I'm salvadoran. In this country, in 1932 there was a Ethnocide of indigenous people and nawat, potón and other indigenous languages were prohibited. As of today, nawat is almost a dead language and potón, kakawira are extinct. Coming from that context, I was always amazed that in Spain most regional languages are spoken, learned and somewhat healthy in today's world. How did the Basque people manage to teach, learn and spoke their language in prohibition?

Both number of flairs and diversity!

While the quality of responses on AH has gone way, way up over time, it does (subjectively! If I am wrong here, then I may be be falling prey to sample bias, in which case I apologize for framing the discussion badly) seem that the burden rests on a shrinking, rather than growing, group of people in a relatively small number of subject areas. While the quality and productiveness of AH is excellent, it does seem fragile: The elimination of 5 or so key flairs would send the Q/A ratio into the abyss.

While AskHistorians seems to be widely and vocally popular and supported by the users who benefit from its gratis product, the appeal to the experts and specialists who produce that work is a little less resounding. I don't mean this as criticism of the directors of the subreddit! I think this is in some sense a failing of the userbase in a roundabout way: Respondants who cater towards a fairly narrow set of subjects or interests might find a much larger audience for their work than would probably ever be possible in conventional academic publishing, but my experience has been that some of the best work on AH goes unseen due to the subjects or approaches involved falling outside the "canonical" historical interests of Reddit. A very few flairs have managed to surmount this tunnel-vision in a few cases (women's history sneaks in every now and then), but that is the minority of cases.

AskHistorians might engender interest in a subject, and encourage someone to seek out higher education in the field, but it cannot train its own flairs: It must attract existing experts in order to grow the pool of respondants to meet the increasing pool of questions produced by a growing userbase. While the successful engagement with the public is evident (3/4 of a million subscribers!), engagement with the academy is more challenging. Is there anything that can be done to either;

• Better shape the interests and expectations of the userbase in order to engender greater participation outside the current crop of subject areas, approaches and disciplines.

• Cater and market the subreddit more directly to the needs and interests of experts and specialists from outside of the Reddit userbase.

TL;DR: Is AH despite the best efforts of its staff doomed by the Reddit userbase to be the Hitler/Rome/Great Men subreddit, or can something be done to increasingly broaden the appeal among outsiders to engender greater diversity as the subreddit grows in size?

You know, disney like things such as people whymsically singing in the forest, Joyful feasts in the castle, knights in shining armor. Just wondering because if it is, i would like to live in the mid ages.

Not to sure about the rules for this sub with regards to questions, I apologise of this is too vague..

Could someone give me a rough timeline breakdown of the early viking era (up to and after the reign of Alfred the Great)?

OR is there any particular website/material you would recommend to look into this period in more detail?

I’ve always wondered whether or not the current German government still holds on to Nazi files. Were they preserved for historical purposes or destroyed in the process of denazification?

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I watched an early 1980's documentary about pornography and one of the people interviewed said that the Germans proliferated pornography, in conquered Poland, in order to isolate and distract the people there.

She posited the feminist view that pornography is intended to isolate and that the Germans were aware of its affect. Is any or all of this true?

I see alot of speculation that the Sphinx is older than people think because there hasn't been heavy rainfall in the time it was supposed to have existed, but could it be from cleaning efforts instead?

I've recently watched some of the second season of Vikings, and the character of the king of Sussex has in his residence, a room full of roman antiques, at which he is amazed that a race of people of whom he knows so little could achieve such heights in the arts, which he could never reproduce. Was this view of the Romans as a kind of long lost, partially forgotten "super race" (problematic term I know) commonly held in dark age/pre-renaissance, especially in places which had been on the outer fringes of the empire?

I’ve heard it said that Leopold II exerted much more direct control over the Congo than his monarchical contemporaries did over their colonies. Is this true, and why is it so?

In the book Salt by Mark Kurlansky there are some mentions of the daily intake of salt averaging forty to seventy grams a day, which appears to be too high to me. Is it accurate? How did they manage to not be extremely sick from such a high salt intake?

I asked this in r/nostupidquestions but didn’t get answers, and someone suggested I should post here.

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As far as I know, African elephants only live south to the Sahara. How did people like the Carthagenians and Numidians get elephants all the way from Sub Saharan Africa? I can't imagine them crossing the desert or even sailing with elephants.