I've noticed a few things:

• one, that military history is incredibly popular; but whether that's a cause or an effect of the sheer quantity of military-themed history documentaries and books, I'm not sure.
• two, that a substantial minority of questions are formulated in such a way that they sound like the enquirer has a school/university history paper due, and is using the subreddit as a helpful resource.
• three, that a lot of questions are to do with the minutiae of how life was lived and experienced in the past, suggesting to me that what people want out of history teaching/textbooks is a bit of relatability. It's maybe easier to delve into the history of a time and a place if you understand how the people of that time and place ate, slept, worshipped, dressed and so on, and how this influenced/was influenced by the parameters of their worldview. It's interesting to see how many people are subscribing to the notion of histoire des mentalités without necessarily realising it.

Not a historian, constantly participating (AKA bugging historians) on this sub tho.

Probably the biggest thing I've noticed is the sheer abundance of questions about Adolf Hitler, and to a lesser extent Stalin, or Mao Zedong...basically a lot of questions that reflect a very standardized 'Great Man' theory of history. I always knew this was sort of the case, but I didn't really think it was a PROBLEM until spending more time on AskHi and realizing (1) it's not a good idea to look at history in such a way according to real historians and (2) it's a reflection of a really pop-culture style of teaching history. Sort of woke me up to a serious issue with history in high schools, if anything else...to clarify, I've been out of (public) high school for 4 years now, so it's pretty fresh in my mind. But in my history courses I was taught, pretty strictly, Revolutionary War->Civil War->World War 2. And that's, uh, it. My teacher was a basketball coach one year, football coach another year, which wouldn't normally make a difference but now it's pretty obvious to me they probably weren't qualified to teach history. The sheer fetishism over World War 2 (I got to watch Band of Brothers AND The Pacific in class!) contributes to the overflowing of 'Did Hitler like to eat beets?' type questions.

This is a really good discussion to have. I hope more people weigh in. As someone who aspires to one day have a flair and has answered a couple questions here, I'll add my own very amateur thoughts to the matter, primarily pertaining to the history of the Precolumbian Americas.

Probably the biggest thing that's stuck out to me (although it isn't surprising), having had IFTTT alerts set up for several months, and occasionally browsing the new queue, is that almost nobody asks about any American civilizations besides the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca. Even the Maya hardly ever get a single question about them, the Inca get a few more, and the Aztecs seem to get far and away the most, which still only amounts to 0-5 questions per week, usually 1-2 (about once a week I type "Aztec" into the search bar and see what's been posted recently). Only a few times a year will somebody ask about Teotihuacan, or the Tarascans/Purepecha, the Olmecs, or the Mixtecs or Zapotecs (combined, I'd guess that all of those get 4-8 questions a year). I don't think I've ever seen a question about the Wari, the Tiwanaku, the Toltecs, the Tepanecs, or the Chimu, let alone one of the even more obscure civilizations, and the only question about the Moche I've ever seen is one about the famous sex pots.

Probably the most surprising thing to me was almost nobody asking about the Maya considering how much we know about them relative to other American Civilizations.

I think there are several factors at work here.

• Almost nobody knows about half the civilizations I mentioned, and often they incorrectly group them with later civilizations. (For example, people saying Teotihuacan is "Aztec")
• Among those who can name those civilizations off the tops of their heads, even less people know that we know anything substantial about them.
• Among those who know that we know anything substantial about them, even less of them know enough about the civilization itself to actually have something to ask about. In order to ask something you generally need at least some knowledge about what you're asking about, or you won't have a question.
• For some of these civilizations, especially in South America, most or all of what we know comes from archaeology, which is obviously harder to ask historical questions about. Notably however, this is not true with the many Mesoamerican civilizations like the Toltecs, Tepanecs, Purepecha, Mixtecs and Zapotecs. Even the Chimu in South America have some primary historical sources, as do a few others.

The solution to this is to devote more time to these people in the curriculum. I think that a full semester of history, or, at minimum, a long unit, needs to be fit in on this topic somewhere. I think that its very important that we give students a good and full chronology of American civilizations so they don't come out with an idea of Mesoamerican history (for example) as something like this:

Olmecs --(collapse)--Mayans--(collapse)--Aztecs--(RIP Forever),

with the Incas potentially fitting in there somewhere, although who really knows if they were in Mexico or Peru? If you do know the Incas were in South America, your chronology might look like this:

---------------------------------------------------Incas--(RIP Forever)

And then people come out of school with an idea of precolumbian America as full of stagnant, monolithic civilizations that ruled the same area for 2,000 years without anything changing beyond the occasional mysterious collapse. Which is fantastic for justifying European conquests.

It might be interesting to some people to see what the other questions I normally get alerted to are. The keywords my IFTTT checks for are as follows:

aztec OR mesoamerica OR native american OR maya OR tarascan OR teotihuacan subreddit:AskHistorians

And some common questions are:

• Some variant of why were Native Americans behind technologically?
• Why didn't Native Americans infect Europeans with diseases?
• Did X Native American group know about X Native American group? (Usually asking if people from the US knew about the Aztecs or something like that)
• Something about what Hitler thought about Native Americans.
• Why didn't Native Americans develop/do X?

Questions about "Native Americans" in general are extremely common. They're also hard to answer, because Native American is an incredibly broad category, including all indigenous people from North and South America, and because the OP could mean just people from the US and Canada or people from all of both continents.

I could rant about this all day, but I'll stop now.

I have noticed that a lot of people who ask questions don't seem to understand the amount of interpretation that historians do, and that it is possible for different historians to hold opposing opinions on a topic that are both defensible​. Both on here and on AskAnthropologists there are quite a few "my teacher says x so tell me why she is wrong" questions.

People also often seem to use this sub to try to justify shitty beliefs. There are a lot of questions about whether it was totally cool back in the day for an older guy to have sex/marry teenage women. Many other questions also have racist undertones ( "golly gee, I'm just asking why First Nations people were so primitive").

This is more from running our FB page, (which exists, and which you should like and follow), but here it goes. People really like the methodological and theoretical questions. People are interested not just in the truth about history, but how to find it themselves. Based on views, our all-time most popular post was about using art as a historical source. Other popular questions included dealing with empathy as the central skill of the historian. People also like history to be relevant, and I don't just mean clickbait. I think people are interested in things that touch on some experience they've had, or society has had. In late August we saw a lot of interest in posts about the false equivalence between Nazis and partisans. We also see that questions about daily life are -always- popular. And pop culture - from the Civ games to Disco Cult Classics - always drives interest.

That literally anything counts as a History question. So far I've encountered Philosophy, Theology, Art, Economics, Politics, Maths, Languages, Literature, Geography and Science. Granted, some of those involve the "History of X, Y or Z" etc. but some questions often lend themselves better to their proper academic discipline than history, there is a historical answer but personally it isn't at 100% of its answering potential when only thinking historically. But, knowledge is knowledge, history or not, right?

I see a lot of questions on AskHistorians that have declarative opening sentences. "This happened because of that..." Often, these seem more like a way to shape responses rather than actually seeking the historical truth. It seems like starting with an axiom that must be accepted to do further analysis on the following questions.

I'm going to show my bias towards my field, but a few things really come out:

1. Military history engages a lot of people from differing backgrounds. This is probably the most active field on the sub, with political history a close second.

2. Interest in history of science is often limited to questions of science and religion.

3. Public perceptions of history aren't all that advanced. I don't blame members of the non-academic public here; I blame the lousy high school curricula they were forced to endure.

4. Most questions are much more focused on bigger picture ideas than academic approaches usually allow for. I think this is a flaw of the field and one that the polarizing History Manifesto correctly approaches.

Among other things, that a large number of non-historian people seem to only perceive past cultures through modern day lenses, or believe themselves to have superior understanding of political or societal issues of the past, because of modern day hindsight.

I'm new to this sub. Although I work as an editor, I'm formally trained as a historian, and academic history is my first and true love. I stumbled on this sub about two weeks ago, and I absolutely love it. I think the mods do an excellent job removing weak answers, and the focus on sourcing answers and providing proper historical responses is excellent. Great stuff. I can shamelessly say that I'm addicted.

In my limited experience here, I've so far observed a bit of a disconnect between users who asks questions and the historians who answer these questions. Users are often looking for quick, straightforward answers, when in fact the question is complex and the answer highly nuanced. I guess that reflects the disconnect between what people think historians do and what historians actually do. As has been mentioned, I don't think many users understand the amount of interpretation that goes into answering a question. The myth that history is simply memorizing facts and that historians are fact repositories is certainly pervasive. I think it's good that we're trying to break that down a bit here.

Both this and TIL have taught me that a lot of people have had woefully poor history education wherever they lived, and a lot of readers seem to be from places where levels of "general knowledge" are pretty low. It makes me glad that this sub is here, so that readers can get well-written, sometimes easy to understand and informative posts about whatever subject they're curious about.

I've learned that there is an absurd amount of people on the internet writing terrible historical fiction who have no hope of ever getting published, but nonetheless want some sort of extremely specific historic validation of their key plot point. I'm just like: sorry buddy, but no one knows precisely what an inhabitant of Upton Snodsbury in Worcestershire would have done on the morning of April 31st, 1537 if his daily routine had been up-ended.

Keep an open mind people. Sometimes the answer's not what you expect, and often there isn't an answer.

How interconnected everything is. I've only been on here a couple weeks and already answered two questions that each required pulling from three different areas of my life. And only two of those are actually history-related. If that's what happens for just me in two weeks, I can't wait to see what other combo-expertise answers everyone comes up with as I keep reading.

It’s shown me that a lot of people have not been shown or given the tools to evaluate historical sources and books well. This is of not fault of their own, but rather the education system that’s in place in many areas.

This is something I’ve been having to learn myself during my undergrad career, and in part thanks to AskHistorians.