askhistorians

Title	Upvotes	Mark as read	Favorited	Rating	Add to a list
Why is the population of Java so insanely high? Its population is twice as high as Great Britain's and even higher than Honshu's, which is home to Tokyo, the world's biggest city.	824
Did the people of the 18th and 19th centuries realize that they were living through the "Industrial Revolution" and understand the enormity of what was happening as it happened?	190
Why did the aboriginal peoples of Australia remain uncontacted by the trading cultures of the Indian Ocean that, for example, brought Hinduism to Bali and Islam as far as Indonesia and Madagascar? Are the waters separating Australia from Indonesia particularly treacherous?	67
Is there an Asian "version" of Marco Polo? Who were the first people from East Asia to visit the West? Do we have first person accounts of their travels?	58
Is it possible that many of what history remembers as "invading hordes" were actually economic migrants? And the negative framing comes from nativism or bigotry on the part of those who wrote history?	17
The theme of this week's Met Gala was "Camp". What is the history of the concept? Are there examples from before the onset of modernity?	6
How isolated was the Indian Subcontinent from the major ancient overland trade routes? Was the Khyber Pass essentially the only way in and out of the region by land? What effect did this have on the culture and its relationship to the outside world?	3
Suetonius writes that Augustus Caesar donated 16,000 pounds of gold to the Temple of Jupiter in Rome. What would that much gold look like and how would it have been stored?	2
In the antebellum U.S. south, are there any surviving records describing the relationship and dynamic between newly arrived African enslaved people and existing Black populations that were born and raised in America?	2

« < > »