/u/EnclavedMicrostate's posts
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I have often heard the Church of the East colloquially called the 'Nestorian Church', but also that its doctrines were never Nestorian at all. So, what was Nestorianism anyway, and more importantly how did the Church of the East come to be so associated with it?
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The chi-rho Christogram (☧) appeared regularly in Late Roman imagery, especially, it seems, on shields, but why? How did this symbol become so popular, and when and why did it die out?
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At the end of the first episode of Dad's Army (1968-77), Walmington-on-Sea's newly-formed Home Guard platoon eagerly open their first shipment of equipment to find that instead of rifles, they have been issued with pepper to throw at the Germans' faces. Did something like this actually happen?
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Did Soviet citizens have access to Western arcade machines and vice versa? Especially with so many games coming from Japan, which wasn't entirely averse to collaborations with Soviet firms (e.g. Kurosawa's 'Dersu Uzala' in 1975).
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George Brinton McClellan is probably the most maligned general of the American Civil War today, yet it seems he was quite popular in his own time? Why is there such a divide?
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Stalin once quipped that Anastas Mikoyan 'loved ice cream more than Communism.' Did the quality and/or availability of ice cream in the Soviet Union see a marked improvement under Mikoyan's auspices?
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In Mozart's 'The Magic Flute', the opera ends with the leads being inducted into a cult of Isis and Osiris. How the hell did it manage to get so popular in Catholic Vienna in 1791? Was the libretto just not seen as that important? Did they just not care that much about the pagan cultism? What gives?
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Cinchona bark, and its refined extract quinine, were vital for treating and preventing malaria among Europeans in the 19th century, and consequently in enormous demand. Did the demand for antimalarial medicines lead to significant deforestation in the South American countries cinchona was native to?
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