Sometimes when I'm bored (you know, like when I decide to go on reddit), I want to look through old AskHistorians posts. I'm interested in a lot of topics, but my biggest fascination is the ancient world. I like everything in the ancient world, but to find old posts, I have to search for "ancient" or "Greeks" or "Han" etc. It would be so much more convenient to be able to search "ancient" or even "ancient china" and go from there.

Askscience allows users to filter by field and I think that method would be great for this subreddit. The fields could be as broad as "ancient North America" or as specific as "medieval France." I just think it would make it so much easier to access the countless excellent posts on this subreddit.

I don't really know anything about subreddit design, but I imagine it would be very hard to archive old posts into these categories. At least for the future, it seems to me to be a good idea. What are your thoughts?

as a guy who reads alot of central european history, ive never understood the deal with silesia coming up every so often in some kind of military/dynastic struggle. why is this particular region important? were there any wars in particular that was fought because of it?

I know that in the earlier history of the church, it was not a requirement, and that certain monasteries were mixed-gender, and was wondering when this started.

I was also wondering if the works of St. Justinian had anything to do with this decision?

Title. I've heard many times about how undrinkable most water was in premodern times. So how would people away from wells have gotten drinking water? Would they have just drunk wine while travelling/on a military campaign? If so, did they still cut it with water (since drinking neat wine was considered barbaric in some cultures, like ancient Greece)?

In a class I had today, I took interest in a very short discussion we had about the revival of Aristotelian thought in Medieval Europe. Does anyone here have any good suggestions of books or articles discussing why Aristotle's ideas of physics and school of thought were revived, or how they influenced the scholars of the time?

Edit: Added "physics" to better distinguish the topic.

Until the English managed to conquer Ireland the country was fractured into various small kingdoms and fiefdoms. What were the reasons that no one was able to unify them into a single kingdom? Was it mainly because of outside influence (i.e. the English) that prevented this from happening? And also what were the factors that allowed Scotland and England to unify into their respective kingdoms?

As a side question almost how close did Brian Boru come to creating a single kingdom of Ireland? And had he and his sons not been killed at Clontarf would it have lasted?

Following the theme of this week (and since I'm on a "History of the USSR" binge) I figure I might as well ask a question that's been on my mind for a while.

While the Cold War was an east vs west conflict, NATO vs the Warsaw Pact, I wouldn't be surprised to see the Soviet Union and United States put aside ideological differences, albeit briefly, in the interest of pure pragmatism. So, at any time during the Cold War, did the USSR and USA establish peaceful or semi-peaceful trading with one another? If they never did, were there at least attempts by leaders on one side or the other to try and establish trading relationships with their rivals?

As a bit of an auxiliary question, were there foreign exchange programs between Warsaw Pact and NATO nations? Would it be possible to find an American Student attending a university at Moscow or vice versa?

Hi! I'm quite new to this, but I understand that Reddit has an infinite amount of knowledge and I need a bit of that. If you've ever tried to research species of fairies, you get lots of links to cheap copies of Hans Christian Anderson and Grimm brothers books. Which would be great if they were helpful at all, but not especially.

I'm looking for fairies, fae folk, and small people from different cultures. Especially from Alaska, Arizona, Louisiana, New Mexico, Switzerland, and France. If you know stories describing their personalities or appearance that would be helpful. Also books that aren't just assorted fairy tales would be really good.

What I'm looking for is anything that describes their personality, their appearance, what they wear, the jobs they have or what animals and plants they associate with, if they are nice or sneaky, the homes they live in, or any other details.

Stories, books, pictures are all helpful.

I am very interested in the history of rome unfortunately I could only find the ranks but not how it worked. Did they have a place like west point where they would train oyou to become a higher rank, did you achive it only by being from a rich and influential family, did you move up by being brave on the battlefield?? Sorry for my mistakes not a native speaker :)

Pretty straightforward question, Hitler was Austrian, but he fought in the german army, why?

I mean, the Persian Empire was pretty big and most Persians were of that faith. In the Ottoman or other Islamic empires you don't see such a large scale conversion, and Arab Christians remained after the expansion of Islam of the 4 caliphs.

I swore that I read somewhere before that sometime in the 60's early 70's psychologist thought that homosexuality is actually a condition that can be cured and there were people who tried to do so. This practice is obviously not done today, as far as I know, but did this practice exist anywhere in America in the past? What were the results?

Why did Thor Heyerdahl decide to lead an expedition to the Easter Islands (Para Nui)?