askhistorians

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Anarchists were once prominent on the world stage, assassinating world leaders, forming armies and challenging governments. What explains the decline of anarchism after WWII from an international political force that must be reckoned with to hardly a blip on anyone's radar?	728
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica (online): "Science and philosophy were either ignored or relegated to rather low status [by the Romans] ... The spirit of independent research was quite foreign to the Roman mind, so scientific innovation ground to a halt." Is this correct?	168
I've heard that during the 1970s and 1980s, the El Salvadoran government ethnically cleansed its black and Chinese populations, then banned blacks and Chinese from ever entering the country ever again. What is the story behind this? Why did the government do this?	131
Canada "was literally built on, around, and by the resource extraction industry... The logic of resource extraction, led by private companies and enforced by the state, is what motivates Canadian policy and justifies Canadian national identity." How accurate is this historical assessment?	60
Aristotle was quoted extensively by Spanish conquistadors and American slaveholders to justify conquest and enslavement of Native American and African peoples. Based on what we know of his life and writings, would Aristotle have supported the Conquest of the Americas and African slavery?	49
Peter Marshall describes the Tao Te Ching (written 400 BC) as one of the "greatest anarchist classics." Is this true? Are there any non-western cultures that developed political philosophies similar to anarchism? To what extent can we speak of non-western "proto-anarchisms"?	45
Do we really owe the existence of modern gynecology to black slave women who were forcibly restrained and forced to undergo various medical procedures without anesthesia?	42
How different would quality of life have been for a poor person in the Soviet Union compared to a poor person in the United States?	32
In 1871, Bakunin wrote: "[R]evolutionary socialism [i.e. anarchism] has just attempted its first striking and practical demonstration in the Paris Commune." How true is this? Is it accurate to describe the Paris Commune as the first anarchist social and political experiment in history?	27
American slaveholders usually viewed their slaves as subhuman and "racially inferior." In fact, black racial inferiority was one of the main justifications of African slavery in the New World. Did the Arab slave traders and slaveholders of the Middle East also see their slaves as less than human?	26

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