askhistorians

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What was the official reaction of the Japanese government to the US internment of Japanese-Americans and Japanese citizens living in the US? Was there any sort of post-war program to allow Japanese citizens to return and to allow US-born Japanese-Americans to start a new life in Japan?	7
Was Vlad the Impaler's level of cruelty considered ordinary for his day? Wikipedia's article on Impalement suggests that this punishment was fairly common in Central and Eastern Europe back then, which would fit my understanding of the Late Middle Ages/Early Modern Era as a violent era in general.	7
When and why did the name "Martha" so thoroughly eclipse the more characteristically Spanish spelling of "Marta" in Mexico (note that they are homonyms in Spanish)?	7
Salsa music is popular in Mexico, so why has Mexico had very few salsa musicians of its own?	7
Why are many formerly Spanish-ruled Latin American countries notably corrupt while Spain itself (at least post-Franco) doesn't seem to differ significantly from its Western European neighbors in terms of corruption? (Repost)	7
Nowadays, it seems neo-Nazis like to idealize Vikings as pure Aryan supermen. Do we know how actual Viking-era Norse people conceived of race and what they thought of people from different climes who looked different from themselves?	7
Do we have any indication as to whether Chaucer or his 14th-c. contemporaries could have understood an 11th-c. Late Old English text?	7
The Canary Islands are just 62 miles off the coast of Morocco, so why and how had they remained isolated and unconverted to Islam when the Castilian conquest of the islands began in the early fifteenth century?	7
My Mexican brother-in-law claims that purchasing political positions was a normal practice in colonial Spanish governance and that modern Mexican corruption is a survival of this. Is there any evidence that this is true?	7
If early Gothic novels are any indication, British readers in the 1790s seemed to find bandits very scary. Were bandits still a genuine threat on British roads more than half a century after the era of the most infamous highwaymen?	7

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