AskHistorians

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Wikipedia's article on US Civil War prison camps has a pretty disturbing picture of an almost literally skeletal but apparently still living survivor of one. Is the identity of this particular soldier known? What happened to him? NSFW	2448
Why are Catholic saints patrons of such specific and seemingly random things? For instance, Philip is patron saint of pastry chefs. Maximilian Kolbe is patron of Esperanto speakers. Stephen is patron of headaches and Rwanda, a country which didn't exist at the time of his canonization.	2443
Why is South Africa the only African country where the population of white colonizers and their descendants remained throughout the 20th century?	1436
When John Carpenter's The Thing was released in 1982, it was received extremely negatively and even named the most-hated film of all time by some. Today, it's considered one of the greatest horror films of all time. What was the reason for the initial response and why did it change?	570
Surströmming has such a foul odor that one critic has said "the biggest challenge when eating surströmming is to vomit only after the first bite, as opposed to before." Nonetheless, it has been a traditional dish in Sweden for centuries. How did it and similarly offensive foods come to be popular?	439
If you look up pictures of the Paris catacombs they're filled with stacks of thousands of skulls and bones with no apparent organization, identification or containment. Why were they made like this? How did the bodies end up in this condition, with their bones all separated and intermixed?	398
Is it a coincidence that movements like abolitionism, civil rights, universal suffrage, feminism, gay rights and so on all seem to have become such major social forces in roughly the last 100-200 years, or is there some broader explanation for this dramatic shift in morality, law, etc?	365
The regions of Africa once labelled by colonizers as the Pepper/Grain Coast, Gold Coast and Slave Coast were all renamed as they became independent and are now the countries Ghana, Liberia, Togo, Benin and Nigeria. Why did the Ivory Coast never change its name?	320
What did modern French philosophers like Foucault, Derrida and Lacan actually believe? What kind of influence has it had on society?	256
Why did Mark Felt use the codename "Deep Throat" to communicate with Woodward and Bernstein, given its meaning? Did the phrase have a non-sexual meaning at the time, or to some particular group?	217

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