askhistorians

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How did the Spanish Flu pandemic end?	65
Multiple works of popular fantasy media frequently depict Dwarves as living in great cities and halls built into mountains. Were there ever any real-life civilizations that did this? If not, where does this trope come from?	52
Where does the notion of a medieval era from roughly 500-1500AD, distinct from both antiquity before it and modernity after it, come from? Before we came up with the category of "medieval", how did people periodize what we now call the middle ages?	49
It's the year 40BC and I'm a soldier in Julius Caesar's army. Suddenly, I'm transported a thousand years into the future, to the 10th century, from the middle of classical antiquity to the middle of the middle ages. What differences in warfare would I notice?	40
How did people think about integration before Riemann? The fundamental theorem of calculus was proved over a century before Riemann was even born, so people must have had some notion of an integral before Riemann sums were invented	40
How much, if any, trade and communication existed between pre-colonial Southeast Asia and Australia?	39
Did ancient and medieval peoples have a notion of timezones, that if you traveled far enough east the sun would rise and set earlier and that if you traveled far enough west the sun would rise and set later?	32
Why do the Ku Klux Klan wear what appear to be dunce caps?	31
In 2001, Crown Prince Dipendra of Nepal famously massacred his family. Why did he do this? Was there any indication beforehand that something like this would happen? What was the reaction, both in Nepal and from the royal families of other monarchies?	29
The length of copyright was expanded several times in the past century and a half-ish. How did the general public react to these term expansions?	29

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