/u/td4999's posts
In America, privately issued currency was widespread until 1866; how was the transition to a state-backed, and only state-backed currency handled? What were the repercussions?
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Charles Dickens's father spent time in debtors' prison. How did they work? Inmates were charged room and board, already unable to pay their debts; how could one hope to ever get out? Was there a set 'sentence', or were prisoners simply dependent on others paying their way back into society?
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Peter the Great legendarily traveled incognito during his reign, even though he was difficult to miss at 6'8. Do we have any accounts from those he met in his travels?
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Where did the notion of the "American Dream" come from? Was it directly tied to the notion of American exceptionalism, or did they evolve separately? Did they predate American independence, or were they products of the growth of the 19th century?
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The Suez Crisis pitted the US and USSR against Britain, France, and Israel in the midst of the Cold War; how did the two superpowers wind up aligned against what are three of the US's traditionally closest allies? What were the long-term ramifications?
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In the 1930s, Katharine Hepburn created a stir by wearing trousers at a time when it was considered a shocking thing for a woman to do; how did the norm that trousers were for men and dresses were for women become so entrenched?
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Hemingway apocryphally "liberated" the Ritz bar when the Allies retook Paris following the D-Day invasion. What really happened? How did this story become the stuff of legend?
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In 1824, John Quincy Adams won the Presidency despite garnering only 30% of the popular vote and less than a third of the vote in the electoral college. Do we know how the surviving founding fathers (such as Madison, the architect of the constitution) reacted to, or felt about, this?
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Greensleeves is an English folk song written and registered in London in the 1580s. Would somebody have been making money off of it? If so, who, and how?
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