I agree completely that many questions presented here have embedded assumptions and that often these assumptions are troubling, prejudicial, or at least presentist in some way. I often begin answers by challenging the premise of the question, and that is often a necessary place to begin. You are right!

At the same time, we must understand that this is a healthy part of the process of exploring the past. History is not just about understanding what happened in the past. In a rather inevitable way, history is how we, with our modern perspective, understand the past. We bring prejudices and our modern perspective to the subject, and it is typically necessary to step out of one's skin and consider how our modern perspective might be affecting our perceptions. How that is done is part of the process undertaken by trained historians.

Questions presented here at /r/AskHistorians often require an answer that is as much about ourselves as it is about the past. I frequently answer questions that begin with the premise, "We all know that all legends are based on something real, so (a) how do we explain "x", or (b) could "y" have been the basis of "x". The problem here is that it is a matter of modern folklore that "all legends are based on something real." The premise needs to be challenged and understood in a modern cultural context before the question can be addressed. When the sort of prejudicial stances expressed in questions occur - as you indicate, the best of answers handle that premise before dealing with the heart of the question.

You'll be interested to note that questions with faulty premises are addressed in this Rules Roundtable.

Put simply, any decent answer to a question with a false premise will itself address that premise in the first place. Nothing says you have to accept the premise, after all.

Speaking for myself and my own flair area, which is frequently-asked questions in general and Medieval water in particular, I get false premises every day. I have copy-paste responses prepared in a .txt file to address faulty premises like "Why was Omaha Beach a failure?" "Why did soldiers of the 18th century all stand in lines?" "Why did the Church persecute Galileo for his heliocentrism?" and my favourite, "Did Medieval people drink booze all the time because of contaminated water?" and its variants "If so, what about fetal alcohol syndrome?" or "If so, what about Muslim countries forbidden to drink alcohol?"

My copypasted answer for all three forms of the Medieval Water Thing even leads off with "I'm afraid you're starting from a false premise".

Ultimately we don't want to remove questions, no matter how ill-phrased or badly-founded they may be. There are very few bad questions, and the actual bad ones are usually an OP trying to push an agenda (which we remove under soapboxing) or something we know won't get decent answers (like the poll-type stuff). But if it doesn't fall afoul of our grounds for removal, we'll let it stay. It may be ignorant - but isn't that why we're here? To address that we know we're ignorant of the question we ask about, and wish to be enlightened?

I'd like to take issue with one of your paragraphs, though:

The reason is that the premise is not historical but cultural or sociological. A historian is not expected to know the current cultural background of a country or a region, or a group of people. The question is historical but the premise is current. So historians, being focused on history, cannot say whether the premise is true or false. They just identify the topic and tell its history.

Here's the thing: A lot of history has to touch on sociology in the first place. My own field is Medieval aqueducts, but in the course of studying water technologies, I also have to look at how people related to their conduits, why they treated their water the way they did, and why they put up their aqueducts. A historian can't not know culture - historians deal in culture, breathe culture, and on this subreddit, explain culture. Hell, one of our Actual Capital-H Historians published a book entitled Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History. And the answers in the tracksuit thread did indeed touch on culture, most of them pointing out that it's specifically a gopnik thing.

So I really don't know where you're coming from with 'not historical but cultural or sociological' - indeed, we have eighteen flaired users who have 'culture' outright in their flair titles, and others go even more specific. Would "Irish Food History" not touch on culture? Would "Medieval Law" not touch on culture? What of "Eunuchs and Castrati | Opera", "British Regimental System", "18th-19th Century Society & Dress | Queenship", "Dueling", "African Literature", "Musicology", "Vajrayana Buddhism" - are these not culture?

It's going to take a while, but you can be assured that any answer that we let through for the "why no secular Muslim countries" thread will deal with the premise, should the answerer find it faulty.

And because it's my flair area - you're far from the first to have this concern.

I don't think there's necessarily harm in poorly phrased questions or in questions that don't pass academic muster - if you create a rule that not only do answers have to meet proper academic standards but so do questions, then this sub just becomes a pseudo-academic journal and loses 98% of its participants.

Instead answers should correct the faulty assumptions in the question, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with an answer being "The fundamental underpinning of your question is incorrect, and here is why..."

It suggests that OP has collected data on religious attitudes and various group affiliations in the immensely huge “Muslim” world and reached the conclusion that Tunisians, for example, are more religious than Chileans.

Does it? Or does it just suggest that they've heard this somewhere and taken it to be true? Or that they've considered what they know of the subject - for instance, they know about the Hajj but don't know of any religious activities on that scale among Christians - and that knowledge has inevitably given them an impression about the two groups, whether or not it's accurate or a complete, in-depth picture of the situation? How else do you think people who aren't historians - i.e. virtually everyone who asks a question here, as is the sub's purpose - come to any conclusion about history?

To take a random example of a more or less inoffensive premise, I'm guessing the user who recently asked how Japan went from losing WWII to being rich is not an expert on the Japanese economy, but just has a general idea of it from popular culture and so forth, which led them to be curious about the subject. If they were an expert, there wouldn't be much point in asking. The same goes for the two questions you've cited.

Asking a question with a particular premise doesn't imply that you've personally verified that premise yourself, it just implies that you think the premise is true, which could be for any number of reasons, some bad, some good, and some with no particular reflection on the asker at all. This is a sub for asking about things you don't know, not for displaying your research in the form of a question.

While I kind of agree with your point. Topic 2 (aka the Muslim majority country topic) had (completely factual) answers that absolutely destroyed most presuppositions about the countries that are now "theocratic" and previously weren't. I think it was absolutely a loaded question but I'm glad it was asked because the answers were very eye opening to those of us who didn't know the complex history of world geopolitics and religion 1950-1980.

Sometimes people don’t understand a topic well enough to ask the question in the proper academic framework or using the “correct” perspective. Some people will do things like mistake a stereotype for a “truth” and ask a question based on that.

While some questions are obviously dog whistling or posted for more nefarious reasons, I would suggest that gatekeeping in the manner OP suggests is not in the best interest of this sub. Use it as an opportunity to educate.

To be honest I think the OP is pushing an anti-intellectual perspective which seems to be a common thing these days. Automatically attributing an agenda to questions you don’t agree with, assuming the worst in people, banning discussion instead of educating and seeking a dialogue. “I don’t like the way he asked that question it makes me think that maybe he’s racist so therefore we should just delete the question and call him a racist.” You want people to be experts before they ask questions.

My general go to is that when I see a question with a faulty premise, I take a step back and try to rephrase the question in a more professional way. For example, with the adidas tracksuit question, the meat of the question really was "what kind of role did tracksuits and other western fashion styles play in Russian society during the 1980s and 90s?" And I'll have to push back on the notion that the idea that the Muslim world is more religious is a construct of western media. While Muslims might not necessarily indicate higher levels of religiosity across the board, religion has a significantly more prominent role in public discourse in the Islamic world than in Christian Europe, where even nominally secular states like Syria, Lebanon and Turkey display a similar or even higher prominence of religion compared to countries like Poland, Ireland or Greece, which are known for being particularly religious. I'll take a stab at it in a bit.

Topic 2

I'll give my opinion on this as a practicing Muslim. Firstly, I personally didn't see anything wrong with the question. That might be my bias of wanting to see Muslims practicing their faith. It might also be my personal experiences where most other Muslims I meet are also actively practicing their faith and open/proud about it.

That aside, the main thing I wanted to address is the two problems you had with the question. I agree with you that the question was subjective and an assumption, and it could've been worded better. I really don't see it as a big issue. You have everyday people coming here and asking questions in their heads. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Let the experts correct their assumptions. This is a learning opportunity.

What I found problematic is you thought it was a "harmful" question because it reinforced a negative stereotype - Muslims being religious. That seems worrying to me. Muslims aren't seen as less advanced because we might be more religious. And it definitely did not start with Trump. Orientalism goes back centuries and it only intensified against Muslims post 9/11. That is my only nitpick with your overall post.

I too, would like this sub to not turn into Quora.

I think this is a good thing to bring up, as any longtime reader here has probably seen a few questions of the like raise up to the top.

Using your sinister example question ("...why rape is a part of the culture of nation X") as the worst case, the question now is whether it is a bad thing for something like that to rise to the top of AskHistorians. For the question we're talking about, the top answer begins immediately with:

Your question is hard to answer because it's based on inaccurate but widespread assumptions.

...which as other commenters have stated, challenging inaccurate assumptions should form the basis of a good answer. So the question now is whether there is harm with even the worst imaginable questions being asked, so long as people actually read the answers to see the misconceptions refuted. If they do, I think that's great! There aren't a lot of places on the internet that both are open to the general public and have strict enough moderating to ensure that information is up to a standard.

Though users don't read the comments, or a sufficient answer never appears, it might serve instead to propagate the misconceptions ("well, AskHistorians is a pretty serious forum, if someone asked a question about XYZ and it's allowed to stay the premise must be true!").

Maybe if a question gets to the very top with a controversial premise, the mods could insert a comment in the thread stating so (though I feel bad recommending anything that is more work for the mods)?

The reason is that the premise is not historical but cultural or sociological. A historian is not expected to know the current cultural background of a country or a region, or a group of people. The question is historical but the premise is current. So historians, being focused on history, cannot say whether the premise is true or false. They just identify the topic and tell its history.

I agree with your first sentence but disagree quite strongly to the remainder of the premise. Most historians who post here have Ph.Ds. That training requires preparation in more than just the period and place of their research. In many cases that means being knowledgeable about the places they research up to the present. Additionally, historians don't just 'tell history' we make arguments about the past. In particular, we are interested in change over time. That means knowing what came before and what came after. While historians are by definition interested in the past, we cannot help but shape or questions about the past through the present. Finally, most researchers need to secure funding for their research and find ways of getting published. In many cases, that means being able to answer the 'so what' question about the period and place were study. This inevitably means explaining why the thing we are interested has modern relevance.

The flip side to all this is that historians of Islam, religion, Eastern Europe, or fashion will have the knowledge to situate the type of questions you comment about even if those questions are not particularly good historical queries.

edit: fixed a few typos.

harmful stereotype that the Muslim world is more religious

This also seems to be making assumptions. I’d argue that for a given definition it is likewise not simply to be taken as read for this post that this is (1) false, (2) harmful. That presupposes a lot about the exact quantification of ‘religious’ being used, that the Muslim world is definitely not more so by some such measure, and that this is automatically a bad thing. I’m not even sure we can objectively say any of these.

That said, I agree with the concerns - the original post, making rather opposite assumptions, should also have either been more precise and substantiated the premise, or rephrased the question openly enough to keep the premise broader but so it could still be discussed.

I also have seen questions that seem to have premises that are simply wrong and I've wondered if one has to be a historian with good sources to point that out. For example, mixing up Old ENglish and Early Modern English.

But on the Muslim religiosity question, the OP seems to accurately describe the data as found by Gallup polls. The four largest Muslim countries were all over 90% religious, while no country in Europe or the Americas was except tiny Paraguay.

Well, those are legit questions and need to be examined, stopping people from asking them will achieve nothing but the opposite. Imagine a child coming across a person with physical deformity and loudly proclaim "ma, why's he ugly?" You don't stop the child from asking the question, but by answering how it might have happened, it's not nice to say such thing and ultimately, hope that the child will gain understanding and compassion from this experience. Hushing the child and pulling it aside is really not the best solution, IMO.

Now, some of us plebeians are not as educated, eloquent or politically aware than the scholars. To us, "Why is the man so ugly?" is the best we can do. Would "Excuse me mother, but why is the male specimen of homosapien significantly below average in conventional aesthetics standard?" really better?

Questions are the first step to understanding, even if they sound dumb or offensive at first. Please don't kill questions.

Lot of long answers in here, and I agree with your overall point, but I think the tracksuit question might not be a good example? Rewrite it with Americans and denim jeans, I think it scans just as well (and the answers that question would attract, equally complex and interesting).

When the tracksuit question came through here originally, I felt there was a metaquestion visible behind it that basically said "hey is there substance to this meme?" And lo, there were some pretty good answers to that question too.

A historian is not expected to know the current cultural background of a country or a region, or a group of people. The question is historical but the premise is current. So historians, being focused on history, cannot say whether the premise is true or false. They just identify the topic and tell its history.

This is absolutely not true and frankly an insult to the historian’s profession. Historians have to be and are absolutely aware whether they are “going against the grain” and deconstructing clichés. If anything, someone who has studied the history of a cultural phenomenon is in a better place to explain how or why a stereotype came to be than any other social scientist.

Now if the answers in those threads aren’t up to par as you say, that is an entire different discussion which the moderators should look deeper into. Banning a loaded premise isn’t a solution to me neither, because that would be used by less savory communities to say “See! Political correctness got to that sub too!” As someone else in this thread already pointed out, most of the time faulty premises are the first thing to go on the chopping block in a good answer. If that means that a lot of people upvote or look at the thread because they see a stereotypical premise they believe and afterwards is deconstructed in the first comment they see, that is a good thing. (This is the case in the second thread you linked to by the way).

My point here is that some questions can reinforce harmful stereotypes - even if the asker and the replying historians have the best of intentions. While this is not exactly soapboxing, as there is no malicious intent, it is still a troubling issue.

This is an open forum meant for a general audience to be able to ask experts questions. For that to work, people need to be able to ask questions from where they are, which is often somewhat ignorant and based on stereotypes. To require the asker to be properly informed and nuanced on a subject before asking a question turns this forum into an ivory tower.

It's also just generally a bad way to go about responding to questions.

As an example, when a coworker learned I was mormon she asked if my father had more than one wife. Was that question ignorant, yes. Was it based on stereotypes, yes. Was it what one would call politically incorrect, again yes.

It was also a honest question and deserved a reasonable answer. Not a tsking about improper questions and memo to HR.

"I'm very concerned about soapboxing." They said, from their soapbox.

I agree, though I would point out that your own post has an unwarranted minor premise.

this sub’s [current] top post - is much more worrying, as it reinforces what seems to be a harmful stereotype that the Muslim world is more religious and - as a result - as certain orange politicians would have you believe, not as “advanced”.

I took the same stance (that if the Muslim world is more religious it must be less advanced), but as an atheist liberal who thinks that all religions are bunk. I don't see the need to insert your politics here, even though I likely share your own political affiliation.

I recognize the ways in which my own comment is unsatisfactory (and remains unsatisfactory), but insofar as OP has framed their post as a META one, their framing of the situation may precludes moderators from recognizing or addressing it.

In short, OP's post (and my own comment) commits the same error as those they are calling out, but is perhaps more problematic because their discourse presents itself as objective truth via the META label.

I'm honestly not sure it's possible to eliminate incorrect baseline assumptions in questions here. I will admit that it can be a bit tiring (especially when it's the same assumptions over and over), but if I'm answering...that's a "me" problem. I can always take a pass if I'm not up to it. But on the other hand, as u/DanKensington mentions, it often means I have an existing answer ready to go (no .txt file though).

The Muslim countries question is interesting, because part of me was kind of eye-rolling. Not that the premise is totally wrong (you can pull all sorts of international surveys that do show very different levels of religiosity in the Middle East/North Africa vs Western Europe), but because of the assumption that there's something inherent in the religions about this, and that the regions have pretty much always been that way (also that the regions themselves are "Muslim" and "Christian", which overlooks secular European Muslims and religious Middle Eastern Christians, among others). So the assumptions are actually the ahistoric piece!

And frankly the answers there did an amazing example of showing how that's not an accurate assumption for the Middle East, and how it's based on some big changes and events in the recent past few decades! My only regrets are that there wasn't more (last time I checked) about the role of Saudi Arabia in that, and also that we didn't get a discussion of how a "secular Europe" is a very recent phenomenon as well.

So: I think wrong assumptions behind questions are honestly kind of par for the course: a good answer will address that and explain why the premise is wrong.

Also:

"A historian is not expected to know the current cultural background of a country or a region, or a group of people. The question is historical but the premise is current. So historians, being focused on history, cannot say whether the premise is true or false."

I'm honestly kind of confused by this. A historian of ancient Iran obviously doesn't have to know much about Iran in 2021. But a historian of 20th century Iran probably will have some experience and knowledge of the present. And anyone studying Iran in 2021 will deal with recent history as well. It's not like the two things (current society and recent history) can be studied in vacuums, even if the study of the present day is more sociology. Sociology, anthropology and recent history kind of bleed together, at least in my experience with modern Central Asia.

Just dropping in to mention you used 'he' to refer to historians.

If I may voice a concern - most of the responses in this thread neglect that these loaded questions, if I may refer to them thus as a shorthand, are often presented uncritically on people's main Reddit scroll. Most of us engaging passively with /r/AskHistorians are clicking through from this area and, in most cases, we see something unanswered, shrug, and go about our day. I might bookmark something I find particularly interesting for follow-up, but that's about all.

Hopefully it's obvious from this (admittedly anecdotal) snapshot of user experience with the subreddit that there could be some troubling knock-on effects from loaded questions. Whether deliberately or not, they can reinforce a passive reader's existing biases, and because of the methodical and careful pacing of actual informative responses in this subreddit, can go uncorrected or unamended for quite a while.

I'm not saying this to absolve myself or other passive users of responsibility to engage with questions in a critical and intellectually honest manner. I just want to make sure that the effect on the broader audience isn't lost on people who specifically navigate to this sub and engage with it as a sort of forum, rather than as a portion of their Reddit experience.

Which leads me to wonder, how does one ask a question which only has premises that can be confirmed by an historian?

"A historian is rarely equipped (nor is he expected to) to discuss the harmful stereotype portrayed as true in current popular discourse." Or 'she' dear boy. Why not go for a more neutral 'they'?

While this is not exactly soapboxing, as there is no malicious intent

I am not convinced this is true, by the way.

I noticed the tracksuit question too and wondered why it was posted because I knew reasons why it became a thing, why it's a meme etc because... I'm a sociologist 😂

I haven't even checked, but I'd love an r/asksociologists for people to ask these questions about historical to current changes in society. Us sociologists, depending on our subject specialisms are social historians. We go back tens of thousands of years, up to today. So we definitely could answer the culture over time questions and bring relevance of today into it.

If r/askhistorians had an automod to message in new posts that diverts users to other subs (e.g. r/asksociologists), that would help. It's a bit shit though that so many people haven't heard of sociology let alone know what sociology is all about to ask someone. Pretty much everything to do with people is sociology.

I understand where OP is coming from about dubious premises, and I would inject three critiques of his analysis. First, any historian responding to these questions is equipped to raise the question “what evidence do you have that this is actually representative of Eastern Europeans as a whole?” And then segue to answering why and how—based on pop cultural representations of Eastern Europeans in film etc—this came to be a dominant stereotype or narrative.

Secondly, though we in pluralist cultures often have a laudably reflexive aversion to stereotypes which is clearly well-intentioned, stereotypes aren’t always untrue or unfounded. I recall reading once in Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society that disharmonious relations between German-American and recently immigrated Irish-American communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was attributable partly to German stereotypes about Irish immigrants relating to their propensity to alcoholism, the frequency of cholera outbreaks in Irish neighborhoods, and a whole lot of others. Mean-spirited and prejudicial though it may have been, these stereotypes were rooted in facts. Irish-American immigrant neighborhoods were more likely to have higher incidences of alcoholism and cholera outbreaks. Now, we could have a robust discussion about why that was, and why American culture—due to nativism, anti-Catholicism etc—was less conducive to the assimilation of Irish-American immigrants, but the fact remains that the stereotype wasn’t all wrong.

From Intellectuals and Society:

Cholera, for example, was unknown in America until large numbers of Irish immigrants arrived in the nineteenth century, and cholera outbreaks in New York and Philadelphia went largely through Irish neighborhoods. People who did not want to live near Irish immigrants, as a result of diseases, violence and other social pathology rampant in the Irish communities of that era, cannot be automatically dismissed as blinded by prejudice or deceived by stereotypes. Strenuous efforts, especially by the Catholic Church, to change the behavior patterns within Irish American communities, suggest that it was not all a matter of other people’s “perceptions” or “stereotypes.” Moreover, these efforts within Irish American communities ultimately paid off, as barriers against the Irish, epitomized by employers’ signs that said “No Irish Need Apply,” faded away over the generations.

Thirdly, why Islamic countries have not fallen into the pattern of secularization which has characterized nominally confessional Jewish and Christian communities throughout the Western Hemisphere is a worthwhile question. As to whether we can substantiate the religiosity of peoples in different parts of the world, and compare it to others, we can with polling data. While I’m not knowledgeable enough to verify the quoted comparison of Chileans vs Tunisians (according to my linked source, Tunisians are more religious than Chileans, incidentally), I can with a Google search verify that lots of collected data would support the conclusion that people in the Middle East for example, are more religious than people in Europe.

https://www.pewforum.org/2018/06/13/how-religious-commitment-varies-by-country-among-people-of-all-ages/

As for why the Muslim world tends to be more religious I’d venture to guess that because there are fewer distinctions between secular and religious spheres (and depending upon the level of observance imposed by certain governments—or whether the regime in question is expressly theocratic or not—in Muslim countries, there is sometimes virtually no distinction at all) in Islamic theology would go a long way to explaining why that has been a slower process in Muslim countries. Muslim jurists double as clerics as well, so all this points to a kind of cultural order which resists secularizing trends more strongly than in Western, or other non-Muslim countries. That said, in many elite circles (versus at a small town or village level) in these countries, like Jordan, for example, you often finds lots of people are more or less religiously lapsed and more secular. So status influences often the level of observance vs secularization.

This recent source indicates that the Islamic world is in the midst of a new secularization:

https://m.dw.com/en/middle-east-are-people-losing-their-religion/a-56442163

So, the Muslim world is catching up with the West. One key finding is that Muslims are disassociating religious faith from religiously ordered societies and calling for reform, which theocratic regimes in Iran and Saudi Arabia are becoming alarmed by. When you couple this with the fact that Islam is still the fastest growing religion in the world perhaps reformed theological schools will be ascendant; perhaps traditionally raised Muslims will eclipse today’s reform-minded Muslims. It is too soon to tell.

On the contrary, I think these questions are the most important ones, because (hopefully, at least) the answers genuinely educate people and destroy prejudice.

It's been mentioned that usually the premise of a problematic question should be addressed by an acceptable answer, but I feel that this tends to be done "too gently."

I've seen a fair number of answers that I thought should've been "let's mostly address why this is a problematic assumption" but are more like "well, not really, but here's some related stuff from my field of study that you might be interested in."

I realize that's a problematic area which can run afoul of the ideas of 'there's no stupid question' and 'we don't like to remove questions / be unwelcoming' - not to mention the problem of 'I'm an expert in medieval aqueducts, I can't deconstruct unconscious racism for you.' Yet I fear that, particularly as the 21st century presidents - and, lord, 9/11 - start falling out of the 20 year rule, this sub may end up having to take a harder line on the idea that questions don't have to intentionally violate the "don't soapbox/propagandize" rule to be a problem.

But your alternative is to ban questions that do not fit your politically correct definition? That is far more dangerous.

Without the freedom to ask any historical question we want (good or bad, ignorant or intelligent) we will all lose out on education.

At the end of the day this is a public internet forum, the historians can be anyone and the USP of the sub is to allow multiple historians to answer questions and debate.

It's that exact reason why we are not allowed an answered flair, all questions remain open to further answers and all answers are open to debate.

To give a more sinister example: OP may have asked why rape is a part of the culture of nation X.

In my comment history, I have absolutely responded to AskHistorian questions that LITERALLY DID THIS. It is absolutely a thing that happens.

Because most questions posted to this sub are based on the experiences of non-historians , that is to say, lay people. It’s part of the reason this sub is so popular because history affects all of us.

People who want to know more about history have their own biases, preconceptions, prejudices ; but their subjective experience has generated a curiosity that they want to verify.

It doesn’t matter if the questions that people ask offend you, or reinforce stereotypes - they are still a valid method of engaging history from a perspective that is perhaps the only one available to them.

You have no call to gatekeep approaches to history.

Humans are inherently prejudiced. This prejudice obviously then reflects in the questions they pose. It is better to accept this prejudice as an inherent part of human nature.

"...The reason is that the premise is not historical but cultural or sociological..."

Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you.

I used to be a big fan of this sub, then these "tell me why large numbers of people do X" questions kept popping up, usually becoming popular because the premise fed into some pre-existing stereotype among the readers and experts.

Whatever period of time you're an expert in, if somebody asks you a "Why did people do/not-do X?" your answer should be to refuse the question. Turns out people are not all the same, but academic consensus is. The most appropriate answer should be along the lines of "I can't answer that, here are some examples that support your premise, here are some that refute it. In all honesty we don't know. As for the person who actually made decision Y, they public said this one thing, while we have close sources that say something a bit different ... (yadda yadda)..."

But that's not the way humans work. Instead, historians, like every other profession, go through phases where one reason for public perception triumphs over another one, then a new generation comes in, somebody writes a paper or provocative book, and everybody flips around. There's no shame in that, it's actually probably very healthy in the long-term, but it tends to lead people into talking out of their butt.

These kinds of questions can't be answered in the way requested for things that happened last week, much less a hundred+ years ago. As much as this is red meat for those already primed to repeat how much they're caught up on the latest opinion, it's okay not to be able to answer something. In a way, this is the historian version of breaking the 20-year-rule. You're not answering a question about something that happened in the last 20 years, you're answering a question about how current academic opinion has solidified around a topic in the last 20 years. It's the same thing, only meta.

Which leads me to my last request: I'd like to see more "history of history" questions. How did academic opinion of the later crusades change from the mid 19th century through the end of the 20th? What are the various reason military history might be on the wane and has it gone through cycles? How did the job of historian develop from Herodotus through the early 20th century? These kinds of questions might be considered meta-meta, but for folks interested in history they show a field that's not afraid of looking at itself with a critical eye. That's probably a much healthier intellectual environment than simply taking all comers and insisting that replies have lots of sources. Lots of folks have lots of sources. There's a patina of priesthood here that's not attractive for some readers. (Also, by and large, this kind of thing doesn't happen. I exaggerate in order to make a point. I still find this forum most interesting. Please keep up the good work! It's just not perfect and you guys can do better.)

OP, how would you phrase the title of the tracksuit post in a way that met your standards, while also being snappy enough, and still essentially asking the same thing?

Please do not censor questions like number 2. I learned so much from those answers. Many of us on this sub are here to learn and have our preconceived notions challenged or changed.

Don’t let this sub become a place that tiptoes around difficult questions.

The first question is interesting too (even if it is based on an incorrect assumption) but I agree that maybe the history subreddit isn’t the best place for it.

Edit: I take back what I said about the Russian track suit question. That answer was super interesting.

As a political scientist, I gotta say that happens WAY TOO OFTEN with political questions. It's absurd. This sub is amazing but when it goes to politics people just... They are not trained in science, and sometimes history explain things, but most of the times you can't just throw a historical fact and say political phenomena has an explanation.

I suppose we could do a couple of things:

• require/encourage every top level answer to express their view on the premise.
• introduce tags on posts with says: “bad title”/“potential misleading title”

I really appreciate OP for bringing this up.

I welcome this rule change, those two posts struck me as very much not in the realm of what you should seek out a historian for

Thank you for saying this. I hadn't seen topic 1, but did see topic 2 and felt the premise was rooted in bigotry. But Reddit be like that sometimes 🤷‍♀️. It's more disturbing that it's the top post.

I guess OP has never seen pics of Iran in the 70's...

I think part of the issue with addressing more dubious questions like this is this subs rules on all comments necessarily including sources. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely understand the reason for that rule and I think it has been broadly successful in promoting a much higher quality of discourse here than can be found elsewhere on Reddit, but it's also very confining in instances like these. I saw the tracksuit post at the time and I had some input I would have liked to give, that having grown up in a Slavic country in the 80's and 90's and having lived in Russia somewhat more recently I feel would have been valuable, but was very subjective to my own experiences and not really something I could give sources for.

That said, not to start too much of an argument but the second post you mentioned, regarding religiosity in the Islamic World, did have a valid assumption: Muslim Majority nations are, with few exceptions, much more Religious than the nominally Christian nations of Europe and North America. While Christianity in South America and Africa does complicate the narrative a bit, and while younger and more internet-savvy generations in the Muslim World are more secular than their parents, the observation that Muslim countries tend to be more religious than "Christian" ones is broadly speaking a well supported statement, as is the statement that Muslim majority nations tend to be underdeveloped by first world standards. I'm not including a source for this because this is honestly one of the few times where "just google it" feels valid, given the amount of study that's went into this and that it isn't an even remotely controversial statement among Sociologists (what would be controversial however is suggesting that the West is more developed because it's Christian, which some would argue but is a point of view that I strongly oppose).

So the opposite kind of soapboxing is ok? You know, the ones that paint false or misleading narratives around support for left wing ideologies? I understand that "professional" historians and anthropologies may be reticent to talk about things in a way that doesn't put minorities on a pedestal, because of the way those fields have been used to justify "racism" in the past, but this is supposed to be a history subreddit, and the mods really are way too overbearing, especially when it comes to points not supported by the mainstream leftist narrative.

I'm glad you said this!! I noticed those two particular questions (as well as a few others) and they stuck me as as having an "agenda" and based on some assumptions.

I just don't understand why people insist on an academic answer to their niche question. Why not post the question to r/history where it can be answered albeit without the scholarship we experience on this sub? There have been many questions that can't be answered with certainty, but could bear speculation to a certain degree, and that is also an exercise in studying/learning history.

What about all the incredibly anti-semitic "questions" about the Israel/Palestine situation?