AskHistorians

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Suppose I'm an American (white) man in 1798. Assuming I know where he is can I just walk up to the president in public and start talking to him, or even then would there be some kind of barrier between him and the general population?	4007
my grandmother once told me there was an experiment in the 19th century where they fed a man to a whale to see if people really could survive inside them (IE like Jonah) and unsurprisingly they can't. was she talking about a real experiment that ever took place?	2998
Carthage was destroyed by Rome in 146BC and not permanently re-built until Caesar's time a century later. Suppose I visited the site at sometime in between, 129BC say, what, if anything, would I find there?	2583
suppose I'm the son of a Maharaja studying at Oxford in the 1890s. Will I be excluded in anyway socially excluded because of my race, or does my high class insulate me from that kind of thing?	2515
I'm given to understand that in the pre-modern world salt was a very valuable commodity. If you lived near a coast line what (if anything) was to stop you just making unlimited salt by boiling sea water?	2474
There’s scene in HBO Rome with an Indian trader in it. The Indian man is wearing a turban, either a waistcoat or a jerkin make of hide, leggings and boots. He also seems to have arm jewellery. Is it authentic for an Indian in the first century BCE to be dressed like that?	2136
Before they decimalised British money in the 1970s what was the oldest a coin could be and still be legal tender?	2047
in the 1970s what was the richest you could get in the Soviet Union by way of legitimate work (IE as opposed to being a gangster or a corrupt official or whatever)?	1969
I remember once being told Tolkien believed that Anglo-Saxon mythology never got developed and passed down to us (as it did in other Germanic speaking countries) because the Normans suppressed the native folkloric tradition. Any truth to that idea?	1892
you know that bit in Life Of Brian where somebody asks "what did the Romans ever do for us?" and the crowd starts listing of things that a better now than before they conquered Israel. In general did general living standards go up or down in a place after Rome conquered it?	1846

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