/u/Ersatz_Okapi's posts

Title	Upvotes	Subreddit
Every commissioned American Civil War officer was a student of the Napoleonic War and the massive casualties of battles like Borodino, Leipzig, and Waterloo. Why were they so shocked at the far lower casualties at Shiloh and Antietam?	69	AskHistorians
Southerners biblically justified slavery before and during the Civil War. What was their theological rationalization for why God had apparently allowed the North to free them and why repression should continue in a different form (Jim Crow laws)?	67	AskHistorians
How did Saddam successfully hang onto power for so long after the extremely costly invasions of Iran and Kuwait, the punishing sanctions regime, and being a Sunni in a Shia-dominated country? Was it the brutality, the relative secularism, or was there something more to it?	58	AskHistorians
An enslaved black man who waited on the guests of South Carolina Governor Francis Pickens disparaged John Calhoun by noting that unlike other guests, he never tipped. What was tipping culture like under slavery? Were slaves restricted from freely spending their tips?	46	AskHistorians
What were the most brilliant tactical decisions made in the heat of battle (i.e. constructed after the engagement had already begun)?	34	AskHistorians
In 1975, did foreign policy experts see the nearly contemporaneous falls of Saigon, Phnom Penh, and Vientiane as validation of domino theory? If so, what led them to re-evaluate it to its present marginalized status in academia?	33	AskHistorians
I heard of Barbary corsairs kidnapping people into slavery as far away as Iceland. What were the circumstances of these kidnappings (i.e. why did they go so far just to find captives for the slave market), and did they make any material contributions to cartography or exploration in their time?	32	AskHistorians
Would the lifestyles of the central Asian steppe people (the Huns, Mongols, Tatars, Pechenegs, etc.) have been constant for thousands of years?	31	AskHistorians
In 1975, did foreign policy experts see the nearly contemporaneous falls of Saigon, Phnom Penh, and Vientiane as validation of domino theory? If so, what led them to re-evaluate it to its present marginalized status in academia?	30	AskHistorians
What were the Allied plans for Poland before Operation Barbarossa? Did they entertain the idea of carving a separate nation out of Nazi-occupied Poland up to the Soviet-occupied border? Were they thinking that far ahead?	25	AskHistorians

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