In 1919, the US Navy began investigating reports of homosexual activity among sailors and civilians around the Newport Naval Training Station in Rhode Island. At the time, homosexual conduct was treated by the Navy as a serious disciplinary and moral offence.

You are a young sailor stationed at the training station selected to assist the investigation. Your superiors ask you to go undercover by entering local social circles, gaining the trust of men suspected of homosexual activity, pretending to be sexually interested in them, and reporting any incriminating conduct. This may require you to allow intimate or sexual contact to occur so that evidence can be gathered.

The 4.2-kiloyear aridification event began around 2200 BCE and lasted for around 100 years. It was characterised by a global decrease in rainfall, leading to the collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley Civilisation in India.

After the First World War, a core principle of the newly established Imperial War Graves Commission, which managed all dead soldiers in the British Empire, was the "equality of treatment" principle. The "equality of treatment" principle meant that all soldiers, regardless of military rank, social class, or religion, would be commemorated identically and by name. Soldiers were buried in battlefield cemeteries near where they died, and their graves were marked with uniform headstones. The state managed and completed all this work, and paid all the costs. Families were not permitted to erect private memorials or headstones, no repatriation of bodies to home countries was allowed, and unidentifiable bodies were buried in an individual grave with an individual headstone in existing battlefield cemeteries.

The alternative approach was that of "private commemoration", which was common pre-WWI, and required families to purchase and erect private memorials and gravestones or arrange (and pay for) the repatriation of remains for burial at home. Under this approach, most soldiers, ultimately, were buried in mass or unmarked graves on the battlefields.

The Lex de Modo Agrorum, passed in 367 BCE, limited private ownership of land to 300 hectares. However, by the 1st century BCE the laws were widely unenforced and many wealthy Romans owned significantly over this limit. 

The two main political factions at the time were the Optimates, who defended the traditional role and supremacy of the senate, and the Populares, who represented the interests of the people. The people were represented in the comitia, where they could vote on laws and elect magistrates. The senate was an advisory body that could propose and pass laws. 

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union provided support (money, weapons, training, troops) to rival independence and national movements. Historians have widely analysed the subsequent conflicts as ‘proxy wars’. Examples include Korea, Afghanistan, Angola, the DRC, and Algeria. 

Menocchio was a sixteenth-century Italian miller whose unconventional religious beliefs were investigated by the Roman Inquisition. He was tried for heresy, imprisoned, and later executed after continuing to express heterodox views. During his trial, he described an alternative account of creation:

"I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed – just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels. The most holy majesty decreed that these should be God and the angels, and among that number of angels there was also God, he too having been created out of that mass at the same time, and he was named lord with four captains, Lucifer, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. That Lucifer sought to make himself lord equal to the king, who was the majesty of God, and for this arrogance God ordered him driven out of heaven with all his host and his company; and this God later created Adam and Eve and people in great number to take the places of the angels who had been expelled..."