There are various reasons why people come up with different numbers:

The first question is what are you actually counting. The most usual approach seems to be soldiers killed in battle plus civilians killed either by direct impact of the war or indirectly by famine and disease caused by the war. Victims of the holocaust and other nazi mass murders are included, as are victims of German and Japanese war crimes. The timeframe is usually from the first act of war in Europe, Hitler's attack on Poland, to the Japanese surrender. There's a few points right there which may lead to different estimates, the most variance is probably in estimating which civilian casualties are war related. Civilian casualties of strategic bombings or people directly killed by the advancing Wehrmacht (or later the Red Army) are pretty obviously war casualties, but when it comes to disease and famine it's not always that easy to judge whether a death is war related or not. Was a death by disease just basically bad luck or was the disease only deadly because of malnourishment directly caused by the war? Do you count soldiers wounded in the war who die from their wounds after the war has ended? Do you include victims in the war between Japan and China before the war in Europe started? What percentage of missing people do you presume to have actually died?

Then there is the fact that a lot of the documentation and paperwork you would need for exact numbers was destroyed in the war, or possibly never existed in the first place. And during the war, gouvernments (especially in Germany and the Soviet Union) would not have been keen on making exact casualtiy numbers public (or, quite frankly, casualty numbers that were anywhere close to reality)

So it's not really surprising that the numbers diverge a lot. There's cases where you can pin down things pretty closely, like the number of US soldiers killed in action (you will still need to make estimated considering those missing in action, but you will get close to the actual number), and then there is cases like the Yellow River flood in 1938 when the Chinese Nationalist government intentionally destroyed the dykes to stop the Japanese advance, where you can only really say for certain that hundreds of thousands were killed directly (estimates vary fromm 400.000 to 900.000), and then you would still have to decide how many deaths in the aftermath of the flood you want to attribute to the war...

Usually the variations come from who they're counting. The 20 million range is direct military casualties. i.e. just the people that were in armies. The 50 million range includes all the soldiers plus the civilians that were killed by military operations. i.e. civilians killed in fire bombing of cities. The highest range, the 70 million range, includes everyone, the soldiers the civilians killed in battles, and everyone that was killed due to famines and disease outbreaks that were caused by the war.

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.

Its probably a couple of different factors, though I'm by no means an expert. 1. Exactly when do you start WW2? 1939 and the invasion of Poland? 1931 and the invasion of Manchuria? Somewhere in the middle? Adding 8 years and a hot war will change the numbers substantially. 2. China was also in the middle of a civil war; how many of those count? 3. The numbers are always squirrelly in wartime, especially civilian deaths in areas where the records were also destroyed. And there have been strong incentives to "adjust" casualty figures for political ends. Stalin and his successors would inflate casualty counts to show that the West were freeloading off of Soviet casualties or blame deaths they caused on the Nazis, China and Japan try to "out-victim" each other wrt to deaths in Nanjing and Hiroshima+Nagasaki, etc.

Disease prevalence was mentioned already, so I'll mention location.

While it has been extensively documented that Vikings had many settlements on modern day Greenland, the same cannot be said of modern day Canada. The only undisputed settlement on Canada is L'Anse Aux Meadows, located at the northern-most tip of the island of Newfoundland. It should be noted that this site is believed to have been rather short-term and small in scale — it was used for several decades, upwards of perhaps a century, and was significantly less populated than settlements in Greenland. This is because the site lacked features that are typically associated with permanent, constantly-populated settlements (animal pens, agriculture, burial sites, etc.).

Part of why the Europeans devastated the Native Americans with disease was because they established permanent, populated settlements on continental North America. The permanence of these settlements meant that by extension there was always a permanent source of disease to infect the Native Americans. Also, because the settlements were on continental North America, that made it a lot easier for trade and travel to occur, thereby spreading the disease. Much easier than if your settlement is located on a island, which would either limit you to trading just on that island or demand you having to get on a boat and go elsewhere to trade then boat back to the settlement.

One reason is that the disease most responsible for decimating Native American populations was smallpox and smallpox does not seem to have been nearly as common in Early Medieval Europe as was in the Early Modern Europe.

Among Eurasians and Africans, the mortality rate of smallpox was 30%, but among Native Americans and indigenous Australians, it was more like 90%.

Part of the answer is that the Vikings took longer to reach America, most sailed from Greenland. So a disease would have to start in the big towns in Europe, then be taken to Iceland, with a smaller population with no big towns which would limit spread. Then to Greenland with a smaller population before reaching the New World.

Zelensky shows me that charismatic leaders can, indeed, spring forth to defend a nation.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/king-arthur-real-person-180980466/

At a time when most Britons were struggling to find cooking utensils,
Tintagel’s inhabitants were using crucibles to forge metal, inscribing
slabs with Celtic writing, and controlling agricultural production
across substantial territory. The settlement would have been well
defended against the marauding bands that plagued the mainland: Geoffrey
of Monmouth noted that just a handful of warriors positioned at the
narrow neck could have staved off an army. It is not difficult to
envision a charismatic leader rising here to defend northern Cornwall
from Saxon invaders, says Scutt, or to imagine that his feats would
enter sixth-century folklore and be passed down by storytellers to
Geoffrey and other chroniclers. “We know this was a center of power,” he
says. “But whose power was it? It’s always going to remain a mystery.”

None of this is really surprising, nor anything we would expect to be unique to one culture -- therefore they can all come about independently and when you think about what a society needs to do to survive it's no surprise that they did.

Housing: need places to live safely, need a place live securely, need strong and easy to find materials. Rocks are abundant and hard. Pyramids are the easiest shape to build tall things. Start with a big foundation and build on top of it, and add less as you go up so there's less and less weight to support. Look actually here at the earlier pyramids in Egypt for great examples of what didn't work, they didn't start with the Great Pyramid, there was a lot of trial and error.

Food: You need food and materials to provide for a civilisation, the jump to agriculture is an early one for civilisation and not that surprising. Finding out how to ensure a regularly and steady food supply rather than just relying on nature to provide it. It also means you can stay in one place instead of constantly moving around throughout the year, and therefore be close to your protective dwellings at all times (even more reason to have one then too).

Societal factors: Religion comes as a result of the unknown, so we can't both expect that things would be unknown, and that religion appeared. It's a universal experience across civilisations. "Why is this happening? Why does the sun move each day? Why does thunder exist? What the hell is causing this flooding and why is it happening to us?"

Social Structures also exist in animals. Humans didn't invent the concept of leaders, and leaders will form naturally if a gap is present. You could take 10 fry-cooks from Maccas and drop them on an island, if they're going to survive someone is going to try to take charge (whether efficient or not). But if someone is efficient, and even good, people will be more likely to continue following them. And there comes in warfare. What if someone doesn't like that group, what if rival factions split up, what if a new party shows up and decides that they already have a leader and won't respect the way of things done on the island -- or have arrived with supplies that would be greatly useful? etc.

With war comes loot, you can destroy everything they have, or you can take it and benefit off of that. That includes humans. Humans can farm, humans can build, humans can even teach. We have use. So it's no surprise slavery is common.

Want a stronger system? Create markets, create a central place where you can sell your goods, and people can get them. It benefits everyone.

And then bridges, boats, irrigation, is just a natural extension. River in the way, but there's some good hunting grounds just beyond it? Well, we gotta get over that river. Back to our island buddies, fish may be the best supply they have, need to get in the water to get them? Or maybe to another nearby island? Boats. It's overcoming obstacles, ones that would have been obvious to the people. It's very much "if there's a will, there's a way" we recognise we need to get past this natural wall, how do we do it? Well...

People are all the same species. Why do beavers from different areas do the same things? Why do animals of different species and different continents do similar things in broad strokes?

As to your final question, reverse everything. Why the vast variety of differentiation in animals across the world? How have basic human needs been met with the diverse responses of humans to their needs?

For the same reason you can find pyramids like structures around the globe: is the easiest solution and offers more stability.

The part of cities is debatable: sure mayas, incas, and Aztecs (and many others) had cities, as well as many others didn't, and all the instances in the middle.

Nobility is the natural evolution of a tribal society with different people in different roles. Was American nobility the same as European, African, or Asian? Well, there you have differences.

Irrigation, boats, and engineering is a response for having similar needs and materials. It's interesting that no American culture developed the Arch as the Etruscan/Romans did. They had the "Mayan" arch, that's a succession of stones in cantilever. Also, you can argue that the Incan work with stone was the best in the old world against earthquakes: basically they had a base of heavy stones interlocked, but not fixed, and on top of that smaller stones made the rest of the wall, with a lightweight roof. This prevented the collapse of buildings during earthquakes.

It's interesting to review the economic system the Incas had. Was not totally feudal, was not totally socialist, was not totally open market. Look it up, it's quite interesting. With it's upsides and downsides.

Also, the Incas didn't have writing as we understand it. They had knots registres.

Also, the Incas didn't use the wheel for carts. In part due to being very difficult to use in the Andes mountains, and also the llamas were not ideal as cart beasts.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/12/why-are-sweden-and-finland-not-yet-in-nato-and-does-the-alliance-want-them

The Guardian has a decent article on why Finland didn't immediately join NATO after WW2, and also explains Sweden too.

In a nutshell, Finland wanted to avoid possibly provoking the USSR into war. Joining NATO could be possibly interpreted as a threat, because NATO was effectively a force to push back the USSR's expansion during the Cold War. As such, Finland saw it prudent to go with a compromise. They didn't officially join NATO, losing out on some of the benefits of being in NATO (like protection in case of invasion), in exchange for being able to be friendly with NATO and the USSR at the same time. After all, it'd be hard for Finland to claim that they were at peace with the USSD if they were members of what was effectively a "fuck the USSR" club.

This arrangement used to make sense, because back then the USSR was somewhat weary of war. They'd need at least some tangible, somewhat justifiable reason to go to war. A country like Finland, which literally borders the USSR, joining NATO could easily be turned into a reason for war. By not joining NATO, Finland was demonstrating to the USSR that they weren't a threat.

The reason why Finland now wants to join NATO is because this arrangement no longer works. Putin has shown that he's willing to invade countries and start wars for next to no justifiable reason, as seen with Crimea and now Ukraine. The only thing between Finland and being invaded are mere whims. If they're going to get threatened, might as well get the protection.

Hitler was not actually that great of a planner or organizer. The current theory in historical circles about Hitler's management style is that he would kind of voice ideas he might want to get done and then underlings would compete to get them done to impress him. Whoever did it the best would gain his favor and maybe some promotions or a bigger area to manage. There's been some push back on this theory about whether or not Hitler was more intentional or involved in organization, but where that seems to happen were in things Hitler was really interested in like architecture or war planning.

With diplomacy Hitler was kind of distractible. If things were going well he would get more involved, often making grandiose plans. When they weren't he would look for something else to occupy him.

I've never hear of him making plans for reparations from Vichy France. Operation Barbarossa started a year after the Battle of France. He spent just enough time on France to get an occupation set up so he could plan an invasion of England and start planning the part of the war that was more important to him, clearing out the east for Lebensraum. The Battle of Britain didn't go the way he thought, the air war wasn't really as grandiose as he liked, and he kind of lost interest and turned to focus on Barbarossa.

If Barbarossa had turned out differently his attention might have returned to France and he might have been interested in getting reparations to rebuild after the war, but it's hard to say. He was kind of famous for having these monologues at his dinner guests and saying all sorts of grandiose things. He would bring up reparations, but it's all the steps after that we don't really seeing happen. No one was drafting up plans to enforce a reparations policy, or at least if they were they weren't getting invited to dinner with Hitler to take the next steps forward. And if you were ambitious you were probably focusing more on things that Hitler was interested in, like rounding up Jewish people or prosecuting the war, or increasing France's industrial contributions to the war machine.

Realistically, Vichy couldn't borrow money from anyone. And in German SOP they looted France's treasury when they took over. So the best way for France to be useful was to exploit France's industrial base and that's what Germany did. I think the Vichy economy operated at like 110% of it's prewar level in the first year and most of that was producing German war materiel. There's a decent paper on that aspect of the occupation here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30034464

Over 16 million people. This includes military and civilians.

There are only a finite amount of routes any large group of men can take. Mountains? They'll take the pass. Rivers? They'd take the crossings. Swamps? They'd go around. Forests? They'd go around (if possible) or take the few roads available. And so on. Then, it becomes a case of scouting those limited options.

They wanted to make their own nation in their own place. They had developed different cultures and ways of life since then, and wanted freedom. One of the other reasons of the revolution was the taxes on them, and because they had no representation of the Parliament that was ruling them. Many people came from Britain to the Americas to get away and start a new life, and many came for religious freedom.

This was generally not a war of cultures since American and British citizenry were extremely similar. It was (very simplistically) an issue of taxation and representation. During the 7 Years War, also known as the French and Indian War, Britain spent a large sum on protecting and defending its colonies throughout America from the French. This war was a massive drain on the British economy and to help recover they decided to tax the American colonies more heavily than before since much of that expense had come specifically from defending the colonies themselves.

Even after the war there were substantial factions on both sides who assumed the two would be reunited again eventually due to the cultures and citizens being essentially one and the same. This is all of course a very simplistic explanation and of there are tons of nuances on each side.

The Americans were rooted in British culture, but had very much become their own nation, if not their own state, in the roughly 150 years of the first permanent settlements:

1. The Americans had their own view of who was gentry (or who could vote, basically,) and this was massively more broad than what the British would ever accept.

2. The Americans saw fighting in war as a patriotic demonstration, which was not a sentiment shared by British officers.

3. The fighting with the natives was far more personal to the Americans than anyone from Britian.

4. The British saw the American colonies as insignificant compared money sinks compared to the deeply lucrative colonies elsewhere.

5.1 Because gold and silver were so rare, bank notes backed by land and debts were practically the backbone of the American economy. This became a major issue when the British banks allowed borrowers to overleverage, as they passed laws to reduce the quantity of American notes, and bar their use as payment, while also reducing speice sent to America.

5.2 Needless to say, combining deflation with the mercantilist policies led to disaster dominos, since Spanish currency was even more common than British money before this, so increasing the imbalance further would almost certainly benefit those who were already breaking British laws.

6. Americans also had a tradition of getting what they wanted by rioting at this point, so the British decision to give their governors the soldiers they would actually need to prevent this came far too late.

So basically, there were a LOT of cultural differences by the time of the revolution.

Peter Hagendorf wrote a [retrospective; he wrote it all in 1649] diary of his rather extensive soldiering during the 30-Years-War [the diary covers 1625 - 1649] - for both sides.

There is some really dark humor in it; one believes he takes sardonic pleasure in retelling some of his misfortune.

It is lamentable that he didn't include how he went from mercenary without a job after 1649 to becoming judge and mayor of Görzke, Brandenburg.

Memoirs of Sergeant Bourgogne.

Well, there's a lot. We don't know much about early Rome because there's not a great historiographical record left behind. We rely heavily on works written long after these events took place. People were writing, including those in Rome and those outside of it, but not all these writings survived into the modern day. Some of them may have been surpassed by later written works, some of them may have been a bit boring and just not enjoyed. We know that some of these works still existed when others were writing theirs, so they are maintained in that way (i.e. in fragments) But we run into a whole different set of complications when evaluating fragments.

Still, people in Rome during its heyday, and historians ever since, have done a good job at piecing together the little bits of information we do get to try and at least paint a picture of what was going on, even if there are still a lot of gaps, a lot of questions, and -- to a certain extent -- a lot of guesses.

We know tons about ancient Rome. There are literally anthologies written about it. If you want to learn more about ancient Rome, I would suggest starting with The Storm Before the Storm by Mike Duncan in audiobook (he both wrote and narrates the audiobook). He had a long running podcast about ancient Rome as well. With regards to the decay of written accounts, I always remember what one of my professors for a Historical Archives class said in college: imagine that for each century that passes, 9 out of 10 historical documents and artifacts that remained were destroyed, melted down, or decayed. Some from that century might write new copies or accounts, or replicate the paintings or sculptures, but these would no longer be the originals. After centuries of loss, very little of the originals would be left, just a tiny remnant. The rest would only live on in archival copies or a reference in another work. This is why places like Pompeii are so important, they are like time capsules preserving the history (until we dug it all up). The last few centuries were particularly bad about chopping up historical artifacts and dragging them across the world to museums, and wars destroying historical landmarks.

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.

This seems more like someone's specific theory of federalism more than anything widespread or accepted by a large number of constitutional scholars.

There's tons of overlap in state powers since basically the 1930s and the expansion of federal power. Some are simple like military responsibilities shared between the Executive and Congress for commanding and funding and provisioning armies, and state's militia powers. Other stuff is more complicated and has changed overtime, like the expansion of commerce clause power into what was traditionally seen as a state's responsibility for providing for the "common weal", which meant any kind of safety, or health regulation or policing powers. Some stuff has changed b/c of amendments. Citizenship in the U.S. as a whole was determined by states until the 14th Amendment, but it was a joint issue b/c the citizenship in the state would make you a citizen of the US and able (hypothetically) to use federal enforcement of the privileges and immunities clause.

There's a lot of overlapping areas too, like the power to tax. Basically you can scan through Art I. Sec 8 and count tons or areas where the powers are overlapping. States and the Feds can both borrow money (but this is complicated b/c of issues of state banks issuing paper money and issuing bonds), both can establish courts and their courts can hear both state and federal matters in some areas (concurrent jurisdiction). There's other stuff like voting that was mostly a state power but has become more federalized b/c states failed to really protect the right. Some stuff varies from state to state, like my state has protections for free speech that go beyond the 1st A. and other states have gone the other way and have tried to limit stuff like free exercise of religion or establish religion, which used to be a state right, so that would indicate an overlapping power if a state can expand on it.

I read a fair amount on the Constitution and an advanced degree on the topic and I can't remember hearing the 6 powers theory and thinking through the big popular books on the Const, like Akhil Amir Reed's books or Chemerinsky's, I can't remember it ever being mentioned, even as an argument they counter.

I could easily be wrong b/c there are literally 1000s of books on the topic and some that were popular 2 centuries ago are basically unread today, so it may have been an older idea.

Here you go:

http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/acts/1947-education-act-ni.html

A bit lengthy, too.

Yes and no. People misunderstand what this mean. His antisemitism wasn't influenced by America, so

>Did he learn how to treat Jews based on the way Americans treated blacks

no.

But when crafting racial laws, specifically those that defined who was or wasn't Jewish as far as Nazis were concerned, Nazis took inspiration of the "one drop rules" in some US laws.

So not in how to treat people, but yes in how to craft laws to discriminate against them.

UNAMIR was in Rwanda and knew about the plan, but they weren't allowed to intervene by the Peacekeeping Department. The most major thing they did was provide refuge for thousands of people.

No. Why would it be? The Spanish Inquisition was formed out of paranoia that newly converted Jews (and later Muslims) were not truly Christians. And so they hunted hidden Jews in the kingdom.

There isn't a single timeline but usually "late middle ages" (14th century and on) for Western Europe to the 17th century. As for why: war and money. More centralized means more money to do war better. The 100 years war was a big catalyst for central power in France and England, even though it a process that started earlier.

As you alluded to, the Vikings that settled in Francia quickly assimilated with the Gallic Romans and the Germanic Franks to form a distinct Norman identity, which interestingly left a massive cultural legacy in Sicily and the Crusader states (though at this point were far from their Norse roots). There were also Scandinavians that settled along the Volga River as merchants, trading with both the Byzantines and the Muslims across the Black Sea and Caucasus. These people, known as the Varangians, ultimately formed the loosely organized Kievan Rus and assimilated with the Eastern Slavs and Fins already there, creating the cultural foundation of both the Russian and Ukrainian identity today.

Probably the Mycenaean Greeks. Elites of the Greek society would often be buried with Amber. The Greeks considered Amber to be a sign of wealth due to the unique color. Studies have shown that this amber can be traced back to the Baltic Sea. Even early Scandinavian art from the Bronze and Iron Ages show boats that could point to the Mediterranean.