askhistorians

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How did "publish or die"/"publish or perish" develop? Were academics in 1900 or 1950 under the same publishing pressures they've been in the past few decades? Or were they allowed to teach & then publish at their own pace?	43
I've come across Western men's (sometimes fantastical and obviously 2nd or 3rd hand) accounts of women in the Ottoman Empire and the harem system. Do we have any examples of Western women's accounts of Ottoman women? Or of elite Ottoman women's accounts of Westerners?	42
Is the modern graduate thesis a descendant of the medieval and early modern guild "masterpiece" and a callback to the European university's roots as a trade guild for academics, or a completely independent development?	41
Other than the run up to the Civil War and later KKK terrorism, was inter-party violence ever a regular part of electoral politics in the U.S. at the state/territory or national level?	40
Was Hitler's model of government organization, with multiple inefficient, redundant and competing agencies, a form of "coup-proofing" like that undertaken by modern authoritarian states, or was it really just about his belief in competition/"survival of the fittest"?	38
How far up the social/administrative ladder did WWI propagandization and information suppression go? Were decision makers getting accurate intelligence? I.e. were governments just lying to the people or also lying to themselves?	37
Did Romans think Rome would last forever? Or did they think it likely/inevitable that they would eventually decline or be conquered by someone else? And did eschatological thinking exist in Rome before the Christian era?	37
To what degree did Irish republicans of the late 19th/early 20th century identify with the anti-colonial struggles of other subject peoples? How did these attitudes influence post-independence sentiment and foreign policy?	36
How much of the near extermination of the American bison was ecological warfare against indigenous people & how much was simple economic exploitation or recreational hunting by colonizers?	35
What was the status of Russians and other Slavic peoples in the racial imagination of early 20th century America and more broadly "the West"? Patton seems fond of describing Russian people as "degenerate Asiatics".	35

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