AskHistorians

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Why are the musical notes named A B C D E F G in germanic languages and when did we started to use this system? Why are they not labeled as Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Si like in Latin languages?	3578
Is the Long Middle Age theory seriously considered by historians?	1747
In old cartoons (Looney tunes, Tom and Jerry, etc), should anything fall on a character, most of the time it's an anvil. Why the anvil specifically? Did the kids understand what it was despite blacksmith's being less and less common?	385
In S1E2 of Turn: Washington's Spies, the main character Abe shows his baby son a purse with coins and says "oh, what's that? A pirate treasure?". Were pirates already set into popular culture in 1776? If so, how much did it differ from our modern traditional imagery of pirates?	78
The fantasy cliche of the Mercenary is the lone man who travels from town to town to offer his services to commoners. Historically, in Europe, mercenaries were large organised groups of thousands of men. Was ''lone mercenary-ing'' a thing in medieval Europe? Where does this myth comes from?	58
Did the allies have a plan to retrieve the bodies from Normandy, should the invasion have been a failure?	48
Why didn't emperor Frederic III crown Charles the Bold as king of Burgundy?	22
Did (some) battering rams really have a sculpted/forged/cast ram head?	22
In the movie Apollo 13, during the re-entry scene, a shot shows the crewmates of the USS Iwo Jima cheering on the deck of the ship with the Apollo's Command Module at a fairly close distance. Were the recovery ships really this close? How precise were the estimates for where the capsule would land?	21
How did Romans viewed the afterlife?	19

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