In my opinion the people who ask these questions are effectively asking us to tell them a story, and write them a little bit of (historically "accurate") fiction. Which I guess is fine - in the past, questions like these have got some very popular responses.

I don't think I'm alone among the historians who frequent this forum, however, in suggesting that these questions are problematic and, for lack of a better word, kind of annoying from a historian's perspective. Unless the question happens to ask about a real person or class of persons that we happen to know a great deal about (ie: have both studied personally, and have a large quantity of primary sources that we can use to understand on that level of detail) then the question can't be answered without a huge amount of speculation and guesswork.

I think these questions come from people wanting us to give them a first-person view of history, people wanting to know "what it was like" or "how it felt" to be alive at a certain time, or to deal with a specific set of historical circumstances. Which is certainly an understandable, even an admirable impulse.

The problem, though, is that one of the first things historians learn when they start studying and practicing history is that this kind of knowledge is often just completely inaccessible to historians. It's extremely rare for us to know enough about a specific period or situation to be able to effectively answer questions like that, and even when the documentation/evidence is available, it's definitely not something that historians can or should be doing on the fly - these are the kinds of questions where you need to be writing a book or a dissertation about that exact subject to have any real hope of answering (that is, if your answer is going to be anything less than 50 % guesswork and extrapolation).

The past, as they say, really is a foreign country - in fact sometimes its way, way, stranger than any place or culture that we could visit today. They do things differently there - and one of the first things historians are taught in grad school is that they should never be too quick assume that they know what people in the past were thinking, how they were feeling, or how they might respond to certain events/stimuli, because the people of the past had a fundamentally different way of looking at and relating to the world around them. This is probably one of the hardest things about history for people who don't study the subject to understand - but as historians-in-training it's drilled into us from day one. We're taught to make those kinds of assumptions very carefully, and only after lengthy study of all the available evidence. Hell, half of the "historiography" (theory of history) courses that historians take are devoted to looking at how wrong older generations of historians have been when they assumed that they could put themselves in the shoes of people in the past, and assumed that they could understand what it was like to be in one of these "I am a..." situations. So if we're reluctant to toss off an engrossing answer to these kinds of questions, I think it's primarily because we're well aware that we're far too likely to give you an answer that's wrong.

tl/dr: I think these questions stem from people's desire to have history made more relatable, more narrative, and more like a novel or a film. Unfortunately, that's not how history works, especially in this environment. It's certainly possible to answer these kinds of questions, but only if we happen to have great evidence available about someone who actually did live during that period and actually did experienced that event, and only if we've spent a very long time studying that evidence and the period of history that it's from. Otherwise, folks are basically just asking us to tell them a story that might be true, but is really a work of historical fiction.

Edit: One thing I'll clarify is that when I say that these questions can be annoying from a historians' perspective, that doesn't mean that the question itself or the question-asker is annoying: what's troubling about them (to me, anyway) is that these questions are framed in a way that essentially forces me to answer with an "I don't know" - even when they relate to my area of expertise! They tend to be too narrow, and to be asking about a very narrow person/group/situation which I most likely have very limited or even no knowledge of. Rephrasing it in a broader, more general way (as /u/Jasfss does with his example in the OP above) allows me to share what I do know about that era or that subject with the person asking the question, while the more specific "first person" question basically precludes me from doing so. So it's annoying in the sense that it's a lost opportunity, which inhibits the kinds of conversations which I feel like this sub is supposed to encourage.

I always assumed these were written by aspiring fantasy writers too lazy to do research!

I think people tend to frame their questions like this to indicate that they're asking about very microcosmic, day-to-day changes for individuals rather than asking about social history. For example, (knowing as I do absolutely nothing about either the 14th century Balkans or the Ottomans), life changes for the peasant class as a whole might be fairly significant and include some kind upheaval - riots and rebellions, perhaps? It may lead to a general status change for the peasants, improving economic prospects or bringing them even more thoroughly under the thumb of the ruling regime. By contrast, reading the first person framing, my immediate thought is about one individual peasant who has just watched an Ottoman army walk through his village. While the considerations above are still relevant, things get a little more personal. What are the chances that this peasant actually participated in the battle? Who is the new face of government now? Is there one? Will the Ottomans let this peasant just go back to farming, or will he potentially be conscripted? Enslaved? What's going to happen to his family?

All of these questions can of course be answered with the question framed without the first-person aspect, but my understanding is that people are using to say "I'm not asking about the trends and forces at play in the peasant class in the Balkans, I'm asking what might be the experience of any one peasant in any one village at this point in time." I think there are better ways to ask about these things, but right now this is how the subscribers to this sub are doing it.

(My experience is British; history education may be different in other countries.)

Assuming that the people who ask such questions are not academic/professional historians, one influence may be exposure to "Living history" exhibitions, which have an acting/roleplaying element to them: you really are invited to speculate what it was like to be a young person in Victorian London or to be a new soldier in the Trenches, for example.

There is also the fact that textbooks at a pre-undergraduate level often pose questions in exactly this way. I have seen (and yes, this is an anecdotal response complaining about anecdotal questions!) even A-level (final year of school) textbooks that had questions along these lines: "You are a Jew on Kristallnacht, describe what you have seen"/"You are a young person who has just heard about the discovery of a New World, explain how this makes you feel".

Finally, popular television history shows often feature suggestions to "imagine what it would be like to..." They may feature reenactments or constructions which add to this sense of "first person history".

While I cannot imagine questions in the world of academic history being phrased in this way, they probably seem less unusual to those familiar with history to a school level, or to commercial history.

That's my dreadfully patronising interpretation.

I'm going to take the dissenting opinion and say the hand-wringing over this format of question annoys me more than the format itself. That's all it is to me: a matter of formatting. "I'm a Christian peasant in the 14th century Balkans and the Ottomans have just conquered the place where I live. How will my life change?" and "How did life change for 14th century Christian peasants living in the Balkans after being conquered by the Ottomans?" are functionally equivalent to me. It's not a matter of "need" or "added [or lost] value".

Has there been a time when someone here has answered an "I am a..." question as though it were it's non-IAMA counterpart and had the OP respond with "That's nice and all, but I wanted to know what it would be like for me specifically"? If you can answer how life changed for 14th Century Balkan peasants after the Ottoman conquest and have some spare time to do so, I see no reason you couldn't treat the "I'm a Christian peasant..." question as the other question and answer the question to the best of your abilities.

Now, admittedly, I'm coming at this from an ethnohistorical background, and this sort of thinking might be more alien to other historical fields (as other commentators here have elaborated on). But to me this seems like a rather trivial distinction between questions to concern ourselves over. Of course, I have my own hobby-horse of despised questions so I'm not going to fault anyone if this is the enemy they choose to fight.

I've always assumed that the question format arose due to Reddit's ever-popular "AMA" format, which these questions very much mimic in form. Perhaps this is too simple, because there's clearly some very interesting discussion happening on more complex theories, but the similarities should not be overlooked.

I personally think they're fairly constructive questions, even if they're more "difficult"—it tugs at the part of the historian that finds such a question unanswerable due to the inherent uncertainty of something this specific, but, nevertheless, this imagination and quasi-empathy are an important part of the historian's trade.

I asked a question in this format just a few weeks ago! But my reasoning differs from the explanation above, and perhaps reflects the though process of others, so I'll add my two cents.

The titles of posts are the only advertising a post is going to get. Thus, making a post sound interesting is vital to its success. Sometimes interesting questions are asked, but posed poorly, and instead of generating lively and enlightening discussion, flounder and then sink with only a handful of upvotes. Wording my question in the first person was a conscious decision in order to make the post seem more attractive, more laid-back like the beginning of a conversation with friends.

It sounds gimmicky, and perhaps it is, but it seems posts asked in the first person do better in getting lots of replies. I noticed that I click on them more frequently, and thought other people might be prone to the same habit.

Edit: Another explanation could be that people just repeat the phrasing they have seen on this sub before as a way of fitting-in.

I've always assumed it's an attempt to be specific enough to get through the sub's rules about specificity in questions. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22in_your_era.22_or_.22throughout_history.22_questions

Whether or not an open-ended question about an open-ended era will be allowed seems to depend on the time of day, moderators active, and whether or not it gets any decent responses before a mod finds it. So it's safer to be as specific as possible, even if it limits what answers you can get.

I suspect that a lot of the people who ask these questions are doing research for novels/short stories/school assignments. The unfortunate part is that researching for fiction is completely different than researching for historical purposes because you need to immerse yourself in the historical time period and you never know what will be relevant. (My friend, for example, refuses to read any historical romance novel where the guy wears a wedding ring before the mid 1900s because men didn't wear wedding rings before then).

Sorry fiction writers! There are no shortcuts!

Because some of us wonder how our ancestors lived their daily lives.

I actually think hypotheticals like that should be restricted to only a day a week or outright banned, I think they clutter up the sub and aren't really good "academic" questions as snobby as it sounds.