/r/AskHistorians

Title	Upvotes	Author
I’m an average guy living in London in 1097. One night I kill a man and leave his body in the streets with the dagger I used. I then return to my house on the other side of the town. No one has witnessed the crime. Who is tasked with catching me? How high are the chances of me getting caught?	5919	Artnshitnstuff
Where did HP Lovecraft come up with the idea of Cthulhu? It doesn't look like anything in ancient Greek or Roman mythology so did he have another origin for it?	5916	AnnalsPornographie
There are two places (that I know of) in the Bible where a mob of people come to the door of a house demanding the right to gang rape a visitor - Judges 19:22 and Genesis 19:5. Does this sort of thing happen in other, contemporary ancient texts? If this was a semi-regular thing, why?	5901	Wil-Himbi
Happy 10th Birthday AskHistorians! Thank you everyone for a wonderful first decade, and for more to come. Now as is tradition, you may be lightly irreverent in this thread.	5901	Georgy_K_Zhukov
Were the 'legendary' names of ancient Greece common among the population of the time? Ie: were there people named Hercules, Icarus, Midas, Narcissus, Odysseus, etc getting around?	5897	MedDust
Operation Snow White was one of the largest infiltrations of the United States government and resulted in 11 high-ranking Scientologists being convicted (including Mary Sue Hubbard). Why didn't the organization itself face any consequences or reprisals from the government?	5883	notmike11
In one of my classes, we received a list of the greatest mass killings in human history. The top was, of course, World War 2, but number two was the Mongol conquests under Genghis Khan, to whom they attribute forty MILLION deaths! Can this possibly be true? How do we calculate something like that?	5857	TheTromboneGeek
At what point did humans go from building their own houses, to paying someone else to build it, to then building them prematurely in hopes someone comes by needing one?	5851	78Carnage
Did defenders of Jim Crow legislation explicitly argue that its purpose was to stop blacks/poor whites from voting, or did they publicly use other justifications like dealing with 'election irregularities' and 'fraud'?	5849	All_Tan_Everything
I read somewhere that only about 25% of soldiers actually aim to kill someone in war, the rest just shoot pretty much randomly. It also said the US army did some special training to raise that percentage, but that also allegedly caused a significant raise in cases of PTSD. Is this true?	5842	eskereeeskrr

« < > »