askhistorians

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In the painting 'February' from Très Riches Heures (1416, France), two people are explicitly depicted warming themselves in front of a fire with their genitals exposed. Why? Was this normal practice in the winter? Would people at the time have been surprised by the painting? NSFW	7425
After the Norman conquest of England in 1066, a fleet of 235 ships of Anglo-Saxon nobility apparently fled the country and sailed to the Byzantine Empire. What became of them and their descendants? What do we know of their life there?	3736
After the use of Choctaw code talkers in WWI, Nazi Germany apparently sent spies, disguised as anthropologists and art students, to the US to learn Native American languages. However, they failed to learn Navajo. What do we know about this effort? How organized was it and who ran it on the Nazi end?	3532
Apparently some scholars believe that Christianity did not evolve from Judaism as traditionally thought, but that both religions emerged together from a religiously chaotic region that contained a number of proto-Jewish/Abrahamic sects. Is this a matter of interpretation, or new evidence?	3213
I've heard a lot about refugees during/after World War II, but only in Europe. What about Asian/Pacific refugees? How many were there, from what countries, and what happened to them?	718
George Washington is known for warning about the pernicious influence of political parties and polarization. But given how few democracies or republics there were in his day, what examples would Washington have been thinking of?	659
15 years on, what does Lawrence Wright's 2006 book 'The Looming Tower' get right and wrong about al-Qaeda and 9/11?	145
Charles Mann writes in 1491 that before epidemics struck, "a rising proportion of the shipping traffic along the [1600s] New England coast was of indigenous origin." Where did he get that information, and what research has been done on this topic since 1491 was published in 2005?	125
Sławomir Rawicz, a Polish officer, claimed in his book 'The Long Walk' that he and five others escaped a Siberian gulag in 1941 before walking all the way to India and freedom. Is there any evidence that his story was true?	89
What did colonial-era Christians think of Hinduism? Did it pose any theological challenges for Christian writers?	85

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