askhistorians

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If I were a peasant in Yuan or Ming China, how much would I have known (or even cared) about the changing of the emperor? How "important" would I need to have been before dynastic changes had a noticeable effect on my daily life?	2165
How did 'waving the white flag' become the universal sign of surrender? Did it originate with a single culture and spread from there, or was it spontaneously adopted by multiple societies around the world?	997
When Henry VIII issued the Act of Supremacy in 1534, how would smaller-town priests have reacted? Would they have actively taken a position for/against the Act, or would they have considered it "above their pay grade" and carried on with their duties as normally as possible?	233
Westerns always seem to have Desperados breaking out windows to shoot at the Marshals, or tavern brawls where someone a quick exit into the street through a large window instead of the door. How hard would actually have been to replace a broken window (large or small) in the Old West?	171
If I were a commoner in rural medieval England (1400s-1500s-ish), would I know anything detailed about events like the War of the Roses or the Hundred Years' War? Would I have publicly voiced support for one side or the other?	166
Following the Louisiana Purchase, were French residents of the territories granted automatic US citizenship, or were they treated as (involuntary) immigrants? Were existing land holdings legally recognized by the US, or were records lost/ignored in favor of new claims by people moving West?	25
Are there any records of dedicated bookstores existing (and succeeding) prior to the invention of the printing press? At what point in history would book production costs been low enough and literacy rates high enough to make a bookstore a viable business?	11
Is there any evidence that heroin was actually smuggled into the US via corpses/coffins of GIs during the Vietnam War?	10
Is there any evidence of the phrase 'When in Rome...' ever actually being used during Roman times?	1

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