Because people can learn from other people, in both in failures and in successes. The founding fathers of the United States took after the Roman republic in modeling after there government. This is why the United States Congress is structured in the same manner as the Roman Congress. Versus the rectangular or roundtable types of congresses that are seen in European countries.
They also took after the Romans on the idea of a republic being comprised of people elected to represent them. These people are also meant to be changed out on a regular basis. And that the public was in control of who was calling the shots on their behalf.
Crossing the Silk Road, Marco Polo brought elements of Western culture to the East and Eastern culture back to the West.
Because of his exploration for trade of what is today modern China, Indonesia, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, and India, the east experienced Western culture.
Furthermore, his journeys were documented in the Book of the Marvels of the World which presented to Europeans the Asian cities and countries.
If you eat pine nuts, berries, and salmon as part of your diet, you likely live in the "Pacific Northwest," since this is where all of these items can be found (generally speaking).
On March 1, 1917, the American public learned about a German proposal to ally with Mexico if the United States entered the war. Months earlier, British intelligence had intercepted a secret message from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to the Mexican government, inviting an alliance (along with Japan) that would recover the southwestern states Mexico lost to the U.S. during the Mexican War of 1846-47.
The secret to the British interception began years earlier. In 1914, with war imminent, the British had quickly dispatched a ship to cut Germany’s five trans-Atlantic cables and six underwater cables running between Britain and Germany. Soon after the war began, the British successfully tapped into overseas cable lines Germany borrowed from neutral countries to send communications. Britain began capturing large volumes of intelligence communications.
British code breakers worked to decrypt communication codes. In October of 1914, the Russian admiralty gave British Naval Intelligence (known as Room 40) a copy of the German naval codebook removed from a drowned German sailor’s body from the cruiser SMS Magdeburg. Room 40 also received a copy of the German diplomatic code, stolen from a German diplomat’s luggage in the Near East. By 1917, British Intelligence could decipher most German messages.
