the collapse. I know Stas Bush would recommend his other works, particularly Magnetic Moun...

Out of curiousity, can you corroborate that? Because the BBC article I checked before posting suggests otherwise. (article here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-18549968)

To me, it's a funny coincidence that about a week ago a bunch of Zimbabwean MP's got circumsized in order to promote it as a way to fight the spread of HIV there.

Someone with the ROTJ novelization on hand might be able to check, but I seem to recall it mentioning that the black outfit Luke wore was indeed a Jedi uniform that he put on to show he survived the events in Cloud City and emerged stronger and wiser. The robes that Obi-wan wore were just simple, c...

Plus, fighting Boba Fett, cutscenes with Vader and Jabba and even a brief recycling of ROTJ footage for not-Ackbar, a mission to steal plans to the Death Star. There was plenty of brand aesthetics to the game.

Vader is described as a "Dark Lord of the Sith" and "Sith Lord," both in narration and dialouge, in the A New Hope novelization, but "Sith" is never used in any of the OT movies.

I'm actually from the town that book is set in and went to the school they ultimately holed up in. And if the level of planning they show in that book is indicative of how the rest of the world will act (i.e. setting up their first base literally within visual distance of a castle on a hill), I can'...

I'm not familiar enough with the coup to comment on the presence of protestors early on, but Yeltsin was the epicenter of opposition to the GKChP, and went a long way toward thoroughly discrediting them, though they managed to do a lot of that on their own. The whole range of miscalculations and blu...

I wonder how much a coincidence it is that they just unveiled a new, "mature" game taking place in the Coruscant underworld, and that Lucas has been announcing for awhile now that he's "retiring" from SW.

Just to add to something you said earlier about the protests being the "peaceful" spots in Chicago, over the holiday weekend there were 40 shootings and 10 homicides.

So, about as many violent crimes as there were arrests at NATO.

They're weren't neccesarily protesting NATO specifically. Until very recently, the G8 summit was going to be in Chicago back-to-back with NATO, until it got switched within the last few weeks to Camp David. Most protestors had already made plans for Chicago, plus you can't really protest at Camp Dav...

Britain and France providing aid to the Republicans, or conversely blocking aid by anyone to either side, would likely have gone a long way toward either allowing the Republicans to win, or dragging it out for much longer. Imagine if Franco couldn't cross back over to Spain, or if the French sent 60...

Overall, I'd say the Chicago PD did pretty good both in terms of responding to the protestors and making a concerted effort not to validate the stereotype established in '68, and I imagine quite a few protestors didn't want to provoke it, either. The big confrontion was Sunday evening at Michigan-Ce...

Anyone know of any good histories of the Great Depression, either overall or regionally? I've sadly lost access to JSTOR, so I can't easily tell if the books I've looked at are particularly good or just "FDR made things worse" revisionist garbage.

Protip: this is the history sub-forum.

I've read Maier's biography on Julius Caesar too and found it to be pretty good. One of the parts that I didn't like especially, but which might be more what you're looking for, is what I'd describe like a psychological analysis of him.

I figured that the aqueduct's water supply had just been diverted for some cardinal's purposes, not that they literally rebuilt the thing in a day. As for the scouts, I looked at them being more like uniformed thugs than some highly skilled fighting force. The issue with the gunpowder wagons and sen...