162 Questions about Afghanistan: A Case Study of Current Events and Digital Public History on Reddit

On April 18, 2021, a user posted on the forum AskHistorians “What did people in Afghanistan do for fun after the Taliban banned nearly every pastime?” and received over 7,700 upvotes or ‘likes.’ The same day, the New York Times ran a headline stating, “Debating Exit from Afghanistan, Biden Rejected Generals’ Views”. A few months later on August 14^th, the top AskHistorians post of the day asked, “How did Afghanistan go from being relatively stable 50-60 years ago to the constantly-devolving mess it is today?” and received over 4,400 upvotes. The New York Times headline asked “The Afghan Military was Built Over 20 Years. How Did it Collapse So Quickly?” Moderators of AskHistorians can anecdotally discuss the correlation between current events and the content of questions asked on the subreddit, but this is the first analysis to look add data to this observation. This poster will add empirical evidence to examine how Reddit’s AskHistorians serves as a social media-based source of historical content and how current events shape public inquiry about the past by using a case study of post titles and text containing the word “Afghanistan” from 2021.

In 2021, AskHistorians moderator approved a total of 162 questions with the word “Afghanistan” in either the title or text of the post. Post approval means that the question complied with the subreddit’s rules, and crucial to this case, did not ask about modern politics or events less than 20 years old. AskHistorians moderators approve between 100 and 150 posts per day on topics ranging from food culture in Ancient Rome to how accurately Avril Lavigne’s song “Sk8er Boi” represented high school dynamics in 2002. In other words, the history of Afghanistan rarely comes up on the subreddit. Of those 162 posts, 79 of them (48%) were posted in August and September during the peak coverage of the United States’ withdrawal of troops from the country. Nearly all 79 explicitly or implicitly linked their inquiry to current events. While only a quarter of the August-September posts were answered, these two months averaged 10 answers per month compared to an average of 2.7 answers during the other ten months.

This poster will use the textual and numerical data from AskHistorians post to create word clouds, bar graphs, and other visualizations in RStudio that show the interest levels in Afghanistan and related history on Reddit, the types of questions asked, such as specific questions on Afghan history unrelated to the news cycle, questions related to American and European history, and requests for reading recommendations; the responses to questions through various engagement metrics including answers, comments, and upvotes; and it will look at the relationship with current events by comparing post submissions with newspaper headlines.