askhistorians

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Did medieval China, being one of the first countries to use paper money, ever have to deal with bank runs or shortage of specie or confidence crises in the paper currency?	12
Before the rise of nationalism in France, would anyone have used the word 'français' as an adjective to describe him or herself?	11
How many discrete social ranks below nobility were there in the high and late Middle Ages of England?	10
A lot of peoples' names for themselves seem to translate to things like "men" or "people." Historically, would that imply they didn't consider other groups to be true men or people?	8
What functions did medieval European governments have other than the military one? Did they ever build or maintain roads, canals, or other public works projects?	7
Are there any historically well-documented cases that describe how tribes/clans, in the sense of extended kinship groups with social/political power, lose their strength and identities?	7
If antique and medieval cities were population sinks that required constant immigration, what motivated people to move to cities? Were these societies unaware that the cities had such a higher death rate?	6
Why American voter turnout so high between 1840 and 1900? What caused it to rise and then to decline?	5
I'm reading Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy and one of the things he talked about that interested me was the Russian peasant commune. How did the communal farming system develop in Russia and were there similar things in Western Europe?	5
In the show Game of Thrones, a character called the High Sparrow takes over the show's church with a Populist/Fanatic movement. Are there any historical parallels of a religious movement that combined populist support with religious zealotry?	1

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