I am a "people who lurk" on AskHistorians. I will never post anything of significance in AskHistorians, such as this post.

History is interesting to me, but not my strength. I am new to Reddit and up or down voting is not something I am used to, so that rarely happens either.

I enjoy the well thought out questions and the very well researched answers by people that really have a passion for history. I usually get sucked into responses, follow their links and spend hours learning about topics I never knew existed or may have known about but not to the extent presented here. I found AskHistorians by chance when I was looking for good subs on Reddit as a new user.

Keep the good stuff coming and I will passively sit on the sidelines learning about the history I never knew I wanted to know.

Ultimately, history is my expression of nerd-dom. I love history, I love talking about it, I love being crazy enthusiastic about it...and most importantly of all, I love getting other people as enthusiastic about it as I am. :D AskHistorians is the perfect blend of casual and serious to allow me to get down and dirty with historical method but still have FUN with it.

I can think of a lot of next level factors. I know SO MUCH MORE about the Middle Ages, especially off the top of my head, since I've been writing here. ("If you want to learn something, teach it.") I've made some fantastic connections with other AH regulars. AskHistorians needs more women both as readers and as panelists, and REALLY needs people who can talk knowledgeably about women's and gender history.

In the end, though, my significant participation (I am an active moderator as well as question-answerer) comes down to the fact that I believe AskHistorians does something special, important, and exciting. It's hard to think of someplace else that gets so many people excited about understanding the past for the past's own sake--not to fulfill a sense of WW2 hero-worship or to twist something politically. It's hard to think of another accessible place so committed to breaking down the barriers of proprietary knowledge that academia and academic publishing are so insistent on maintaining. AH does something I believe in, and the environment we've cultivated makes doing that FUN.

I will e-mail you as well. :)

I have two basic motivations for posting. The simplest is that I fill a gap. There's a dearth of fashion historians on Reddit in general - a lot of incorrect but popular history gets passed around on the subject, a lot of supposition or speculation, and personal experience (in modern clothes or reenactment attire) gets used as the be-all-end-all of proof. By having someone in my field here, I can correct misinformation and make sure that people asking questions in my area of fashion history - roughly 1660 though the 1950s - are coming away with an impression that's as close to accurate as I can make it. (Also, now that I'm a mod I can remove answers that might have stood previously, because I recognize the outdated assumptions they're based on even when they appear to be formally-written and cited.)

The other reason is that I'm a public historian at heart. I'm more into dating/sequencing than most fashion historians, which is certainly more of a "behind the scenes" issue, but my favorite thing about my day job (I'm a curator/collections manager in a small museum) is working on exhibitions. Recently I installed Come On!: Portraits and Posters of World War I and Miner Street in 1900 (a map of a residential street in our town with photos and blurbs on the people who lived there); currently I'm working on making binders to hold labels for all of the objects placed on view in our historic rooms, figuring out what we know about them and what I can say to teach the people who actually want to read labels about their original owners (one rocking chair was from a Revolutionary War veteran!), their uses (the difference between an astral and a solar lamp), and their decorative arts styles (mostly Empire, some Sheraton).

Finally, a question I'm qualified to answer!

Please allow me to begin with an anecdote:

One day when I was listening to NPR or some such programming, someone pointed out one of the virtues of listening to music on your favorite radio station rather than your MP3 player is that you have a chance to be randomly introduced to a song or singer you might enjoy which you otherwise might never have known about.

In a way, AskHistorians has been like my history 'radio' these past few years. Getting on here gives me the chance to learn about areas of history which I may not have even thought to explore.

I've even been exposed to hypotheses and frameworks I would otherwise never have known. In turn, as any good armchair historian, I can apply them to my own areas of interest when seeking to understand or explain phenomenon.

Yet another charm of AskHistorians is a certain sense of solidarity I feel. I'm not really surrounded by many people who care or know much about the areas of history I'm most familiar with. By getting on AskHistorians I am reminded that there are not only others who enjoy the same kind of stuff I enjoy, but there are also regular people behind the computer like me who in fact know far more about this or that than I do. It feels reaffirming and provides me with a sense of solidarity I otherwise wouldn't have.

Even though I'm a lurker, the tone of the subreddit and ability to respond to anyone (within community accepted boundaries) makes me feel more like a peer to some contemporary great academic minds rather than feeling like an anonymous fan connected only to such people through reading their books or articles.

Last, and perhaps least importantly, it provides an endless stream of interesting trivia to whip out in conversation. I come here and generally feel comfortable with quoting things I've read because I have trust in the way this subreddit is maintained and moderated.

I first ran into AskHistorians when I was doing a Masters Degree in Ancient History, so I was already at the point of committing myself to further historical education beyond my bachelor's. I love history, I love talking about it, I love introducing things to people from history and being introduced to new things in turn. I was being exposed to a raft of new ideas and subjects during my Masters, and also on AskHistorians, the two fed off of one another in terms of expanding my historical awareness. Then I grew to love what AskHistorians was creating in terms of a particular community, and not long afterwards I was asked to be a moderator here, which I've now been for several years. I find it hard to imagine AskHistorians not being a part of my life.

I don't post as much as I'd like any more due to having less time to do so, but I care very much about the community that I've been part of for so long, and I've made a number of very dear friends throughout my time here. That, along with my belief in what the community is doing, is probably why I've been a moderator for so long now. I feel that AskHistorians is a precious thing that needs watching and nurturing, its robust ability to maintain a polite discourse and avoid derailment is entirely due to human effort, both on part of moderators and the wider community.

AskHistorians allows me to talk about history in a rigorous way that still employs a very different register to writing a paper; it's a public presentation that I'm in full control over. I'm feel like it's a creative and historical outlet, but also an opportunity to interest people, and hopefully change people's perceptions; a number of my historical focuses are considered fairly obscure, so I've always felt a little like I'm an advocate for them, simply by being around to answer comprehensively when someone does run into the Seleucids, or the Greco-Bactrians, and wants to know more.

I started out posting here after someone linked an answer by /u/kieslowskifan – who is officially The Most Knowledgeable, Able and Impressive Contributor^tm here and probably on the whole internet – in another history subreddit and I was thinking to myself "I can't do this exactly because that is impressive but I can at least jump in ans share some of the stuff I know".

Initially another motivating factor to start commenting here was that at the point I was right at the very start of my PhD, conceiving my research question and topic. During my MA thesis I had started to be very disciplined about writing daily and I though this might be a good way to keep up a "writing regiment" if you will and at the same time polish up my academic(ish) English (I'm a native German speaker).

What I soon found that not only had I found a community of really interesting people, both in the users who ask questions as well in those who contribute, but also that the mission of this online space aligned very closely with something that has always been close to my heart: The spread of historical knowledge as a tool to educate and understand in a very open and accessible space. My original interest for my research topic (WWII Germany and National Socialism) arose in my teens because I was part of an anti-Fascist group in my home country that organized among other things, trips to memorial sites, historical workshops, and seminars for people who had no High School Diploma or had never visited university.

What I found here was a space that aligned with what I see as one of the fundamental missions of the historic professions: The spread of knowledge. The fact that this space is driven not by traditional outreach or traditional academia in that content is designed by experts for an audience without their initial input but that it is in fact driven by user input, that experts answer questions they did not develop themselves is what in my opinion makes this space so unique.

Actually seeing how people perceive my field and what questions they have about it not helped me discover actual gaps that exist within historical research (who knew that there still isn't a definitive monogrpahy on the Nazi persecution of homosexuals in 2017?) but it also helped me devise my output better for consumption by a general audience and not just within academia.

It's has been amazing experience here so far, not just asking and answering questions but also having found new and good friends and a community that shares this passion for history.

To me, AskHistorians creates some of the highest quality and most interesting content on Reddit. I was a History/Econ double major in undergrad and I've found so many questions and answers that have piqued my interest in the same way that many of my undergrad classes did. I love that people here are passionate about their fields of study and are willing to write in-depth and interesting answers on so many different types of questions. There are very few places where you can get such informed and interesting content and that's why I always excited to see what's new each day.

I've had the opportunity to answer a couple of questions based on classes and research that I've done, and even was interested in a couple questions enough to go out and do a little additional research based on resources that I already knew existed. I know that I'm not always the right person to answer a question, but I always feel a little proud when I know that I can add something to this place.

I've asked enough questions on this forum to be highlighted for it so I'll answer from that point of view. Those questions have ranged from fish tanks in ancient Rome to Paul Bunyan and fakelore to the Dyatlov Pass incident to Mark Twain, medieval theology, and universal salvation with respect to Satan. Those links show how AskHistorians rewards such inquisitiveness. The users in those threads (tagging to appease the bot: /u/QuickSpore, /u/itsallfolklore, /u/OnlyDeanCanLayEggs, and /u/sunagainstgold) have demonstrated over and over again that they are willing to take a good chunk of time to address the things that pop into my head while driving or reading or staring at my monitor at work daydreaming about being Spaceman Spiff.

I can't think of any other venue in which such disparate areas of historical expertise coalesce into a knowledge pool this deep. Anyone who provides an answer here has clearly parsed through the reams of paper dedicated to their area of interest and distributed a product for users who seem to be looking for something between what you'd find in an academic journal and a well-written and sourced Wikipedia entry. And the best of the answers on here trend toward the former.

Someone else who answered you mentioned 'comment graveyards.' That's another reason I come here. I love those graveyards; they let me know that the moderators here are motivated individuals who are dedicated to keeping Snapple Facts far away from what I consider reddit's City upon a Hill. It's also how I've become comfortable with not tasking everyone who provides an answer to a question I ask to present a list of sources for me to go through to test the validity of an answer. That being said, I can already fill a library with the books AH has added to my Amazon wish list.

The users here also come from a variety of academic and professional fields, not to mention walks of life. The answers that they provide are clearly going to be informed in at least some way by those backgrounds. In that regard there's an aspect that I personally find appealing. I don't know from what angle any given user is going to approach my question and often that leads to the awakening of some latent area of interest in myself and other users.

So, learning is certainly the motivation for me participating here. I lurk around a lot of other places on reddit, but I rarely engage in any discussion elsewhere. The conversations that take place in most other subreddits aren't enticing enough to me. I got a guy at work who thinks people killed off the dinosaurs because 'they're fucking scary' and I can talk to him in person if I want. That's not to say that there aren't good conversations elsewhere on this website and across the Internet as a whole. Obviously, that's not the case. I just haven't found such a concentration of substantive discussion in many places outside AskHistorians.

Very late, but since this is a long term project I feel justifying in still posting!

I initially stumbled across Reddit a few years ago, around the end of my master's degree, and it was an escape for me from serious academic stuff. I came for memes, shitposts and endless references. I didn't even have an account for the longest time, because I just browsed looking for funny stuff. (I still do this, BTW, even though I'm actively involved only here. Contrary to popular belief, the mods do don't have a sense of humour. You wouldn't believe the amount of shitposting and meme-swapping deep intellectual discussion that goes on in the mod backchannel.)

I created this account when I came across a post in r/history asking about the 'feudal system' for the purposes of game design. Since I had just started a PhD on the topic, I got super excited to actually contribute and did. The result was... underwhelming. The poster seemed a bit disappointed with the complexity of my answer and the difficulty of translating it into a workable game mechanic and other, more simplistic answers, got more attention. Like most of reddit, it was fun watching as an outside observer, but once I got involved it wasn't nearly as satisfying as I had hoped.

Then through the r/history sidebar, I found AH. And it felt, all of a sudden, instead of watching other people, I was watching my people, people like me. They were talking about the kinds of things I like to talk about, in a way I found refreshing and exhilarating. It felt like a place I immediately wanted to contribute to, but I saw all the rules and restrictions on answers (which were a great thing) and so waited carefully to spot an opportunity for something I could answer. (To any lurkers doing the same thing now - the Tuesday Trivia provided the best opportunity).

The thing that really sold me on the community though was what happened soon after I had started answering some questions. Being just a baby-medievalist, I wasn't particularly confident and was very nervous about posting. But then along came a little orange envelope from none other than our very own /u/sunagainstgold telling me how much she enjoyed my answers and encouraging me as another medievalist to stick around. As anyone who's spent any time on AH knows, Sun is some sort of awesome answer-writing machine, and having someone like say they liked my writing was such a confidence boost. The fact that she was so encouraging throughout my time here is probably the reason I've gone on to be a flair and then a mod (both of which she prodded and encouraged me to do). While I'm still nowhere near her level, she's a model of how to be an engaged historian online and if I could even get close to the level of breadth, depth and entertainment-quality of her answers I'll be lucky. When I grow up I want to be /u/sunagainstgold.

And through engaging with the sub and with Sun (and all the other awesome mods and flairs here) I feel I've really developed as a historian and developed my own thoughts on what being a historian means today. Writing semi-regularly here has given me much more confidence in pitching my writing to different audiences and really helped me in both academic presentation and in teaching first-year undergraduates. But what started as a way for me to practice writing and generally give myself an ego-boost by winning arguments on the internet has transformed into a belief that what's happening at AH is something genuinely worthwhile, that it's one very unique way of fulfilling a mission that I think all historians should undertake to inform the public in any way we can. And that's why I'm happy to be a tiny cog in this big history machine!

I am a bit late but... anyways.

I used to read AskHistorians sporadically; one day I noticed an unanswered question about the experience of a citizen in Fascist Italy and though I knew enough about that to attempt an answer. And it happened to be in a fairly noticeable thread.

Now, while general appreciation was welcome – perhaps a bit excessive – it also opened the door to some follow up questions that made me question how much I knew about the subject. Now, being not a professional, nor having studied history at higher educational level, I was aware that my knowledge was incomplete. But I believed that, no matter what, I had some clear well formed idea about the most relevant stuff.

In fact I was kind of wrong... The most interesting thing for me became the challenge to put a thought in a form that allows me to relate it to someone else: if possible retaining some degree of the real complexity of the issue – something that is not made easier by the fact that English is not my mother tongue. I do not think that knowledge implies the ability to relate everything to anybody; but it should mean that someone else who takes the time to read through it, should be able to get the idea. This also encouraged me to learn more about a subject I like and allowed me to share some of it with other people who might have an interest in it – also, I think honestly that I can provide some decent content, especially since I can balance my non-professional approach with the availability of Italian sources, which may not be available in translated form.

As a reader, this process made me appreciate some answers more than I did before; I don't know how long it takes, or how much though goes into the process for others, but I can see how long it would take me to come up with something like that.

A final note, and I believe a relevant one; while many focus on the high quality moderation, I have found this to be a rather welcoming community – one that actively encourages users who take some time and effort to contribute – which is an incentive to keep posting.

I mostly just read and vote here, with occasional links to old answers and such. I would love to be expert enough in something to contribute, but it's actually kind of relaxing to have a place where you don't even think about upvotes because you're not commenting. (Am I the only one here with a compulsion to high score as soon as there's a number on something?)

One of the most appealing things here is how much it can surprise you. I can walk into my local academic library, poke around subject headings a while and come up with interesting reading. But it'll only be stuff I knew to look for. Here, you get to see other people's questions (about Hitler and otherwise), and the direction the answerer went with it, and frequently come across something unexpectedly fascinating.

The other thing AskHistorians excels at is giving you a peek under the hood. I get more historiography here than anywhere else, plus bonus academic catfights and research frustrations.

And all in a shockingly civil space for the Internet. I don't even bother with sites I used to entertain myself with five years ago. I'd much rather learn something than waste a bunch of energy getting angry at random people I'll never meet.

Oh, and, you were interested in hearing from women, so <raises hand>.

Hi Sarah!

I've been quietly following the dialogue as you organised this with the mod team, and I'm really excited that we have this chance to support you in your research!

I forget exactly how it is that I stumbled across /r/AskHistorians. Like a lot of our readership past and present, I was a teenager fascinated by history around the time I joined. I'd graduated from school and just started a humanities degree, and when I discovered that Reddit could be useful for more than just cat pictures, I was overjoyed!

At first, /r/AskHistorians was basically just a place where I could procrastinate on my work while still feeling guilt free (or at least, less guilty!) because I was learning something. Sort've like how we always manage to discover those incredibly interesting around the time we're meant to be doing something more important. Even now there's a big element of procrastination to my involvement here, but this time I'm not just learning, I'm supporting community outreach, and promoting public interest in history! Whatever it takes to distract myself from my impending deadlines.

But if it were just about procrastination I wouldn't be here, four years and Lord knows how many hours later. It became clear to me pretty quickly that /r/AskHistorians really is something unique on Reddit and the wider Internet, and something which I wanted to be a part of. This project played an enormous role in feeding my passion for history, and I credit it above everything else for transforming me from a naive teenager interested in history for its wars and its battles to a naive early-twenties-er with a much broader and richer understanding of my own ignorance range of amateur interests.

/r/AskHistorians has shown me how much there is to learn and why it's worth learning. It gives me fascinating windows into fields of study I never even knew existed. It's introduced me to an incredible community and a team of flairs and moderators who I am privileged to work with and alongside whom I feel woefully amateur. And it keeps bringing me back with something new every single day.

Hello and welcome to our sub :).

Well, ever since I have gotten interested in history or to be more specific Economic History, I have been something of an annoyance to my many friends, parents, cousins who had to put up with my lectures about rather obscure topics of which they had no interest in or anything to benefit from. It just so happens that my interests itself are very specific and there is no forum that is better for writing on such specialized topics.

Where else can I write long answers on topics ranging from New Deal, Socialism in Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the impact of liberalization of Cooperative Housing in Sweden, China's agricultural reform, Marxism, South Korea's Industrialization program etc etc. I also actively ask questions and I know the answer I am going to get is a quality one and which I can trust. The Moderators have been very kind in even granting me a flair.

r/AskHistorians is truly a great place where you have a lot of people present who actually want to have an in-depth understanding of a topic and excellent moderation which ensures that there is a very conducive environment to do so. This combination of things is not present in other places. I view it as Singapore of Reddit.

I'm an assistant professor who teaches and studies history. I have been involved with many Internet communities over the years. I eventually gravitated almost exclusively to AskHistorians because:

• It's a chance to practice explaining things to people. All writing is good writing in my eyes.

• Sometimes the questions asked are, either purposefully or inadvertently, very good ones that stimulate a lot of thoughts for me. These thoughts can be along many different lines, but often things I write on here I can later use in teaching or blogging. Sometimes if I see a question enough times it makes me think, "oh, this must be interesting to people, even if it's the kind of question academics tend not to ask." As someone who writes for popular audiences and is always looking for a fresh approach, that is useful. Some of my most popular blog posts were inspired by questions asked on AskHistorians (e.g., did the US warn the Japanese before Hiroshima? how much did the Germans know about the Manhattan Project? if Einstein hadn't been born, would the atomic bomb still have been built by 1945?). Occasionally something I will post on here will get a lot of traffic, as well, and that can be useful. (But self-promotion is not my primary motivation.)

• As a form of procrastination it feels more intellectually useful than Facebook. (I suspect procrastination and "time wasting," in limited amounts, is probably cognitively important; the brain seems to do work in such moments that it does not do when you are consciously trying to use it.) I enjoy answering other people's questions. It's part of why I do what I do, to feel useful and somewhat authoritative. I also sort of enjoy arguing with people (or at least correcting them), and it's a better outlet for that than the rest of my life. I try to limit myself to only about 20 minutes per day.

• People seem to appreciate my efforts and answers and are nice to me on here, and I enjoy that. I only bring this up as a very basic psychological motivation, but also to contrast it with other Internet forums I have been involved with in the past — Wikipedia had too much of an anti-expertise bias, and the sourness of the whole endeavor got to me.

• Lastly, Reddit is a powerful community if you write things on the Internet. It pays to know how it works, what it is interested in, how it responds to things. I suppose one could get that more passively by lurking. But seeing these things first hand is always better. The place has its ups and its downs. AskHistorians is heavily moderated to mimic the norms and idealized behavior of academia, so it is pretty comfortable if you are interested in those norms and idealized behaviors. The rest of Reddit is... not so much. But it's still something people who engage with the broader public ought to be aware of.

I rarely use reddit, but when I found this subreddit earlier today I got very excited. The idea that hundreds of experts are willing to share their knowledge on a public forum, and that anyone can ask a question and receive numerous well-informed answers restores some of my faith in people! I studied History for 4 years at university and have a big problem with the research historians do being kept in an 'ivory tower' - it needs to be popularised. It doesn't seem enough, to me, for a select group of individuals to inform society in the light of history. Rather, society as a whole needs to inform itself in the light of history, and I think the most valuable historians in a given society are those who work to get their research out into the open. An online forum like this is a wonderful way to popularise academic history!

Mainly, it's because Public History to me isn't just a choice in concentration. I came up through the museum field, and talking to the lay public is pretty much my entire reason for pursuing history as a career. I am passionate about my interests, and I find satisfaction in sharing that passion with others in an informative way. I think that's particularly important here, on a website that both has a huge cultural footprint and can be kind of a cesspool at times. Participating in this place, I hope, makes the whole site better and gives me something to point to when people associate Reddit with the sprawling alt-right infestation on this site.

I speak out in favor of public history and working outside the academia as much as I can as a somewhat distracted PhD candidate, but I'd be a hypocrite if I did not practice what I preached.

I also find it easier to write here than on my own, more serious work. Part of that is just the freedom from needing to rigorously footnote everything. Mostly, its the knowledge that I'm engaging with another person to answer their question, with the immediacy of feedback and the fairly likely chance that I'll help start a larger conversation. It's entirely more gratifying than academic writing, though perhaps at the risk of being french fries to the kale salad of my actual work.

I'll send you a PM to volunteer for a longer interview, if you're still looking for subjects.

When I first started posting here I was still in my last year of high school. I'm not sure I could say why I stuck around other than that I generally had nothing better to do and my girlfriend at the time thought I might as well write about stuff I enjoyed (she changed her tune later when she realized it took me upwards of an hour sometimes to put something together). Once I had determined I'd stick around, though, I realized that it was a good place to get used to articulating my ideas and synthesizing thoughts that I could use later for work. And it has been helpful, I'd credit AH with helping me gather my thinking together well enough for me to become confident in my understanding of how classical scholarship is actually done--I've always been good at Latin and Greek, but actually being scholarly is a very different thing. I dropped the Chemistry part of my double major about a year after joining AH and have never looked back. Even more recently it's helped me put together my thoughts better--a number of arguments in my undergraduate honors thesis started as posts here, and recently a user's question made me think about a particular politician's career more carefully than I had before. There's a lot of really interesting stuff that gets asked here, alongside the more regular "what did Hitler think?" and "ELI5" stuff that clutters the upper regions of the front page. Even those questions, until you inevitably get bored with them, are useful in helping understand how to formulate answers that, to a specialist, seem so trivially elementary as to be, at first glance, almost inept. And of course I just like teaching, mostly because I like the sound of my own voice. There's also the fact that, being one of the younger users on the sub, I can learn a lot from people above me. There are a lot of people here who are really useful if you need a little help with something. For example, /u/Astrogator, who works in one of the epigraphic databases, helped me out on some epigraphic work I was doing since the epigraphist at my university mostly does Greek stuff (btw Astrogator, one of the inscriptions, despite what I thought, did actually make it into the final draft of my thesis). And there's a certain degree of satisfaction in finding a nice little piece of the internet where people like me can hang out and not be swamped by the mind-melting barrages of memes that have destroyed at least one classics undergrad I know. There's something very satisfying, for example, in talking behind the scenes with /u/bitparity about some element of Greek syntax, only to realize it's in Byzantine Greek and looks utterly moronic to me.

History is my passion. I originally went to college to be a history teacher but changed to straight history when I wanted to be a lawyer. Now I own my own firm and make my own hours, barely grossing six figures and trying to build my business. I have a house with a pool, a new car on a lease, health insurance, etc. However, I often fantasize about how it could have been if I rolled the dice and pursued my passion, to join the do what you love movement. Ultimately, the career prospects for historians are poor and the economic prospects poorer. I went to a state school where my professors wrote books and no one bought them. The best selling professor was a professor of historical tourism in national parks, who managed to sell a bunch of books in the gift shops of national and state park visitor centers. I had written almost a hundred pages between two 50 page reports on the history of the Cherokee Nation, but I as I read books that seemed like no one read them, I was worried about the futility of all that writing for an audience, essentially, of one professor and myself.

AskHistorians was the first time I could try to answer questions to people who were interested in something to which I knew the answer. I have been banned three times and had a lot of comments removed. I finally created a new "respectable" username that I use only when I have the time to answer something in depth and in full accordance with the rules of this sub, and am even thinking about writing a history of imperial law in the new world that would utilize my trilingualness in English, Spanish and Portuguese, all because of the upvotes I got on this subreddit. And I am not even a flaired member of the community. My other username may eventually be, but I'm not letting that name get sullied by this trice banned username.

As a lawyer, I probably write about two hundred pages double spaced of legal writing a month, not counting copy and paste body text like you find in complaints or discovery. Yet an 8 page essay on here that's up-voted by five hundred people is more fulfilling than a win in Court... especially after having had so many answers deleted by the mods before I got my act together.

So, to wrap up, I write here because as a lawyer I constantly have to write academically (though the style is different) but not about anything people would find entertaining. Here, I feel like people are reading because they want to, and one essay potentially could be read by more people than everything else I write this year for 300 dollars an hour.

I just love the quality of answers, and the demanding requirements, that this sub has.

There are two areas of interest of mine, post WWII Nazi Germany, and LGBT rights. I have asked questions here and there. Unfortunately, not every one has gotten answered, but those that do are extremely impressive. I just keep plugging away, though, here and there, and while I don't like to make repeated reposts and be annoying, I still look for the best ways to get answers.

History was my minor in college, and it's fascinating to me, keep up the good work, and once again thank you to all who contribute and keep this site solid academia.

I am not a historian. My focus has been scientific/computing, not history or sociology. However, history is important--it's referenced constantly, it informs current politics, and (to me, most importantly,) the methodology of the study of history is both interesting and useful to know more about. It's a way of examining data that I'm not directly trained in, and learning more about it helps me think and approach my own personal tasks differently. In short, not only do I learn about history, I learn new ways of viewing the world.

Oh hey I'm a UBC History BA grad.

I love learning knowledge in general, and history in particular. It's too hard to find people interested in history in life. AskHistorians is a place I can read about history, offer my own knowledge, and engage with other people who really like history. It's basically where I can find people with a common interest as me.

I'll email too.

Im a scientist and college professor, and I find thay r/askhistorians answers questions worth answering in a deep and nuanced way. I also appreciate that the answerers often change poorly stated questions into better, more tractable ones.

I really enjoy how well regulated AskHistorians is, while still allowing the subreddit to have "fun" during April Fools. All the posts are informative and it allows an interesting look into how optimally reddit as a medium can work within an academic setting. I typically lurk and have thought about posting but I don't think I have enough expertise to answer most questions. For subjects that I know more about, I would probably answer if someone has not already, but I'm waiting on the perfect question to be asked for that!

I am here because learning about history and sharing that knowledge is one of the most meaningful things I do. If I had to rank things that give my life purpose it would be something like 1)Family 2)Friends 3)Learning about history and sharing what I have learned 4) Career. This is a fantastic place both to learn and to teach. The q and a format means that rather than lecturing I am engaging with something the questioner already cares about. The need for rigor means that I must always refine my own knowledge - I know so much more than when I started. Compared with other history for this is a community much more dedicated to scholarship and less interested in speculation or opinion. Indeed, I find that this place is uniquely respectful of knowledge (so many places treat opinions as equal, or hold people ability to participate more important than distinguishing between who knows what they are talking about) without being too deferential to outside authority. It is a blend of rigor and openness - anyone can answer, and their work speaks for itself. Since I am outside of Academia this is my chance to participate in a fairly substantial exchange about history; it is a great way for me to participate in something intellectual and stimulating and enriching. This also makes this a place worth maintaining and expanding and sharing, which is why I am a mod.

I'm one of those who lurk. I have no formal education beyond high school, but my upbringing and what education I did have gave me a love of learning and of history in particular. I can thank my high school history teacher Mr Page for a lot of it. His genuine love of the subject was infectious and nearly 20 years later I'm still hooked. Unless questions arise about the film industry (my profession) I'm unlikely to ever be able to answer a question.

For as long as I can remember my go to books have been history. Now as an adult I have about two bookshelves devoted to the subject (though actual historians may turn up their noses at many of my selections). about half the tv I watch is documentaries.

Askhistorians is always the first sub I check out. It's fascinating. People ask questions that would never occur to me and invariably I'm sucked into the answer.

I don't know if this is of any use to you, but I hope it can add a bit of data to your project.

I study history with a United States concentration at the University of Delaware.

I come here to be among better historians than I (I hesitate to call myself one), to learn and ask questions, and maybe one day to be a panelist.

I'm very late to the party, but I suppose I could add my 2 cents.

I have had a strong interest in history since I was 8 or 9 years old. I especially appreciated the vast variety of cultures and depth of time that there was to choose from when studying history. Throughout middle school, high school and college, I would become intensely interested in a specific cultures history for a period of weeks or months. I like to think that this fickle but intense interest gave me a basic knowledge about the history of lots of regions.

After I graduated from college with a bachelors in History, I realized that my base of knowledge about the history of Africa was shockingly poor, outside of a simple understanding of the Atlantic slave trade, and Egyptian history. So, I decided to buy some books and try to learn a bit more, especially about the era before Europeans came on the scene.

At the same time, almost 5 years ago, I found out about AskHistorians as a link on the r/history sidebar. For the first year or so, I answered a variety of questions about Finnish and Russian history, New England history, germanic kingdoms, as well as occasional answers about African topics. At the time, I didn't have an expectation that my interest in African history would last very long before I felt like reading about something else.

But, African history questions kept coming up, and very often the answers would not be very good, which motivated me to try and provide more informative, better researched answers and challenge mistaken assumptions. Also, I made a subreddit specifically devoted to African history, so that people interested in the topic could share book recommendations or otherwise discuss African history. Eventually, an African history flair messaged me privately and encouraged me to apply for flair.

Once I got flair, I really saw my role as filling a gap in knowledge, by trying to share information about the pre-colonial history of Africa. At the same time, because I am self-taught in African history, I felt motivated to try and encourage interest in others, and try and increase the number of Africanist flairs.

The mods noticed my enthusiasm for answering and activity on the sub, and they invited me to serve as a mod, which I did for almost 3 years. When I decided to serve as a mod, it was partly because I understood how big a job it was, and I felt "many hands make light work". But, I was also motivated by the hope that I could encourage other people who also have an interest in African history to apply for flair.

However, in the 2 1/2 to 3 years that I was a mod, more Africanists were de-flaired for inactivity than new flairs were minted. When I first became a mod there were 12 africanists, and now there are only 8. Although the mod team did two separate flair drives where we specifically encouraged people knowledgeable about African, Indian, or other under-represented areas to apply, only a small handful of new flairs in those areas came out of it. The lesson I took away from that is Moderators and flairs don't have much power to encourage people to become experts/flairs in under-represented areas of history.

So, now I have tried to reset my expectations, and focus on providing answers to questions that interest me, without expecting to inspire anyone to become a flair.

ps- This answer focuses a lot on the activity of answering questions. I have asked a few questions about Indian or Pacific history, but they didn't get much response. I will ask questions about South African or Zimbabwean history because I know there are active flairs who will often answer them. Otherwise, I figure I am capable of researching any African history questions I might have.

I don't believe I'm a good candidate for an interview but, quite simply, history is fascinating. I love learning of (and researching) the things that have shaped the modern world: Conflicts that have drawn boundaries, people who have created recognizable modern artifacts, the stories of those who have made the world we know now.

This subreddit is a great resource for that. I've been able to answer a few questions myself but by and large I lean on the expertise of the more-qualified academic contributors.

Because I myself do dream of becoming a historian. This isn't a possibility (currently), so I can ease the tension by reading answers by historians. Besides, answers here are very detailed and rigorously tested, which brings responses with amazing accuracy, contextualisation, and overall quality. It's unlike anything else in the internet, really.

Besides, I also want that, when I become a historian myself, be able to actually contribute here. There's something about having a flair next to my username that brings unparalleled pride.

Hello Sarah and welcome!

For me personally, AskHistorians provided an incredble opportunity to expand and focus my hobby, which was at first very loose and could be defined as "literally everything in the past is interesting and I need to know as much as possible". With this attitude, I have devoured many answers on here as a lurker. When I decided to post questions of my own, I very quickly became attuned to the way inquiries on here are perceived and how it is best to approach them. Through the process of asking many, many questions I slowly became much more attentive and inquisitive in my normal way of approaching historical topics. Through this, I also started posting answers (to be sure - I still mostly like to think of myself as an inquisitive layman rather than anything else). Having posts removed or prodded for sources immensely helped in changing my approach to writing to something much more comprehensive. It also made me re-evaluate how much I know about certain topics and which areas can be called my "expertise". Subsequently I studied more of these particular topics and thus my interests became much more clearly defined.

The last step was recognizing how great the community on here is and having a desire to contribute, however slightly, to keeping the quality of the place high. Eventually this manifested in me accepting the offer to become a moderator.

Overall, I love AskHistorians for its uniqueness among pretty much all of online communities and I cherish the ability of the sub to provide in-depth answers to the general public, as well as keeping the forum free of pettiness or rudeness, which tend to sour seemingly every facet of our collective online existence.

Because sometimes there are interesting answers and/or questions. Most of the time I'm just frustrated by graveyards of what I consider to be perfectly acceptable answers, though.

I read and never comment. For me, this is a place where I can actually trust answers. The moderation team does such a good job, and other users moderate each other to such a degree that I feel fairly comfortable knowing what I'm reading is accurate. It's quite amazing how rare that feeling is on the internet. I can honestly say I have never read an article from the internet without seriously doubting most of the information in it. We live in an era where misinformation exists at every level, so it's nice to be a part of a place that cares so much about the truth.

Plus I like history.

I'm a lurker - I lack the knowledge to contribute in comments so I try to do my bit by upvoting and reporting. It seems to be almost the opposite here to the rest of reddit; in any other sub I would downvote a bad comment and only report in cases of offensiveness, whereas here I report bad comments and very rarely downvote. That is mostly due to the moderation policy (which I totally agree with) where incorrect or inaccurate information is removed. In my opinion, that's what makes this place so great- I feel able to trust what I'm reading.

I read this sub almost every day. Why? Because history is fascinating, especially when it's so well written and so welcoming to everyone regardless of their level of understanding. Oh, and you wanted answers from women, so "hi".

I'm generally insufferable about the minutiae about Italian society and culture, especially when discussing in the centuries immediately preceding the renaissance; so this is a great outlet for me.

I kid (sort of). In any case, I find that anyone can name the Ninja Turtles and pass that off as cursory knowledge on the Italian Renaissance; however what most people don't know is that the Renaissance is the apex of centuries of economic, social, and political development; which left profound marks on Italy as well as the whole of western society.

I'm a lurker, not a historian. I wouldn't even claim to be 'interested' in history more than any other topic of study.

The reason this sub appeals to me in particular is the high degree of academic rigour that goes into it. I haven't found many online communities that care so much about the quality of their content.

One thing I find neat about askhistorians is how 'dumb' questions aren't discouraged. There's always room to elaborate on a subject. Contrast this with most technical communities where 'RTFM' or 'JFGI' are the go-to answers for many questions.

I think that like most here I read this subreddit daily because I genuinely love history and engaging it in ways previously unknown to me. The greatest appeal, to me, is the insight given into the world of professional historians. It is a casual enough place to be accessible, but it is strict enough where intellectual rigor is required to be seen and appreciated. In a lot of ways, it seems like a useful bridge between being an armchair historian and a professional producing peer-reviewed works. In this sense, I've enjoyed testing my mettle against some of the titans of this board (many of you are tremendously impressive) with my methodology, subject knowledge, and prose and have been encouraged by my experience. Most importantly, I owe this community a degree of thanks to since my time reading and participating (albeit in a very limited manner) here was a partial factor in pursuing entry into a Master's program in history, which I will be starting in August- the "So you want to go to grad school" series of posts was particularly illuminating and I'm greatly anticipating starting my program and becoming a depressed, cantankerous burnout.

If I'm interested in a particular topic, I can further investigate the source myself. The contributors tend to provide good sources that are easy to read, as I usually don't know the first book to check out on the topic.

I read a lot of history, including getting pretty deep into primary sources on infrastructure and urban planning issues, but since I’m not in the academic world, I don’t really have any way to easily share that knowledge. I would find it both daunting and a bit immodest to organize and write an entire book, or even a lengthy article. I’m much better at summarizing things into a succinct answer to a specific question.

I'm happy to be interviewed, but my email failed. You can PM me.

I'm a normal guy with no background in history, so I mostly lurk. I subscribe to this sub largely because the strict moderation results in top-quality content, something much of reddit -and the internet in general- is lacking in. Even if a fair bit of it goes over my head, I still enjoy reading the answers here and learning new things.

• Practically the only sub where I can comfortably assume that what I read as answers are actually correct. A lot of other subreddits (if not all), if you read a comment that is purported as fact you sort of have to read it with skepticism (or at least should). A lot of "factual" comments elsewhere are either biased, incorrect, misleading, or some combination of all those. Here, I'm way more likely to trust the answers.

• Interesting questions/answers.

• I like history and I like learning about history.

• Makes me wish that I could answer some questions. But alas, people here are smarter than I am. On very rare occasions, some questions I'll do some research on (particularly if the question doesn't have answers already) and learn more about it.

I like history and learning about it. I lurk here because I fear getting my comment deleted. I even double checked the comments here to check if it's legal to comment now. I do appreciate how strict it is here, as it is a very solid quality assurance. Admittedly it turns off my critical thinking radar which perhaps it shouldn't do, but it's comfortable to know that there are strict rules regarding the quality of comments.

Question about your research though: do you take cultural context into consideration? I'm asking as I'm Dutch and people often assume redditors are American.

I'll be your outlier I guess, to some degree, and that's why I am replying to this. Although, in a way, I am just a sort of nerd with great interest in history, and that puts me right in the majority group. Let me explain myself. I am a science teacher, raised in a house of economists, and a very avid reader of history/economy/sociology. My science education and frame of mind puts me off from historical romances, fantasy epics and unsourced historical claims or nationalist views of mankind common history and, instead, tells me to really value the process and production of the academic community. Here I can access snippets of that production, written at a level that I can keep up with. But that's not how I found this reddit, and I think that's the fun part. I also have a hobby. I have been creating a detailed alternative world for a long time. This alternative world follows all rules and logic of our World, be it climatology, tectonics or human history. Geology and Earth Sciences in general I can deal with myself, but, as I try to detail History for my con-world, I often find that my understanding of, for example, the bronze age society, is too limited. I have written a few specific questions here (some answered - this by u/mrhumphries75 and others, some not) that I don't think anywhere else on the whole internet would be answered to with sufficient quality and that I would never found answered in a wikipedia article. Often, just by lurking, I also get answers to questions that I hadn't even think of. This is what's specific and upmost nerdy about me as an AskHistorians user. I went from being a partially uncritical reader of Jared Diamond to a never-satisfied reader of everything beyond "Guns, Germs and Steel". I have also contributed sometimes. Nothing of significant worth or noteworthy but, as a portuguese citizen with some history books in my library, I can easily know specifics to some questions about Portugal and so I contribute to fill in, typically starting with "while nobody more knowledgeable replies, here's something to get started". I source what I say and stick with facts and very little analysis, because I know my limits as a contributor. Still (and I hope the mods read this in a favorable way), I've learnt to always expect "removal".

I read AskHistorians because I find that the answers given are subject to an extremely high bar for quality. Therefore any answers that stay up absolutely deserve to stay up because they are well researched, intricately detailed, and are presented in a way that while adhering to rigorous academic standard, they are also very accessible to the layman.

AskHistorians provides a new way of learning and thinking about the world, both historic and modern, and I can honestly say that this forum has contributed to my growth as a person. Meaning, my worldview, my opinions, and my thought process has been shaped by reading, studying, and processing answers that I've come across in this forum. Originally I had a passing interest in history and mythology in particular, but only passing (I'd read the history textbooks in high school to pass the time). But I can honestly say that every day that I come to this forum, I'll learn something new, many times things that I'd never consider as being a thing.

For example, I didn't even know, or could even conceive of there being a history of porn, a history of sleep, or a history of historic study itself! That's crazy, bruh. Answers here have helped me inform my political opinion, my thoughts regarding issues such as LGBT rights and feminism (it was actually an answer here that made me fully consider patriarchy theory!), colonialism and and its very subtle effects on today's society, and last but perhaps most importantly, have had an influence on my overall thought process and problem solving.

I do not regret a second that I spend here, which is a lot more than almost any other website out there.

I'm gonna go meta on a meta thread: this right here is why I love this sub and it sums up the reason why I have been reading every single thread that had been answered for at least 2 years now: in depth answers, follow up questions, great discussions... This community is up there, a place where members agreed upon strict, deep, time consuming standards. I have a lust for knowledge and history is one of these things that interest me. But it's never easy to just take the time to read about it, to choose a book and get started. It's vast, both wide and deep. So here I am taking a daily dose of random historical content. I love it.

Actually as I never post in this favorite subreddit of mine because of my inability to do so, I'll also take advantage of this occasion to thank all our great participating historians for what they do here.

Also, sorry for my English if I did any mistake.

I'm a lurker. I just like learning about history. Besides just a love of gaining new knowledge I think understanding history helps me understand modern events a little better. I'm not a historian so I don't believe I could actually answer anyone's questions competently. I suppose if I had a good follow up question I would comment.

I will up vote some thing I find interesting, or a response I find particularly good. I don't think I have ever down voted anything here. Mostly because even if I dislike a comment or question I'm still interested in the discussion.

Hi Sarah.

I started lurking AH maybe 5 years ago, when I left Digg and discovered Reddit in the search for something diverting to read during lunch breaks. I quickly found aggregators like /r/bestof and /r/depthhub, and the more those led me to /r/AskHistorians, the more I found myself just heading here directly. I have an armchair interest in history: I'm more after a good story, but I always prefer entertainment that has some intrinsic value, in this case actually learning something. Additionally, I have an armchair interest in knowing about other cultures and perspectives, so the diverse questions that come up here can be fascinating, especially when answered by people from all around the world.

Not the type to just sit on the sidelines in any discussion, I used to chip in with answers here and there, but having seen flaired users provide links to previous good answers, I started "helping out" too: I had been an avid and thorough reader for some time so would often instantly recall great old answers and had great fun hunting them down. So that gave me a fun little hobby, a way to participate more often without getting banned, and a feeling of helping OPs. That activity brought me to the attention of the moderation team, who flaired me as a Quality Contributor. Some time afterwards, I was pressganged recruited to be a moderator myself.

Becoming a moderator completely changed my relationship with this subreddit. Whereas before it had been a great place to hang out, with interesting people who had loads of interesting stories, now I could see what was really getting posted here, and how much work goes into giving participants that experience. So now for me, it's not a place to hang out anymore: it's volunteer work in service of a mission: to help to ensure that the OPs the best possible answers, and encourage expert users to feel welcome and valued so that they'll keep contributing, will stay, and more will come. So I still come here because I feel part of the team, and feel that the subreddit is providing something of value.

I'm not an expert in anything historical, but I enjoy this sub because I love learning about random things. I do have an interest in history as well, obviously, though I'm not academic about it. The stuff people ask about here is really, truly random and there's nearly always someone ready to chime in with eclectic knowledge. This sub and ELI5 are a blast for me.

I have little to no interest in understanding the "big picture" of most parts of history, it's just too abstract and broad to hold my interest.

A lot of the questions that get asked (and find success) on this subreddit are bizarre and have a very narrow scope, which makes them hard to just find and grok using a search engine—they're questions that absolutely require a "real" historian to put the answer into the appropriate context. I find these kinds of questions and their answers much more interesting and entertaining to take in.

Plus the sub is moderated with an iron fist, so the signal:noise ratio is great, making it a lot easier and more enjoyable to learn the answer to the asked question.

Hey! I'm a bit late to answering this but I hope it'll help you out. I started browsing AskHistorians years ago when I first created my reddit account. At the time, I liked that there was a highly moderated forum where I could get answers to obscure questions I couldn't easily find on Google. Over time, as I started studying history both as a hobby and in university, I began to realise that I could actually answer a few of the questions. I remember exactly how excited I felt when I found my first question that I could both answer and that no one else had yet! As soon as I felt that, I was hooked. I'd also echo what some other users have said in that this is a great way to remember information. I've found some great topics that really interest me that I otherwise never would have even thought about.

It took me 2 tries to successfully apply for flair which I really appreciated, as looking back at my first application it really wasn't up to snuff (I think I deleted the comment though, as I delete most of my unnecessary comments after some time). Finally, I feel like I can reach an audience here that I otherwise wouldn't be able to. People come to /r/AskHistorians with an open mindset, willing to learn. Compare that to an area like the comments in /r/worldnews and the difference is stark. In my area in particular there is a lot of misinformation spreading around. Some of it is rather harmless but other bits are outright lies and demonise the Islamic community. I personally have no problem if people have legitimate problems with something, but when they are basing their views on "all Muslims are commanded to kill westerners and if they don't they're just lying to stay hidden until they strike", it gets kind of annoying. Thankfully, the moderation here takes care of fear-mongerers like that and allows the forum as a whole to actually delve into the issues.

Fairly new here, unfortunately I don't have the time/ability to offer good answers so I lurk. I participate in AskHistorians because it is the first really good academically-oriented subreddit I have come across. The requisite high bar of quality for an upheld post and and heavy policing by the mods to maintain an academically rigorous environment means that there's a treasure trove of history and knowledge available from highly informed experts that I couldn't get even from an undergraduate setting.

Personally, I have a thirst for knowledge. Since I am only a junior in high school I obviously do not pertain the same level of information as other subs here, but I'll always make my attempts. History has been interesting for ever since I was in grade school reading books on Alexander the Great, and I hope to spend time in the future researching what is not known. Once again it is very hard for me to information, for example currently I'm researching Hellenic literature, specifically poetry, and have hit a wall trying to find a copy of Callimachus's "The Pinakes". While the members of this subreddit are extremely helpful some times stuff like this is mind-boggling hard to find. But I digress, my point is that I view this subreddit as somewhere to ask for directions, not to find answers. P.S. I've always had an interest in psychology, as well as philosophy, so I think what you're doing is super rad, best of luck with your studies!

As a lurker and a huge history buff since my childhood, I just love this sub. Not only has it suggested a wealth of academic books which I can read and enjoy (while being very accurate/presenting little bias), but it has also been a place for learning random, specific topics like Roman colonization during the Late Republican Era to Medieval sexuality to Bhutanese history that has expanded my knowledge past my comfort zone and has enriched me.

Lastly, the great amount of detail and sources backing the replies made on this sub are amazing, nay, inspiring. This is one of the few subs where people who are passionate and well learned on the topics come to meet.

I rarely comment on this sub but when I do it's usually for books and Quebec history which is drilled like hell into us.

Lurker, made some questions, maybe two or three.

Once I got to make a small two paragraph side-answer that wasn't deleted, and it made me so proud of myself. And I devoted a lot of research into it, which goes to show the quality standard in here.

The high standard moderation is what keeps me around. The everyday hitler questions gets somewhat boring but there is good stuff every week.

I think the sub could improve if more historians from different countries and areas joined it, to wide the focus a bit, since many questions goes unanswered for lack of experts. I've tried to convince some historians into joining it, to no avail. Maybe send invitations or something?

Also, shouldn't you make a google survey? It may be tought to collect data from a comment section.

I love history, but didn't study it at university. So I'm not qualified to answer questions. I ask them instead. I might be almost qualified to answer Napoleon questions. That would be great if I could one day do that :D

Because I need to temper my thirst for knowledge with academical texts that aren't dry and sleep-inducing.

I dig through the archives often, looking for posts relating to subjects I'm interested in, either personally or as a question arising from a class I'm taking. For the former, I'm generally treating AskHistorians as an encyclopedia, only better, because it tends to offer a diverse collection of answers. For the latter, it's usually that I'm checking a lecture from a professor against other scholars within the field, to see how it matches up. This is especially true if I already know that something I'm being taught in class is controversial, or else I'm hearing something that I recognize as wildly different from what I've previously heard.

I also use AskHistorians extensively for getting an idea of the state of history as a discipline: what's the overall job market like; which fields are in most demand; what do historians think are the best/worst aspects of the industry. I also trawl the archives to get insight into grad school.

Honestly, I use it for a lot of things, the above just being the main ones. AskHistorians is my one-stop-shop for all things history-related.

1. I am interested in history, lest I inadvertently repeat it. There is little or no point in being interested about the present or future without being interested in the past.

2. r/AskHistorians has such high standards that one is left with the firm impression that every last comment is peer-reviewed. It is even more reliable than r/AskScience.

3. History is stories, and stories grab the imagination like facts cannot. I learned this crucial fact when watching the 2nd version of Cosmos, which was mostly (I think) written by Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's wife.

I've always had s strong interest in wide range of 'history' topics (wars, economics, cultural norms, politics, etc.). The internet is obviously full of information on all of this, but this sub stands out for two reasons:

1. The oddly specific/strange, yet interesting questions. I wouldn't dream up half of these questions if I tried, so I find myself learning about things that I quite literally probably would never do organically due to simply not knowing what I could/should even be asking.

2. Goes without saying the answers here are amazing. Clear, concise, well sourced, etc. In like two minutes I can learn something incredibly interesting that probably 90% of people don't know.

More of a lurker, but I'll post once in a blue moon.

I'm a professional archivist, but I also publish history on occasion (mostly regional publications, and some pop-history for local newsletters). Browsing here gives me an idea of the kinds of topics that people are interested in hearing about. I like the variance in questions because the researchers I work with are sometimes so static, it gets very boring working, sometimes for months, on the same question.

I also enjoy the open aspect of it. The academic atmosphere can be very authoritarian at times, and I like how anyone can participate here. It creates some problems with bad or incomplete information being passed around, but the moderation team here seems to be fairly good and proactive at forcing substantive participation.

All things considered it's a great resource for Reddit. I don't know that I'd put much weight in its value in my professional life, but after I've answered the same question about rural economics for the thirtieth time in a day, it's nice to unwind with something light.

Admittedly I tend to lurk. I'm finishing up my integrated masters in history and while my university is so bad it's largely killed my love of the subject, I still try to keep my eye out for any new theories and such, and if my knowledge is of any help then I will always seek to share it, if needed. I like to follow the philosophy of 'give no man neither advice nor salt, unless he asks for it' so try to stick to lurking until I can't contain myself any further.

Hope that answer helps. If you have questions, feel free to ask.

I just read stuff.

There is a great variety of topics and time periods on the sub. It's ways fun to read the well thought out responses and learn something new.

I also find it fun to think about the person asking the question. What thoughts/discussions are going on in their lives.

Good people, good resource! I'm a first-year postgraduate going for a career in academia. Two big problems I've run into this year have been 1) not knowing what I need to know and 2) how to organize my thoughts on different things.

To the first, this place is great because I can look at answers from other medievalists here, and I can kind of map out how they ended up being able to give those answers, including some sources, if I want to follow that path myself. At the beginning of the year, I was a nervous wreck because of impostor syndrome--you feel like you're expected to know X Y and Z, everyone else knows all that by heart, and you're gonna get busted for not knowing those things that everyone else already knows. This place kinda helped break that. Everyone's asking questions, it's not a competitive environment. I taught myself to look at the great answers here and not think "shit, why don't I know that already?" and instead thing "oh my god that's really cool, now I gotta ask more questions and get more out of this person!" Basically, the closer you can get to approaching curiosity like a 5-year-old again, the better. Learn like a kid, articulate it later like an adult.

As to the second, answering questions genuinely helps me learn the material better. I figured that out when I was tutoring in undergrad, and it's still true here. Say I just read like five chapters from a history book on, I don't know, the history of literacy, and I'm still jittery from all the espresso I drank during. I could spend it writing down in notes, but if I'm totally honest with myself, notes are really time-consuming, and I don't retain them well. They're quick reference for essay-writing at best. But here, considering the volume of questions we get, chances are good I can answer someone's question related to what I just read or have read in the past month or so, and doing that is like...the best way I can describe it is that it's like laying all the pieces of a log cabin down in order, instead of just sitting on a pile of wood and rummaging through what you need. You don't really understand an idea unless you can package it in a way someone else understands easily. This is super lame and dumb and nerdy but I've started formatting my 'notes' that way. Instead of a bunch of bullet points, I'll make an imaginary question and write a paragraph or so answering it. I'm very aware that medieval stuff is a pretty inaccessible field, so being able to talk about it and show people how exciting it is can be fabulous.

Basically, answering questions is universally good for everyone, and I get some nice selfish perks on the side! As long as I'm not a dingus and give bad answers, in which case none of the flairs here shy away from correcting each other in a helpful, respectful way.

There are a number of reasons I'm here. Let me count the ways.

1. I love most areas of history, and I am absolutely guaranteed to find something new here every time I dip in. This was true when I was just reading, it was true when I started to contribute, it was true when I got flair, and now that I'm a (very new) moderator, holy shit, is it true. Even on questions with my areas of research and knowledge, where I think I know the answer and start typing, the mere act of telling someone else about something always leads me to question assumptions, do the digging into books and journals, and learn something new. And importantly, I get a deeper understanding, which is different and, I think, more important.

2. I am a massive fan of online community as a concept. I've been a moderator and community manager in some form very nearly as long as I've been online, which is a little over 20 years now. Online communities have characteristics offline ones don't, which we're still only barely getting to grips with. AH has a huge sense of community even at the most public end, and that's all the more accentuated behind the scenes.

3. I'm a re-enactor (sort of - I play in the Society for Creative Anachronism), and AH is fantastic for digging out the answers to thorny practical questions, because of the cross-disciplinary nature of a place where historians, archaeologists, literary critics, and others cross paths.

4. I was a mature student on a distance-learning course when I got my BA (History & Literature). As such, I'm downright passionate about access to history for people who aren't in conventional academia, or indeed aren't in academia at all. As a graduate of such a course, I still have access to JSTOR and other such sources of information that the general public don't, and that's ridiculous. All of history should be available to anyone who wants to learn, not hidden behind paywalls or in ivory towers. AH fulfils that mission admirably, and not only gives access to that material via people who can assess it and explain it, but pushes it out into the wider world via social media and other outreach.

I like to see a good scholarly rough and tumble.

Not just typical reddit BS but people who actually know things discussing them at a high yet accessible level.

My participation has lessoned over time, because most of the things I actually have read useful literature on have already been given high quality responses, so the effort of writing a high-quality response seeems less worth it.

I still read a lot of great responses and back-and-forth though, and those are my favorite threads by far.

I'm a writer with a side passion for art criticism, and I study history in so far as it has to do with art and literature.

Incidentally, it has a hell of a lot to do with art and literature, and so I study as much as my capacity would allow.

I prefer the answers I see here even when the questions may be better asked in a different subreddit. The flaired users and mods provide a straight up better experience, including an effort at intelligent discussion and attempting to mitigate/disclosing biases. Not many other subs can offer that

I came to know about the r/AskHistorians through posting on r/genealogy . Part of the great enjoyment of genealogy is finding connections to history, and my research took me to very interesting places and times - and I find incredible intellectual satisfaction in learning as much as I could.

I originally came on here asking a question as part of that, when I discovered ancestors who were part of the Africa trade after the abolishment of slavery. I realised that my question was too vague (basically I was trying to work out whether they were good people or not) and so didn't end up getting answered, but asking the question spurred me to think more and I went off and did a fair bit of research myself.

I was drawn in by the sub, and absolutely in awe of the wonderful thought out answers. I can learn about so many different times and places. I haven't posted another question yet, but I have dipped my toes in to answer a couple of questions - mainly as second tier comments. My favorite answers are this one where I talk about Aboriginal possum skin cloaks and this one where I talk a bit about the history of Japanese coins . After writing the second one, I made a little trip to the Japan currency museum and got to ask lots of questions to satisfy my thirst for knowledge.

I studied history in university, but am now far from the academic world. I do have an intense interest in Australian history (my major) and as a long term resident of Japan I'm also interested in Japanese history around the time of the Meiji restoration.

Recently, I've had connections with Christian schools in Tokyo, so questions about the history of Christianity are interesting - I just bookmarked a question about the treatment of Christians during the Second World War and I'll attempt to create an Ask Historians worthy answer.

I just found your post yesterday, when I was absent-mindedly letting the subreddit comment stream pass by, and somebody answered in here. So, late, but better that than never.

History has already interested me, and I spend some time in school working on extra-curricular local history research. To be fair, it ended up with my teacher doing most of the leg work, but at age 14, that is maybe excusable. But it gave me a first-hand experience of archival work, sifting through old files to find sources. To this day, few things get me as excited as old documents: even the most mundane-seeming ones can shed light on the bigger picture. But I digress. So, after school, I had to choose one from my quite diverging bunch of interests to pursue professionally. In the end, history lost out to computer science, the tie-breaker being that I was worried about the job prospects in history.

I made history my hobby: the majority of books that I read (sadly, not as many as I used to and as I would wish) concern history. The majority are written by academics, but for interested laypeople with knowledge of the fundamentals, but not the specific niche. Most of them, by necessity of having to sell, focus on "big history": history of countries and regions, biographies of rulers, etc.

This is what I enjoy most about this subreddit: there are many questions asked about "little history" and specific details, such as the history of the Stardust Club in Heidelberg, the reasons for the dearth of variation in early modern given names in many European countries, or what were the working theories for the existence of twins before modern medicine. While I often have a rough idea of what the answer might be, it's good to see it supported (or refuted!) by people who have the proper qualification and knowledge.

The downside with those questions is that more often than with others, one of two things happens: either they attract a lot of external commenters, which gives us many subpar and/or inappropriate answers, and means the mods have to work extra-hard; or, conversely, they get drowned by more popular topics. Military history, I'm looking at you... that is one of my pet peeves, the amount of military history questions here, because it's one of the fields I'm least interested in. But they are popular, so I won't complain too much.

Most of the time, I simply lurk and read. Occasionally, I answer the odd question. This is always a hard decision for me, because I feel that for virtually every topic, there is a more qualified contributor here. I always feel that it's a judgment call. On the one hand, I think that every inquirer appreciates getting an answer. On the other hand, I think that not getting an answer is better than getting a bad answer, which is the reason for the heavy moderation. Which I think actually makes this place more welcoming and helpful, even if that sounds counter-intuitive at first: by weeding out joke answers, rude replies, and speculation, we can all focus on the topics at hand, and on high-quality replies that we can actually trust.

So most of the time, I only pick up questions that haven't gotten an answer for at least a day. Another reason I answer rarely is that it still takes me a long time to put them together: an hour at minimum, even for relatively straightforward answers. One limiting factor here is that I have very few "go-to resources", and typically have to dig around longer for sources than I expect someone who works in their field had to. I also notice that phrasing and ordering my thoughts can take me quite some time. While I do academic writing in my field, computer science and history are far enough apart that they only share the absolute fundamentals of scientific research (don't plagiarize, provide sources for claims). Thus, bringing my thoughts to paper in an ordered fashion is taxing and time-consuming for me, much more so than in my native field. However, I enjoy the exercise, so I keep going. And while I'm always a little worried that my answers are on the border of being acceptable, none of them has been removed up to now, so I guess my judgment of what questions I'm qualified enough to give at least a basic answer has been right so far.

edit: I forgot to mention that I also spend a little bit of time every now and then on reporting inappropriate posts. I also point people to the correct section of the FAQ if I notice them asking a frequently asked question.

I'm a bit late to this post. I saw it last week, but I too am knee deep in graduate research. I'm just finishing my MA thesis and will be starting my PhD in the fall.

Some background for you, I was previously a working professional in the journalism world for more than a decade. However over time, I developed an interest in ancient history as a means of bridging my two pasts, as someone who was born in Asia but grew up in the southern U.S.

As my journalism work began to run dry, my involvement in history increased, not the least because those skills were quite transferable. I credit this forum, as well as Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast, with getting me started on the path to professional history. I've been on Reddit for six years, and have been involved in this forum in some capacity (as casual poster, a flaired poster, a moderator, and now an at-large poster) easily for the last five. Even before Reddit, I used to frequent history forums on Paradox Plaza's web page (makers of historical wargames).

I credit the sharp and critiquing minds of all caliber on this and other online forums with shaping me into the scholar I am today, not the least because when answering questions on this forum, I need to simultaneously navigate dual audiences: the academic and the lay. I needed to anticipate and ready my responses to criticism.

I continue to be involved because I think AH is one of the best forums for forcing historians to think critically about what their work means to a popular audience (which let us be honest, are our real funding bosses).

Even now, I consider this place to be a testing ground for my PhD comps. Because if I can't hack it here, I certainly won't be able to hack it during test time.