AskHistorians

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I’ve seen several conservative commentators claim that black slave owners existed, they made a significant portion of the slave owning class, & that the first person to own slaves in the colonies was black. Are any of these claims true?	2810
I’ve often heard from political conservatives that early settlers at Jamestown & Plymouth nearly starved to death because they initially attempted “socialism”/collective farming, & that they only survived because they began using “capitalism” & privatized farmland. Is this in anyway true?	2125
Vermont was the first state to ban slavery, having done so when it was an independent country in 1777. To what extent did slavery exist in the area that is now Vermont prior to 1777?	1132
In “Surviving Genocide”, historian Jeffrey Ostler claims that the reason for Seminole removal & the 2nd Seminole War was their practice of harboring escaped slaves, & fears by southern slave owners that Seminole lands would be used to instigate a slave rebellion. Is this accurate?	794
Why was Cavalry so extensively used in the Russian civil war? Hadn’t WWI showed that it was obsolete in the face of advanced artillery & machine guns?	392
Why did the Van Rensselaer family, which was once one of the most powerful families in New York, decrease in influence & power in the 19th century?	327
In his 1831 introduction to his novel, “The Last of The Mohicans”, James Fenimore Cooper mentioned that indigenous peoples of the Americas were likely asiatic in origin, a hypothesis generally believed to be true today. When was this hypothesis first proposed?	318
How accurate is Thomas Sowell’s essay “The Real History of Slavery”? Is it a legitimate & respected history of the practice of slavery?	282
The golden age of piracy is generally seen as ending in the 1720’s when European navies began heavily cracking down on piracy. However, pirates such as Jean Lafitte were active as late as the 1820’s. how were pirates such as Jean Lafitte so active a century after the end of the golden age of piracy?	281
On page 261 of “The Last of the Mohicans”, The James Fenimore Cooper writes “Duncan, who knew that the animal (a bear) was often domesticated among the Indians…”. Were bears really domesticated/ tamed by indigenous tribes?	185

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