askhistorians

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My 60ish year old mother once told me she finds it strange that a lot of young people still listen to classic rock from her youth (50~ years ago), when pretty much nobody her age during her youth was listening to music from 30-50~ years before then. Is that true? If so, why the change?	3404
Did the ancient world have any Chernobyls? That is, places where something so terrible happened that everyone agreed to never go there again.	3366
Beautiful Egyptian women, according to Herodotus, were not embalmed for 3 days for fear of the embalmers offering them "indignities". What does this mean, and is it true? NSFW	3357
It’s the year 363 and the Roman emperor Julian has just died in modern day Iraq. How long does it take for me, a Roman citizen living in modern day Portugal, to hear about it?	3355
With the recent Travis Scott event in mind, how was the 1991 Metallica Moscow show able to keep upwards of 500k people from incident?	3349
In the 1950’s section of WandaVision, no one is bothered by Wanda’s (fictional) Sokovian nationality; while this episode was based on sitcom logic, how would Suburban Americans actually have reacted to an Eastern European immigrant?	3304
In Othello, Brabantio accuses Othello of addicting his daughter to drugs, and in Macbeth, characters wonder if they've eaten "the insane root" after seeing the witches. How familiar were Elizabethan audiences with psychoactive substances and drug addiction? What were their conceptions of such?	3259
How was Bay of Pigs not considered an act of war?	3232
Why do the German and English wikipedia articles on Bloody Sunday (1939) differ so much and what is the truth? They cite the same historian Jochen Böhler but come to vastly different conclusions on local ethnic Germans helping the nazi invasion.	3219
In 1985, the popular American sitcom Night Court ran an episode about a transgender woman, treating her identity (more or less) with respect and dignity. How big of a deal was this at the time?	3194

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