askhistorians

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Today, when I go out for dinner, I can choose to visit an Italian, Indian, or Chinese restaurant. How old is the idea of “ethnic” restaurants that specialize in the food of a particular foreign culture? Could a hungry Roman go out for some Persian takeout?	5624
Martin Van Buren is remembered as the only US president to speak English as a second language, because he grew up in a Dutch-speaking part of New York. How long did these Dutch-speaking settlements survive, and how did the Anglo government of New York manage administering them?	5294
My father grew up in New York City in the 1960s, and tells stories about visiting a futuristic automatic cafeteria or “automat,” which was basically a room-sized vending machine for full cooked meals. What accounted for the rise and fall of the automat, and what was a typical meal like?	3701
When I look at maps of Napoleon’s conquests, it seems he mostly set up a system of puppet states to run Europe for him..... except for modern day Croatia, which he ran directly. Why?	2943
The plague of frogs from the book of Exodus sounds pretty harmless compared to the other plagues (boils, fire, hail, etc). Is there some reason why Egyptians or Israelites would have been particularly afraid of frogs?	2799
Since the Lord of the Rings was released in several installments, was it subject to plot speculation from fans, like Game of Thrones or the Harry Potter books? Do we have any records of how early Tolkien fans thought the story would end?	998
New Jersey often seems to be the butt of jokes about its culture, landscape, and people. How did it end up as America’s “official joke state?”	830
I was doing some research on American recipes from the 1700s, and mostly what I found is an insane number of recipes for beer... including "children's beer" and "breakfast beer." When did our modern idea that alcohol is only appropriate for certain people at certain times of day appear?	513
Why do the people of North Africa not speak a Romance language, when their region was part of Rome even longer than most of Europe?	281
In the eighteen nineties, the book Progress and Poverty was so popular that it outsold every other book except the Bible to American audiences. Today, hardly anyone has read it. What led to the rise and fall of Henry George’s ideas.	279

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