askhistorians

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Why does Mexico have so many Nahuatl-based toponyms even in areas where Nahuatl was far from being the main indigenous language spoken?	39
How is Martin Luther's legacy taken in Southern Germany, given Luther's apparent importance to German national identity together with the fact that Southern Germany remained Catholic?	39
How true is the claim that novels were considered low-brow literature in 18th-c Britain? Would the era's cultural gatekeepers have deemed some novels as high literature but not others, or were novels per se seen as inferior to other literary forms (eg, epic poems, dramatic works, etc)?	38
In litigating the earliest car accidents, what specific problems arose from having to rely on laws made with only horse-drawn vehicles in mind?	38
To what extent is (or isn't) Lords of Chaos (1998) considered a historiographically sound account of the heyday of the Norwegian black metal scene? Any recommendations for other histories of it in addition to/instead of LOC?	38
What's the origin of the classic berobed elderly wizard with the long white beard?	38
Anglophone countries think of North and South America as two continents, while Hispanophone ones think of them as one. When and why did this divergence arise? Does it predate the Panama Canal?	36
Coffee, as far as I know, is from the Middle East, so why does its popularity in Western Europe seem to coincide with the colonization of the Americas, even though trade between Europe and the Middle East had gone on for centuries or even millennia before the so-called Age of Exploration?	36
I've heard that, in Spain's New World colonies, many indigenous converts would take the surname(s) of the priest who converted them, and that this is why there are so few indigenous surnames in Latin America today. Is there even a grain of truth in this?	36
Why did European monarchs (seemingly) take so long to start attending universities? It seems really, really weird to me that kings would wait until the 19th c. to study at one of these supposedly respected institutions that dated to the 11th to 13th c. (and often had royal patronage, no less).	36

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