AskHistorians

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After WWI why weren't the Ottomans forced to give up Istanbul/Constantinople? Was this even considered?	139
Much has been said about the tolerance of the Ottoman empire. At different points in time was the empire as tolerant of different ethnicity as modern countries? How did it honestly compare to its contemporaries?	125
I heard in class that the renaissance and scientific revolution happened when Greek and Latin works were "re-discovered" by the west. Why didn't these shifts in human thinking happen in the Islamic world or Byzantium where those works were never "lost"?	70
How does the Eastern idea of the Mandate of Heaven differ from the Western idea of Divine Right?	48
Was Byzantium doomed to collapse from the beginning or was it a mis-managed empire that made a long series of mistakes leading to its consolidation, downfall, and collapse?	30
Why was the Ottoman Empire so large and so dominant for so long?	29
The Roman Empire is viewed at with reverence and emulated by most of the countries in Europe. Are their any regions of their former territories that currently hate/despise/resent this chapter of their history? (Possibly Israel or currently Muslim territories like Syria or North Africa?)	12
How was China able to stay so technologically advanced compared with the rest of the world throughout most of its history despite having little contact with other civilizations?	7
Excluding North and South America it appears that the colonizing population rarely took a permanent hold on the newly acquired territory. Did the philosophy of colonization change, or just its effectiveness, over time?	3
How close did the American Congress or Presidency come to peacefully abolishing slavery before the Civil War?	3

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