AskHistorians

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What made the strange, pseudo-historical, pseudo-religious theory of British Israelism persist so far into the 20th century?	41
My family's oral history/familial myth suggests our oldest known ancestor was a wealthy man, possibly a noble, who killed someone in a duel in Northern Germany in the 18th century, and fled to the Banat where he ended up living under an assumed name. Is this a plausible story?	33
How did the US State department's/the CIA's support of aesthetically radical contemporary art in the 1950s square with the reactionary anti-modernism of the McCarthy era?	26
A repeatedly used archetypal image of imperial Rome in 20th-century media is of a black slave, sometimes a child, fanning their master with a giant fan, often made of ostrich feathers. How did this trope come into being and does it have any basis in historical records?	21
Was France actively involved, as some have suggested, in the 1987 Burkina Faso coup d'état that deposed Thomas Sankara and gave leadership to the much more France-friendly Blaise Compaoré?	11
In the doc From Mambo to Hip Hop (2006), it is suggested that Machito formed his all-black band in 1940 because he would have been excluded from white Cuban-American bands. How did US segregationist sentiments and laws at the time affect black Caribbeans? Any differently than African-Americans?	3
In light of the support (or fake "support") Putin is currently receiving – how much did the average citizen believe in Soviet and east block propaganda?	2
How do historians today deal with the fact that queer people, historically, have used completely different terminologies and ontologies to describe their gender identities and sexualities?	1
Several in the rioting crowd that entered Congress referred to themselves as "revolutionaries" in social media. What are some examples in history of actual revolutions or changes of regime that have involved storming a national parliament? Have such events triggered larger-scale violence later?	1

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