askhistorians

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The North American Great Lakes are bafflingly large, with the whole system making up 21% of Earth’s unfrozen freshwater. No lake system in Europe is even close to this size. Were early European colonists surprised that something like this existed?	3813
The multiocular O appears in only a single Old Church Slavonic phrase, “серафими мн҄оꙮ҄читїи҄” (many-eyed seraphim), in a single copy of Psalms from 1429. Why is it considered historically important enough for Unicode inclusion when it just looks like the result of an old monk adding artistic flair?	3042
Disney's Pinocchio was released in February 1940. At this point, Italy had been under Fascist rule for decades, was closely allied with Nazi Germany, and would soon join WWII as one of the Axis Powers. Did the political environment impact the film's development and reception at all?	1245
The US WWII propaganda film "Know Your Enemy: Japan" starts with a disclaimer that Japanese-Americans are not enemies. However, the US government shipped many of them to camps during the production of the film. What was the typical attitude of US federal workers towards Japanese-Americans in WWII?	871
I’m a young Soviet biologist when Lysenko’s pseudoscience was the state’s official position. Skeptical of Lysenkoism, I decide to learn about natural selection and Mendelian genetics. How do I do this? Assuming I was trained by Lysenkoists, do I even know these theories exist?	170
In the historical film OfficeSpace (1999), a laid-off software engineer turned magazine salesman quips that his pay is better now than it was as a SWE. Was the labor market for programmers actually so dire (or the market for salespeople so excellent) in the late 90’s for this to be plausible?	132
It’s 1950, and I am an East Berliner who would like to start commuting into West Berlin for work. Can I do this? Is it common? How do things change between now and the construction of the Berlin Wall?	73
[Film pitch] A motionpicture, handling on the great life to Fridtjof Nansen	59
The protagonists of Jules Verne’s 1865 novel “From the Earth to the Moon” had their takeoff in Florida — as did their counterparts in the Apollo missions a century later. Did NASA get any poetic inspiration from Verne, or is the similarity in setting a coincidence?	53
I’m a resident of Elba in early 1814, a place that at the time was not too different from any other small Mediterranean island. How is my life going to change in a few months when Napoleon gets exiled from France and becomes the emperor of my tiny island?	31

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