AskHistorians

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Did any medieval or antique states possess a secret police or a secular equivalent to the Inquisition to which people could accuse their neighbors of treason or non-religious thoughtcrimes?	5
Was it possible for a serf or other form of tenant farmer to transfer hereditary land tenancy through dowries? That is, could a peasant family go all Habsburg with good marriages and up monopolizing all the land in a manor despite not having actual title to that land?	5
In another thread, a flaired user quote a bit of Aristotle wherein he (Aristotle) claims that Argos was marshy and Mycenae was fertile at the time of the Trojan War, but in his own era that Mycenae had become dry and Argos farmable. Is there any archaeological evidence for or against this claim?	5
Did any Americans 'go to the beach' for recreation prior to the advent of the railway?	5
The stock market became a thing in the Netherlands and England prior to Astrology falling out of scientific favor, correct? Were astrologers consulted for stock trades?	5
In Antiquity, Eastern Europe and Central Asia were inhabited by Iranian-speaking peoples like the Scythians and the Sarmatians, yet they were almost entirely replaced by Slavic and Turkic speaking populations - why? Did they have some aspects to their culture that didn't allow them to compete?	5
After the Meiji Restoration when the daimyo and the court nobility were merged, was there any resentment from the former towards the latter at suddenly having regained prominence after being powerless for a millennium?	5
I came across a quote today of Augustus saying he would rather be Herod's pig than his son. Some googling traced this to Macrobius' Saturnalia written in the 5th century. Was Macrobius drawing on any earlier writers or was this line an invention of Macrobius?	5
In the early years of Christianity, was there any attempts at syncreticism with Greco-Roman paganism?	5
How were asylum seekers in the West seen by the larger body of Soviet dissidents? As something to aspire to or as people who gave up?	5

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