askhistorians

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21 years later, the effects of 9/11 can still be felt at airports every day. Did the makers of such enhanced airport security policies intend them to be permanent (as they now seem to be) or to be merely temporary measures until things cooled down?	2207
The Catalans have long had an ambivalent relationship with Spanish identity and have often felt a sense of ethnic distinctness within Spain. Why don't the Valencians, who speak essentially the same language as the Catalans, seem to have had a similar experience?	2104
While the Nazis are clearly the bad guys in Casablanca (1942), they're nevertheless portrayed as superficially affable at times and, while authoritarian, don't quite seem the very epitome of evil that they rightly became once the Holocaust was exposed. How much was known then about Nazi atrocities?	2041
The early Seinfeld episode "The Limo" involves a mix-up with a neo-nazi who is to give a big speech at the Paramount Theater (now the Hulu Theater) at Madison Square Garden. Was this a nod to any sort of similar real-life, high-profile neo-nazi activity in the early 90s?	1697
[NSFW] In Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), when Dracula meets Mina, he takes her to a sort of Bohemian theatre showing what appear to be 1890's porno films. Did such films exist at the time? If yes, would they really have been shown in a place like that? NSFW	1697
Are any actual songs from the Golden Age of Piracy known today?	1513
Martin Van Buren was the only US president whose first language was not English (Dutch). Did his Anglo-American contemporaries perceive his English-language accent as different from their own?	1259
Where does the stereotypical image of a robber wearing a black-and-white striped shirt, a black eye-mask, and a beret or beanie and carrying a big bag (in which to store the stolen proceeds) come from?	1084
Why is the river between the US and Mexico known as the Río Grande in English, but known as the Río Bravo in Spanish? It seems strange that English speakers would use a Spanish-language name different from the one used by actual Spanish speakers.	1083
Was Jerry Lee Lewis really as surprised as he was portrayed in later retellings at the backlash outside his community to his marriage to his underage cousin? For that matter, how normalized actually were such marriages in his mid-20th c. rural Louisiana/Mississippi context?	1083

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