askhistorians

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Montaigne off-handedly asserts that Julius Caesar's horse had human feet. I googled that, and found corroboration in Suetonius. Is Julius Caesar's weird horse documented in contemporaneous sources? If not, when/why did this idea originate?	343
The Pirkei Avot says that tongs were the last thing God created before resting on the seventh day, because people needed an initial pair to be able to forge more tongs. How, when and where were tongs invented?	87
Black Jacobins talks about free, propertied Haitian blacks petitioning for political rights on the basis that "'Protestants, comedians, Jews, the relations of criminals’, all had received their political rights from the Assembly. Yet Mulattoes were still excluded." What does comedian mean here?	63
Why did The Illiad and The Oddyssey survive, but not the non-Homeric poems in The Epic Cycle?	33
The 11th century poem "The Song of Roland" presents Muslims as worshipping the Greek god Apollo. What's up with that?	29
I'm reading a novel from medieval China where the characters are constantly drinking warmed "wine" out of bowls. Is this a drink that I would recognize as wine today? What was the drinking culture of the period like in reality?	19
What do we know about Mussolini's prepolitical career as a school teacher?	8
When and why did waitstaff become common in restaurants in Western Europe and North America?	6
How is There Was A Country, Chinua Achebe's book about the Nigerian Civil War, received among historians of postcolonial West Africa? Is there a scholarly historical survey of the conflict that people here would recommend to read alongside it?	5
When did historians first begin considering convict leasing and sharecropping to be a continuation of chattel slavery in the United States?	1

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