askhistorians

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It's the mid-1950s and I'm a reasonably well-informed, newspaper- and news magazine-reading American. How obvious is it that the Guatemala and Iran coups d'état happened with heavy input from United Fruit and Anglo-Iranian Oil, respectively?	4696
Where did the Western idea that Buddhism isn't a religion but a philosophy -- and that Buddhism as actually practiced in Asia is a degeneration of real Buddhism -- come from?	2597
It turned out that the central thesis of Maines's Technology of Orgasm wasn't true. Has there been any more recent scholarship on the early history of the vibrator?	66
Why was American coffee so mediocre to brad up until the 1990s compared with, say France and Italy?	19
Looking at instances from Napoleon giving the angry crowd "a whiff of grapeshot" to the Armistar Massacre of 1919, we often see soldiers using live rounds on protesters. When did states adopt the (mostly) non-lethal suite of tear gas + truncheons + rubber bullets for crowd control?	10
Why was American coffee so mediocre to bad in comparison to continental Europe until very recently?	4
Thinking of a white prostitute in 1660 Port Royal. How did she get from Europe/Britain to the Caribbean given the cost of passage? Is there a form of sex work-based indenture that paid for her passage? Did she emigrate with expectations of a husband but things went wrong? NSFW	4
Got no answer before but it's on my mind now for obvious reasons: when did states move from soldiers firing live rounds for crowd control (e.g., the Amritsar Massacre, Napoleon's "whiff of grapeshot") to tear gas + truncheons + rubber bullets?	1

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