I know Churchill was a big part of winning the war but what specific events lead to this? I was curious because I recently discovered BBC's list of the most important Britons and expected maybe Newton or Shakespeare at the top but I found Churchill there. So, what lead to him being the most important Briton?

We are currently learning about this in my US History class, and I found this topic so intriguing, but there's not too many details as to why he was actually against it, other than it was 'unconstitutional.' Is there any more reason as to why he wanted the national bank to end?

Howdy! Non-historian lurker. Here to learn. The AskHistorians community has a great wealth of professional expertise and knowledge, and it deserves to have its vast reader base. I am, sadly, starting to question how much of the readership is getting the benefit of that expertise.

One of the reasons that makes AskHistorians great is the high standards it sets for its answers, and the answers are why I read the sub. By design, it doesn't have standards as high for the questions. However, the default browsing mode for Reddit is based around questions, and I feel like there's a sort of tension between the AskHistorians communication model and the default Reddit communication model. On any given day, browsing the AskHistorians reddit will come up with a lot of questions with no answers. They may be very good questions, but for the average reader that's going to be frustrating and a waste of time.

Not only that, some of the questions, well, aren't very good questions. Specifically, there are a lot of questions which directly address topics covered in the FAQ on the sidebar. I understand it's good to encourage historical curiosity, but I don't see the benefit in somebody asking the same question about the Nazis that's been asked dozens of times before.

Because history, I am rapidly learning, is not just about having the answers, it's about knowing what questions to ask. I don't know what questions to ask, and I don't feel like I'm exactly alone in this.

The team here are doing great things with the podcast, the features, the weekly topics. Since I can't get anything out of AskHistorians the way I do with other reddits, I tend to just dive into the Sunday Digest, where Zhukov and others do a wonderful job. I'm not really sure that anybody else, outside of the flaired users, reads the digests, though. I'll go in there and there will be a brilliant, in-depth, comprehensive answer linked, and it's got something like five upvotes. This is a problem because it suggests to me that nobody is reading these responses, that the wealth of knowledge on this sub is not being disseminated efficiency. Same goes for any of the daily features. Yesterday the "trivia" thread had an amazing, heartbreaking post by cordis_melum on the Peoples Temple dead. I'm not saying it necessarily needs to go viral or anything, but I do think on a forum with over 450,000 subscribers it would be nice if more than a dozen of them read it.

So I get the impression that most people seem to view Stalingrad as the decisive battle in WW2 as it had a major impact on Germany and the USSR. But were battles such as Moscow and Kursk equally, less, or more important?

I know it's not a centralised organisation but rather a loose affiliation of people who hold similar beliefs. Do we know who started it?

I read, on a thread here in AskHistorians, that Disraeli once retorted to someone giving him grief for his Jewish heritage that whereas the ancient ancestors of Protestant Englishmen were "savages" running around on an "unknown island", his ancestors were "priests in the Temple of Solomon." I would think that this wouldn't be such a grave insult as it seems on its face, otherwise he would have sunk his political career?

Also, I recall that Gibbons once compared the heathen Britons to the Maori. He went on about how the ancestors of the English were once equally "rude" as the Maori, who likewise were native to an isolated island, and likewise had to be civilized by an invading empire. Therefore, he concluded, it was not inconceivable that in the future there might be a "John Locke of the South." I found this interesting in light of how in other passages he went on and on about the alleged inferiority of black Africans, even taking pains to minimize the achievements of the Upper Nile civilizations.

How did those Protestant Englishmen view the fact that their ancestors weren't so far along on the civilization scale as the Romans that came along and Romanized them? In particular, I wonder how they viewed this fact during Disraeli's time, the height of the British Empire.

Did they view this fact with amused irony? Or did they try to revise history a bit, making the Britons seem more developed culturally and materially than the Romans recorded? Or did they focus on the "noble savage" aspect, going on about how the ancient Britons were fierce, honorbound warriors? Did they emphasize how far they had risen in comparison to how far the Greeks and Italians had fallen?

Was it a sore spot, a point of pride, or an irrelevance?

I have heard of some having as many as ten, but how many was "normal"?

I don't have a particular time period or civilization in mind- in fact I prefer comparative world history. I have study urban theory from a sociological perspective but it would be fun to mesh the historical development of urban centers and their demise (and possible resurrection) with general urban development theories.

First of all, how come the Chinese fertility rate did not decline substantially until 1990? Was the OCP only enforced on a small and experimental scale until the 90s started?

Is this why there was an enormous drop in fertility rate between 1990 and 1991 from 2.6 to 1.8, or did that have more to do with people not wanting to have (or now being forced not to have) kids after Tiananmen Square? That happened in June of 1989 so if it influenced people's choice not to have kids it would have started making birth rates fall in March 1990. Was sex selective abortion pretty minimal before this? Because the stats suggest the post-80s actually have an improved sex ratio compared to the people born in the 60s and 70s and the male surplus wasn't atypical of Chinese history until the mid to late 90s.

And lastly, what is the cause of the missing girls? Is it overwhelmingly selective abortion, was murder a substantial factor, or were most of the missing girls born but just uncounted and denied an education or adopted overseas? Or is it a fairly equal combo of all these things?

I apologize if this is too broad, I will happily narrow it down to particular civilizations but I'm really interested in any cultural take on this. This question is something that I have a personal interest if you can't tell from my username!

I've read as much as I can track down in English about dwarfs in European society around this time, particularly the phenomenon of court dwarfs and how they lived, but I have found precious little available on dwarfs in other societies except for vague basics and beliefs, things like Aztecs believing that dwarfism indicated some sense of being touched by the divine in the womb, but almost nothing on well, life and how it was lived.

Assuming that someone had achondroplasia, the most common form and one that it's often possible to live with without needing specific medical intervention, what would their life have been like in, well, anywhere that wasn't Europe? Again, this is broad, and I apologize. I'm interested in answers touching on everything from how a person with dwarfism would have supported themselves to whether they would have had a chance at getting married, etc.

In researching the history of lapels...I found myself asking, are there any New World (especially US) fashion trends that have become embedded in global society?

I remember hearing a fairly compelling argument a while back where someone was saying that it's actually unlikely that the U.S. was named after Amerigo Vespucci. Sadly I have forgotten who was making the claim and why. Can anyone shed some light on this for me? Was the guy full of it, or is there an alternative theory?

Edit: autocorrect didn't like the name Amerigo

Was "it just doesn't work" it? Was there any argument that actually got it overturned in the courts?

I have found some histories for SOE and certain individuals inside SIS, but not much. Can anyone recommend any articles or sources about SIS and SOE in WWII? For SIS, any intelligence gathering or other operations they may have run against the Axis (Germany, Italy, or Japan). For SOE, about their formation, planning, and how they looked for recruits.

As I understand it, Hitler and Mussolini aided the right-wing Franco in winning the Spanish Civil War. Why is Spain considered neutral? Is it because they did not contribute any resources (troops, money, etc.) to either side? If so, why did they not (or why weren't they expected to) contribute to the "Axis" war effort? Also, how were countries like Sweden and Switzerland able to remain neutral during the war? Were they not invaded by the expansionist Germany? How were they not of at least geographical importance to either belligerent party?

To clarify, by serious talk I mean political leaders, such as senators or governors, bringing up the threat of secession, and having others support it.

This is partially for the AH Booklist but also for my own selfish reasons. Curious in particular about European sexuality history but other regions are fine too.

Was talking to my uncle about the world wars, and he mentioned that he thought the russia had been planning to invade germany before germany struck first. Also that part of the reason the germans were so successful early on was because the russians had moved supplies forward towards the german border and they were captured. He's a history buff, so I'd be surprised if he said this without reading it from something fairly reliable.

It seems pretty easy to imagine anyways. Spreading communism, bad feelings from WWI (?), and expansionist policy all seem like fairly good reasons to be gearing for an invasion.