askhistorians

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There were no publishing houses in ancient Greece & Rome, but Seneca, Xenophon, and Ovid became famous through their writing. How were ancient works distributed, and was anyone making money from the industry?	955
The Artist/Engineer/Scientist hybrid was a surprisingly common career path in the Renaissance. What about the education or society of the era produced this broadness of mind and ability? What was in the water that created so many "Renaissance men"?	938
Queen Victoria began studying Urdu at the age of 69, carrying on for 13 years till her death at age 81. Did she have any practical reason for doing this? Did her subjects in India know or care? Was it mostly an intellectual exercise?	899
The Roman poet Ovid hated being exiled to the town of Tomis on the Black Sea. How bad would it have been out there for a cosmopolitan, educated Roman? Was it really a backwater, or was he just being snobbish about the locals speaking Greek instead of Latin?	856
A Serbian acquaintance recently told me that up until the early 1900s, in the Carpathian mountains of Serbia, it was usual for the eldest son to take his elderly parents into the woods and kill them they got too old. I've heard the same thing about Montenegro. Is there any truth to this? Why do it?	801
The Japanese ate meat with gusto until 675 A.D., when the emperor banned the consumption of most meat, then all meat. It stayed banned for 12 centuries. Did meat consumption really disappear from Japan?	779
JFK was very concerned about the nuclear "missile gap" between the USSR and the USA. How did the soviets fool him into thinking they were ahead when they were far behind?	777
Lt. Hugh Clapperton rode across the Sahara with 200 horses in 1822, relying on springs and bits of shady tree canopy to cross from Libya to Nigeria. Today, that trip might not be possible. Was the Sahara noticeably greener/wetter as recently as 1822?	752
How great of a blow to historians is the migration of letters and journals to the digital realm, where most of them are inaccessible to historians (locked email accounts, hard drives, etc)?	740
Ten US states created state-owned banks in the 1800s. All of them failed the early 1900s. In 1919 North Dakota created its own state-run bank-and it's still going more than 100 years later. What set North Dakota's bank apart from the previous failures?	698

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