Because Reddit is a monoculture.

Our surveys here and information gathered from the rest of Reddit indicates that the website is extraordinarily unrepresentative of the United States and the world as a whole. The average user is an educated white male between the ages of 15 and 35 in North America, Western Europe or Oceania.

That's a remarkably narrow demographic, so it shouldn't be surprising that most of our questions here are things that would appeal to young men: war and warfare.

The questions are even further narrowed by the fact that most of these young men have only a basic education, if that. Most have a bachelor's degree or less, and that limits how much time they've spent thinking about history in deliberate, personal study.

A question is supposed to be about what you don't know, but more often than not, it's a reflection about what you do know already. To paraphrase something Donald Rumsfeld once said, if you don't know what you don't know, you can't inform yourself about it.

You ever see the movie I, Robot? I know ─ it's a travesty compared to Asimov's originals ─ but you've got to learn how to ask the right questions before you can get the answers you actually want.

Most of the folks asking questions here have been exposed to a gloss of history in a few exceptionally masculine areas: ancient Greece/Rome, medieval Western Europe, and the wars of the 20th century. They know about these areas, but they don't know much about them, and so they're interested in learning more. The problem is that they don't know what they're missing. They rarely stop to ask about the social history of gestures, or how the history of paper affected the course of technological development, or things like that.

Thankfully, with more than half a million registered users, there's enough people asking questions that there are always some good, unique inquiries that spark real learning. For the rest, it's just part of the process ─ they're still learning the right questions to ask.

I would come at this from a slightly different angle than u/The_Alaskan - certain aspects of military history are often depicted in pop culture - video games, movies, TV comic books and popular novels. 'Band of Brothers' and 'Call of Duty' and 'Medal of Honor' brought their portrayal of WWII (including a lot of rivet-counting details about equipment) into popular culture and into people's consciousness. 'Game of Thrones', despite being fantasy, portrays something inspired by (certain disparate elements of) medieval Europe in ways that make people wanting to know more about 'the real thing.' I suspect we could trace a lot of popular interest in armour and weapons to Dungeons and Dragons and its influence on subsequent generations of roleplaying games (both tabletop and electronic).

These elements of popular culture are particularly popular with Reddit's most common demographic - which as The_Alaskan observes is white men 15-35 in the US, Europe and Australia/NZ. People engage with history a lot through the pop culture that they consume. I suspect a site with a different demographic would see more questions inspired by 'Outlander' than by 'Call of Duty.'

All that said, I firmly believe, from my admittedly biased perspective, that even bits of MilHist Minutia can be used to illustrate important points about the politics, technology, economics and society of times past.

It might also be a matter of a lot of other questions being more easily answered in a specialist/hobbyist subreddit.

For example, if I want to know about the evolution of tobacco production over time, I'd be more likely to ask /r/PipeTobacco than here. Odds are any AskHistorians participants who would be knowledgable would also participate in that sub and give a good answer, but I'd also get input from tobacco enthusiasts and people who work in the industry offering useful insight as well.

Historical events or wars, though, don't have hobby subcultures around them to lean on. So this ends up being the natural place for them to go.

While this sub does attract a lot of military related questions and responders, I think you'll find that military history is actually a rather "niche" field in the broader academic field of history.

What I really don't get is how absurdly many questions there are about American presidents. Not American political history in general, but past presidents in particular. It seems like it gets as many questions on the front page as both world wars put together.

Frustratingly for me as someone fond of military history, I think this title is inaccurately broad, because the average redditor isn't interested in Military history, they're interested in a very small subset of military events and societies. This list is something like WWII, Early Imperial/Republican rome, WWI, The American Civil War, Ancient Greece (Mostly the Persian wars, because 300), Western European Medieval Warfare (Through the fun house mirror of Fantasy literature.) and a few other things. There's a lot more to Military history than that. Eastern European Medieval, Late Antiquity, loads of early modern and modern conflicts, and tons of other stuff are critically understudied and under discussed, in academia to some degree and horribly in the public mind.

The Crimean War is arguably of similar or greater importance historically to the American Civil War, but most people probably don't even know it happened. Byzantine History is something of a closed box to most people in the popular sphere, and even with my efforts to broaden my horizons, I still know almost nothing about the rest of eastern Europe. I am SO utterly bored with WWII and the Civil War especially, and truly thing the field of Military history would be better off if everyone took a break from those two fields and studied something else for a while.

I have no idea why the bulk of this subreddit revolves around military history, I'd love to see some more concepts around the purpose of history, historiography and events that spawn contention between historians.

There's lots of great discussion in this thread, but I would just like to question the assertion that the majority of threads in this sub are military history. As a nut for military topics, I am actually surprised by how many non-military questions are asked, and also how many I end up submitting answers for. As the study of a particular military, especially a citizen military, is to also study the culture and society from which the soldiers are drawn, I'm surprised how much you can learn about a society by studying mostly military history.

But mainly, I disagree that the majority of threads are military. It appears to me that the majority are actually non-military.

Contrary to a lot of comments in here, my observation is that a lot of the interesting questions go unanswered.

Filter by 'Top' right now and note how many highly voted questions are not answered.

Either they get:

Ignored outright

A snide reply (for asking the wrong way)

A reply that doesn't answer the original question (but nonetheless is interesting - this being the best case scenario).

Go and look now and just make a note.

Note, as well, how many of those must have been upvoted on the quality of the question alone because they are as yet unanswered.

"How was the suffragette movement perceived in the Far East (if at all)?"

Top Comment:

'Well, I can't speak about the Far East. But in Brazil...'

Second Comment:

'Perceived how? By who? Which suffragette movement? Where in the Far East?'

Third Comment:

'The term 'suffragette movement' has no real meaning in historical study any more, so your question is too broad to [etc.]'

Now, in their defence, the flaired historians who post here:

A) have dayjobs

B) have specific fields of study

C) are bound by the subreddit's rules for replying

But as a lurker, I'm frustrated by the best questions not getting the response I think they deserve.

In addendum, I'm especially disappointed that a top comment here seems to make this a condescending discussion about race and class based on no evidence whatsoever (in a subreddit that places such a strong emphasis on evidence).

That's why I, for one, can't be bothered to ask questions and will go back to lurkin'!

As a lurker of the subreddit, I feel as if obscure military history is a pretty unintrusive minority of the questions asked here, but a far more substantial portion of the small minority of questions asked that are satisfactorily answered.

It really feels like many of the answers here are just resorting to lazy demographics based explanations by default without looking at the nature of answering the questions themselves: specific military questions have specific, verifiable and well researched answers while more "important" questions are often impossible to answer satisfactorily outside "this is what the contextual evidence suggests".

Well, my theory that is very much related to our demographics – i.e. in the broadest sense people from the US, Western Europe, and Australia, comprising the main audience and user base here – is the popular representation of history in these cultural spaces.

The very purpose of this sub is to answer questions people have and from recent census data, we can glean that most people asking questions here are certainly interested in history (duh!), a much smaller part are people who study the subject. This means, that the majority of questions arise from a context where a potential users hears or sees something in popular media or through other channels and wants to inquire further.

I'd have to actually crunch the numbers but recent discussions surrounding the US elections this year have broadly lead to an immense uptick of certain questions related to past US presents and elections, Hitler, and Huey Long (of the 13 questions about Huey Long in this sub since its beginning, six were asked in the last 8 months).

Concerning military questions, a similar thing can be observed: People ask a lot about military stuff because a lot of the popular representation of history concerns the military and war in general. While the gender aspect influences skews this further imo, the issue of popular representation of history is a huge factor in this. I mean, the most successful and popular entertainment products based on history revolve around a sparse handful of subject, whether its video games, TV shows or films. And that sparse handful of subjects is dominated by a handful of wars.

A huge chunk of our userbase for example also frequents /r/paradoxplaza, a forum for paradox interactive whose oeuvre of games includes the subjects of the crusades, warfare from the Renaissance to the Napoleonic era, and WWII.

I have a related question, but I'm not sure if it's too irrelevant to the sub to be posted here.

In my high school, it feels like most of the history classes I've taken (Especially US history) have focused heavily on wars. In my US history class last year, we started with the buildup to WWI, spent a while on WWI, moved to the buildup of WWII and spent a while on that, and then jumped around Korea/Vietnam/Iran/Iraq/etc. There were short units on peacetimes (especially the civil rights movement and a lot of focus on the 50s-ish), but overall it just felt like we were jumping from war to war.

Is this true of the majority of history classes? If so, why?

Ok well I have no idea if people will actually see this but I'm just going to say why I love military history.

For me I've always loved history. I just have a burning passion to study history. I love military history because so much changes in times of war and whenever a civilisation develops more and becomes more advanced, so does their ways of waging wars and that absolutely fascinates me.

World history has been altered so much because of wars and as such whenever I read about history, I read about wars and militaries because they have contributed a hell of a lot to world history.

Because we are boys. Boys like war, tanks, cavalry motor engines and what have you. It'll never change.

As a layman, I'm way more interested in ancient economic systems, but those questions are a lot harder to answer, I think.

I, for one, perpetually harbour a vain hope that I'll learn something I can apply to a Hearts of Iron or Total War campaign. :)

As a lurker I think it's also because of the flaired users, if you browse through the questions you will see military related ones get answered much more frequently than other questions.

"War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading."

I am guilty of this to a large extent. And as someone mentioned, given the male dominated demographic of reddit, I suppose males are more likely to be interested in military history.

There are many answers to this question. The mods have given an easy to understand answer that is correct. Here is another take: Much of human history is stained with warfare. Much of our technological progress comes from advancements used to fight wars. For example, GPS was used by militaries before civilian use.