askhistorians

Title	Upvotes	Mark as read	Favorited	Rating	Add to a list
In the Hornblower adaptation 'The Frogs and the Lobsters', the naval officer Hornblower is largely antagonistic towards aristocratic army officers and is jokingly accused of Republican sympathies. Did the Royal Navy's relative egalitarianism lead to any real affection for republicanism?	5
How did Queen gain such a substantial Japanese following that within two years of their first album in 1973, they were able to release a single, 'Teo Toriatte', which was sung partly in Japanese and made it into the top 50 on the charts in Japan?	5
What happened to the Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim in 1021? Why and how did he just 'disappear'?	5
In 1916, Life Magazine published a map depicting North America if the Central Powers won the Great War, with the US partitioned between Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and... Japan. Except Japan was an Allied power. What might have led to the map's creators including it among the victors?	5
What was the reaction of East Germans outside Berlin to the fall of the Berlin Wall?	5
Why are there so many Greeks in Australia?	5
While the modern consensus is that the Kamakura Shogunate was founded in 1185, it seems like there have been a number of alternate dates proposed such as 1183 and 1192. What basis has been given for these various dates, and why has 1185 won out?	5
The Peelites seem to have emerged suddenly on the British political scene in the 1840s, and then to have vanished about as quickly and folded into the Liberals in the 1850s. How did the original split from the Conservatives come about, and how did an otherwise Tory grouping end up in a Whig faction?	5
In the Dad's Army episode 'Shooting Pains', (1968), Captain Mainwaring claims that one of his troops cannot speak to the Major because he's a Polish émigré named 'Paderewski Shostakovich'. Would the composers Paderewski and Shostakovich have been household names in 1940s or 1960s Britain?	5
In 1997, Egon Krenz, the last leader of East Germany, was jailed for six and a half years on manslaughter charges. Why did Krenz's prosecution come so late after reunification, and was it at all typical for former senior members of the Socialist Unity Party to be charged in post-unification Germany?	5

« < > »