askhistorians

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The King of Portugal survived the Lisbon Earthquake which razed his capital to the ground, but was so traumatized that he avoided living in stone buildings for the rest of his life. What was the extent of his psychological trauma, and did it contribute to the downfall of his multicontinental Empire?	1475
If losing a child is inherently mentally damaging, does that means that, for most of history, the majority of the adult population lived their lives with serious emotional trauma? How did the huge child mortality rates impact general mental health and behaviour?	1389
In a famous WW2 photo, a sign next to a destroyed tank in Cologne reads "Fight seers keep out! Beyond this point you draw fire on our fighting men". Who was the target of this sign? Did people used to gather to watch urban battles during the war? Or was the warning motivated by an isolated incident?	1322
A famous WW1 memoir gives a first-person account of an Italian suicidal charge over no man's land, so senseless that it caused the distraught Austrians to stop shooting from their trenches and cry out in Italian "Enough! Don't let yourselves be slaughtered like that." Did this actually happen?	1233
Was the Kama Sutra really a reflection/influencer of Indian sexual culture, or was it just refined erotica targeted at a small noble audience? Was it known among the general public before modern times? NSFW	1016
A century after Muhammad, a Berber King in Morocco proclaimed himself his successor and wrote down "revelations" in a book also called Quran, with 80 chapters and somewhat different rules and teachings. What do we know about this "Quran 2" and its followers?	715
The 1812 Battle of Borodino has been described as "a fully-loaded 747 crashing, with no survivors, every 5 minutes for eight hours". How were the weapons and tactics of 1812 able to produce such carnage, killing 71 generals and more soldiers than Waterloo in one day? Why was it so unusually bloody?	711
In the historical Bollywood movie Bajirao Mastani (2015) characters use swords with blades so flexible that they look (and are used) like whips, with the metal flapping around like a rope. It's bizarre to show this in such a movie if it isn't based in reality; were Indian flappy swords a thing?	627
A Pompeii graffiti reads "on April 19, I made bread", inspiring some people today to celebrate April 19th as the "International Bread Day". Only one problem...was "making bread" slang for what I think it was? Are bread enthusiasts today unknowingly celebrating a horribly different type of "loaf"?	571
A large Napoleonic battle happens in a field by an important river. Men are buried, but what happens to the hundreds of dead horses? They're pretty hard to bury, but leaving them to rot hampers work in the fields and threatens to contaminate the water. Would armies bother to do something?	451

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