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Your post was painful to read.

Painful because I used to be an arrogant, know-it-all Bible apologist like your friend, and it's embarrassing to remember; and painful because I've since had debates with people like me/your friend after learning the truth, and these debates always go in circles and are so unbelievably fruitless and frustrating.

Listen--you cannot change your friend's mind with facts or logic. You can't change anyone's mind with debate; people have to want to learn and be willing to challenge their own assumptions. If this guy is truly your friend, and you want to be able to hang out with him, it would be far better to just say "I don't want to argue about it" whenever he wants to debate, and just go back to doing friend-stuff.

That said, if you are genuinely curious about his claims, there are plenty of resources out there. It's kinda funny, but biblical literalists don't have "facts", they have talking points, and they all use the exact same ones, over and over. Talk origins is the greatest single repository of every fundamentalist claim I've ever seen, and it includes sources for each claim and rebuttal. It's quite impressive.

I've read The Case for Christ, and it's not that good. It's an exercise in logical fallacies. But if you do read it and find yourself scratching your head at some of the claims, Robert M Price wrote A Case Against the Case for Christ and picks it apart with ease. (Price's other books are pretty informative, too, if you're curious about biblical history without the apologist bias.)

I hope this helps; just remember, these links and facts are only going to make your friend dig his heels in deeper. If you want to maintain any kind of friendship with him, I highly recommend changing the subject and agreeing to disagree.

I cannot detail every medieval king of England - that would be too long. I can, however, outline very briefly the fates of 2 or 3 consecutive kings which might help explain that there was no hard and fast rule about counsel power vs. sovereign power:

Edward I is an excellent example of a king exercising sovereign power and effectively binding his nobility to himself and his causes. He was very active in creating policy, expanding the judicial systems, waging war in Wales, Scotland and the mainland. He worked extremely hard to be successful, and to make his kingdom successful. He was forceful enough that his nobles went along with his schemes, and Edward was always in charge. He was an excellent commander and strategist.

Now, contrast that with the fate of his son, Edward II. He was okay as a commander, but he clearly preferred not to fight. He was less interested in the exercise of power as a way of responsibly raising the success and prestige of the kingdom than he was in exercising power to benefit himself and, especially, his friends. His friends often had nearly as much power as he did, and they all - including the king - abused it to enrich themselves, thwart justice, and generally lord it over everyone else. So he had a council, but unlike his father's council which helped develop and implement policy, Edward II's council found itself struggling to get anything done because the favourites (Gaveston and later the Despencers) were running the show with Ed's blessing.

So what could the other nobles do? They tried a few things - they got parliament to back them in forcing Edward to get rid of his favourite, and to let them run the country in a more responsible manner. But then they fought amongst themselves and Ed was able to take the reigns back and recall his favourites. Eventually he alienated everyone, and his wife and son ended up rebelling against him (I'm being very general here) and eventually Ed was relieved of his crown, and either died/was murdered or hung out in Italy as a pilgrim for many years.

So, in short, it depended on the King himself. Henry VIII is another example - he was quite forceful after Wolsey's supremacy was over, but, as Robert Hutchinson has suggested in The Last Days of Henry VIII, some crucial decisions and documents may have been authored and signed by his intimates using a dry stamp because Henry was so ill. If the king was effective, he led the way. If he was egregious, it often caught up with him.

Also see King John I, Richard II, Henry III, Henry VI and James II of England. Other European countries are beyond my knowledgable purview.

There are other books that the users found interesting. Stranger in a Strange Land was one of them. I've read a few others but the titles escape me.

Basically everybody wanted to try acid. They'd try acid and feel really free. You have to keep in mind that this was a relatively new experience so there were as many hangups. Meaning you could be on acid in public places with others and you wouldn't have to be paranoid.

The effects of the acid caused revelations to happen based on the sensory experience of the user. I imagine anybody who hallucinated recreationally could attest to this effect. It made small things seem more significant. I guess you could say it reset perspectives.

So people would try this drug, experience things, start to think differently (it's important to note that the Merry Pranksters and Timothy Leary were promoting philosophy via the drug), and eventually the number of people who bought into these different ways of looking at the world became large enough to where the movement could reinforce itself. So basically you could go take acid and watch a bunch of bands and when it was over there many people that shared the experience and as a whole they were able to provide positive reinforcement for that experience.

Once that started to snowball it spread and suddenly the bands and movements were no longer local. And then they were no longer regional. And then they were no longer national. There were several places having similar revolutions of the mind. This meant several variations on the culture that was growing. Eventually it would homogenize and you have the 60's scene that everybody talks about today.

That book was specifically about the Merry Pranksters traveling around and meeting people and making things happen.

I'm not the kind of person who would be able to summarize that coherently. Read this if you haven't. I'm sure there are other places to find information about it. Project MKULTRA was kinda interesting as well but it isn't really the happy fun time you are looking to write about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_burial_mounds_in_the_United_States

The Mississippian culture built cities, only a few of which survived. These kingdoms covered the area of the midwest and most of the American Southeast. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippian_culture) By the time Europeans came, they were already practically gone, but smallpox did the rest of the job for them.

--

One of the problems with discussing pre-Columbian North America is that with South America and Central America, European explorers were largely just hitting the cultures as European diseases were. The explorations into the heart of North America happened after those diseases had already ravaged the area.

The people of the Iroquois confederacy farmed with stone and wood tools (mixing crops to keep the soil from going bad) had a participatory democracy and ideas of freedom that must have been very alien to both Europeans and their southern neighbors.

People like the Comanche don't even show up until the horse is introduced and their quick adoption of it allows them a huge advantage over their neighbors (see Empire of the Summer Moon as a better history, but be prepared - the Wild West was far more brutal than Hollywood has even remotely shown)

Early European accounts are heavily biased and for ages it was assumed as fact. Today historians have to shoulder their way through biased narratives and counter-narratives to try to figure out the truth. As an amateur history buff, I wish them the best of luck.

> "what things in the Bible are corroborated by other historical sources."

That wasn't the original question. It was/is "What FACTS are IN the Bible" Key word is IN the Bible.

1. It is 100% fact that the Catholic church believes they owe their doctrine to Peter. Whether he lived or not isn't the question or the fact that I was pointing to. It was that he is the ROCK of the church.
   
   
2. In This book you will find proof that scholars agree that the letters to Corinthians were all written by the same person in the same era. Whether it was Paul or not is unknown. Once again I only said they were written by the same person.
   
   
3. Saul changing the path to Christianity by not enforcing circumcision is the hardest to find no religious documentation on. However, just like #1 (Peter) you just have to ask the millions of Christians and "THEY believe" this to be a factual history of their faith.
   
   I wasn't pointing to any arbitrary facts. These were all as provable as evolution. We've never actually seen a bird change its body or features (without human interference) to adjust to its new environment. We've only come to the conclusion based on the evidence presented to us in fossils and by comparing like specimens. We've seen dominant genes take hold in plants and animals, but this was through human interference only. So, we take these "facts" as truth because we are told that is what science tells us. Well Religious history tells us that these three are facts also. And we all know that the winners write the history books. Christianity won for many eons. Just because people have lost any faith in them as a whole doesn't make the history less true. Well at least until we find something to disprove its truth.
   
   To back that last statement I can point to accepted facts on dinosaurs and Lucy specifically. Both 50 years ago were thought to be one fact. Since then they have become a new reality. Why? Not because they were inherently wrong, but because scientists proved the original doctrine to be false. We may find that about Christian history, but until we do that is all we have to go on. Find facts that 2000 years of historical FACT is wrong and people will follow you to the new promise land.

If you're solely interested in the Presidential History, Theodore Rex is an excellent biography on Theodore Roosevelt's Presidential years. I would strongly encourage reading The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Colonel Roosevelt, his before and after years respectively, as they are equally excellent.

This is a huge topic that I can't (nor can anyone) rightly do justice to in a reddit post. There's a huge amount that the Church (sometimes particular churches, sometimes the whole of Christianity) has done throughout the ages, both good and bad, though you're right in saying that the modern narrative is quite heavily weighted against it. To give a few examples of the good however:

• Here is a list of Catholic sceintists and their contributions to the body of scientific work. It's a modernist myth to say that the Church is anti science and largely stems from a misunderstanding of the Galileo Trial and Alfred Dickson White's, totally fraudulent, Conflict Thesis. See here for r/AskHistorians FAQ on Christianity and Science.
  
  
• The Crusades, like all of human history, are a great deal more complicated than Hollywood makes them out to be. Initially the Crusades were largely reactions to Muslim aggression in the Balkans, and while later crusades admittedly got off track (the sacking of Constantinople in the 4th Crusade for example) their digression was largely the result of political and economic issues, not theological. In fact, less than 7% of all wars and less than 2% of all wartime casulties are the result of religon. Again, it's a myth that most (or even many) conflicts are religiously driven affairs.
  
  
• The so-called Dark Ages, a term which, for good reason, is almost never used by historians anymore, is also largely a myth. Great advances were being made in philosophy (The Scholastic Traditions which built upon Aristotle and Plato, re-imported to the West from Muslim lands after the Crusades), legal theory, jurisprudence, social theory, and science (see link above). Seeing the Medieval period as a stagnation or regression is, again, the result of modernist interpretations of the past and a great deal of revisionary history.
  
  
• In more modern times the Catholic Church was one of the few opponents to eugenic movements across Europe and the United States. This stems from the fundamental importance placed on the human person in Christian theology. During WWII Pope Pius XII or "Hitler's Pope" was actually involved in a massive effort to undercut Nazi power and save Jewish people from Hitler's pogroms. I can't find it right now but I'll keep looking for a documentary on Pope Pius XII during the war.
  
  If you're really interested in Church history, here are a few recommendations I can offer:
  
  
• Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart. Perhaps the most apologetic work here but DBH does a fair job going through the various myths perpetrated by modern society against the Church throughout history.
  
  
• Christianity: The First 3000 Years by Diarmond McCulloch. A fantastic single volume history of the Christian religion.
  
  
• The Story of Christianity by Justo Gonzalaz. A slightly more Evangelical work to accompany McCulloch's work. In two volumes.

If by 'great' you mean influential and important there are many, Napoleon, Cromwell, Muhammad, Luther, etc. Therefore it may be worthwhile to read books and biographies on them, however one specific book I would recommended although I have not read it myself is On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle (more information on this book/series of lectures below):
Wiki link- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Heroes,_Hero-Worship,_and_The_Heroic_in_History
Amazon link- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Heroes-Hero-Worship-Heroic-History/dp/1406843849

This might be much more specific than you were looking for, but The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I by Pollock and Maitland is arguably one of the best works of legal history ever produced. The way it tracks the evolution of the common law in England is still relevant to modern common law based legal systems. These guys were giants of their time, and I found the legal developments to be some of the most interesting aspects of the medieval period. Fair warning, there are two volumes, and they are not really for mere casual reading.

You're very welcome. May was an interesting character and I love that I am able to portray him and teach people about his history. Patricia Campbell wrote a fantastic two-part book about the Cheyenne stage and its messengers. Boone, his brothers, and cousin, Gale Hill, all served with distinction on the line and were a part of what became known as the "Famous Eight" messengers on the line.

A History of Modern Russia by Robert Service is a pretty reasonable text. You stipulated "factual" and I'm not sure exactly what that means in your context, but this book is fairly straight forward and I actually think is best suited as an undergraduate textbook (although it is not strictly speaking a textbook). But it doesn't require much, if any, previous knowledge of the field or historiography, which makes it approachable for people who might be interested in the topic but haven't studied modern Russia much previously.

Bill Bryson wrote a great book that answered that and other similar questions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Home:_A_Short_History_of_Private_Life

https://www.amazon.com/At-Home-Short-History-Private/dp/0767919394