AskHistorians

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Richard Nixon's defenders said "Everybody does it" regarding his dirty tricks and that the media was unfairly singling him out. Did everyone do it?	116
In the movie "Hidden Figures," everyone seems to know the term "astronaut" before the first people go into space. How early did the term "astronaut" spread to the general public?	113
What's the history of forcing left-handed people to use their right hand and when did it become acceptable for lefties to be lefties?	112
The Wikipedia article on Alexei Leonov, the first person to perform a spacewalk, says that he wanted to go to art school but decided not to because the tuition was too high. I would have thought all schools would be free in the Soviet Union. Am I missing something?	110
"Mister, we could use a guy like Herbert Hoover again." Was Herbert Hoover nostalgia common among working-class conservatives of the '70s like Archie Bunker?	95
The ancient Romans ate their banquets reclined on couches. As far as I know, no country in the former Roman Empire still does that. How and when did it die out?	91
CS Lewis had a character say Arthurian legend had a division between "very British" characters like Morgan & "not very" British ones like Lancelot. He says this reflects a division in 5th c. Britain between Romanized nobles & nonRomanized Britons. Is this based on 20th cent Arthurian scholarship?	88
Were the Italian city-states that became republics consciously rejecting monarchy or imitating the Roman Republic, or was there no ideology behind it?	87
What's the history of the combover? My subjective impression is that you don't see it in portraits from before the 1950s, it peak in the '70s and '80s where every politician has one, and around 2000 all the balding men suddenly realized it made them look worse. Is this a real trend?	74
The Wikipedia article on romanization of Chinese says Matteo Ricci created the first consistent system and that it was lost for centuries but then rediscovered and published in 2001. But it doesn't describe Ricci's system. What was it? Did his system represent all the sounds it needed to?	72

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