askhistorians

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When, how, and why did people in Portugal start speaking a different language than the rest of the Iberian peninsula?	348
Why is it that a significant amount of African-American descendants of slaves have Presidential surnames (Washington, Jackson, Jefferson, etc)? Was it a trend when they got their freedom to adopt the name of a former President?	54
Did Spanish settlers in Hispaniola ever actually witness the Carib people engage in cannibalism? Or was it all mostly speculation and/or propaganda to justify their harsh treatment of them?	38
Is there still code in use that was written for the early Internet?	26
In the Declaration of Independence, is the phrase “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” purposefully ambiguous? Is it meant to imply that “their Creator” can mean their parents, and that the phrase is talking about birthright citizenship?	19
Where the various mysterious serial murder cases happening in London around the 1870s seen as a new and unheard of thing, or was it likely that similar types of crimes had been occurring pre-industrialization and it was just the first time the police and media were actually connecting them?	14
What exactly happened at the Battle of Valdevez?	9
What caused the “rereleasing movies with updated edits and sfx” trend in the 90s-early 00s, and what caused it to die?	8
Did Hitler trace the underdrawing on a lot of his paintings? Does anyone know how much he actually did Plein Air hand drawings on location, versus the ones that seem pretty obviously done with grids and rulers?	4
Has every generation always gone through a fashion/pop-culture phase where they’re obsessed about bringing back stuff from around the decade before they born?	3

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