askhistorians

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When did "mass genre-fication" start happening? Modern fashion, literature, music, etc. is divided by critics & writers into hundreds of genres & styles each. Would this state of affairs be recognizable to a premodern European critic?	21
How did modern policing develop in Japan and Korea? Did Japanese/Korean police forces adopt late 19th/early 20th c. European practices by large degrees or did they mostly refine and update their own traditions, practices, and norms?	21
For almost 20 years now I've been reading articles and opeds that refer to a vague "Russian political/cultural infatuation with strongmen/authoritarianism" (even more so recently because of current events) going at least as far back as Alexander III. Is there any substance to this at all?	20
Mesopotamia & the Levant are home to numerous historically persecuted ethnoreligious groups: Alawis, Druze, Mandaeans, Samaritans, etc. But only Jews had a pan-Eurasian & N. African diaspora prior to the modern period. What set them apart?	19
What was life like for black people in Dublin or Liverpool (and nearby places) at the turn of the 20th century? How were black people treated in working-class communities?	19
How were old kinda imperialist "darkest Africa"/Lost World type films (with modern day dinosaurs being hidden away in S. American or African jungles) received in colonial countries in the mid-20th century?	19
Much has been written about how Western empires depicted/imagined their peripheries. How did the Ottomans imagine Habesh/Ethiopia & Eritrea? How did the Moghuls imagine Bangladesh? Can we speak of a "Moghul Orientalism"?	19
When did "European" and "the West" become "cultural" terms and not just geographic terms? Did the people of the Balkans (Greeks, Romanians, South Slavic peoples, etc.) fall under the umbrella of the terms from the beginning?	19
Did Romans in the first centuries BCE and CE think that Rome would last forever (or at least as long as humanity existed)? Was there pre-Christian Roman eschatological belief?	19
"... I counted from a mezquita [mosque] four hundred and so many towers in [the city of Cholula], and all are from mosques." Why were Mexican temples "mosques" to Hernán Cortés? How did interaction with Islam influence Spanish conceptions of indigenous Americans?	18

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