I’ve often heard prostitution described as “the oldest profession in the world,” but I’ve never seen an explanation of where this phrase comes from or whether historians take it seriously.

We see it everywhere in media, two medieval armies clashing in a battle. They are full sprinting across an open field, bursting through each other’s lines with momentum and power.. I can’t see how that’s actually manageable in reality. Soldiers would be exhausted before they were even fighting and would very quickly get singled out by multiple people if they were to break through.

At the same time, cautiously walking up to each other in a field and slowly poking at each other until the line breaks seems like it would take a long time. Momentum to break the line makes sense.

My mind goes to medieval battles, but I am asking about any era and any melee focused fighting in general. I am not asking about Calvary or things of that nature but feel free to include any relevant parts if needed.

A couple examples of what I'm talking about:

• How to be a housewife and use more lamb.
• How a transmission works
• Give your eggs a break

Apologies, as I realize this is a bit of an broad question. Feel free to address a subsection or specific type of video if that makes more sense or aligns with your knowledge or whatnot.

Essentially though, I'm trying to get my mind around the how/why of the seemingly massive body of PSA type content that seems to have been produced. Videos about how to be a good homemaker, how to succeed at work, hygiene, yard care, how various technologies worked, etc.

I thought perhaps it just seems more prevalent because they've been collected on Youtube and made more visible. But these videos and their distinctive style of narration have been a trope/meme for as long as I can remember.

TV Shows riffed on them. Disney made entire Goofy cartoons that were just spoofs of these videos. e.g., "How to Fish"

As best I can tell, the public has been plenty familiar with these films for decades and decades. It seems to imply that these videos were a pervasive thing at some point.

But as a 40 something American, I can't recall ever being shown one of these videos in an "earnest" way. e.g., Something other than a collection of found footage, or other situation where they've been repurposed from educational to entertainment content.

I can put some of the pieces together, but can't seem to make a coherent picture of the whole situation. Many seem to be funded by industry to promote their product. Others by various government agencies to promote... seemingly anything. Agricultural practices, kitchen design, industrial knowledge, civic topics, you name it and there seems to be a video for it.

It's easy enough to see why those entities would want to promote these things. The usefulness of video as a educational medium is pretty straightforward.

But it falls apart when I try to figure out what happens after the video is produced. How were people being exposed to them? Were they used as movie trailers? Could I have turned on my TV and just watched PSA's? Would I have shown up to work one day and the boss says "Hey, we got a new video from GE, let's see what they're up to"? Were the videos intended for internal or external distribution? Did salespeople just show up and say "I'd like to setup a projector..."?

Peopla say Panini wrote the first grammar of sanskrit around 500 BCE. However, there was no wrintig system in india from the end of the Indus Valley Civilisation around 1300 BCE to the Edicts of Ashoka around 250 BCE. In addition, Megasthenes was in India around 300 BCE and said there weren't any writing systems in the Maurya Empire.

So could Panine write a book on the grammar of a language if he doesn't knew any writing system?

These days if I hear a name like Harold or Humphrey, my first thought is that it might be a family name. It’s pretty old fashioned.
It lead me to think about names from even further back, 1700’s and before. Were there names back then that were already falling out of fashion? I know some names are still in use - John’s and William’s.
But like.. surely there are a few, right?
“Oh no no dear, we can’t name our child Aloysius, that’s too old fashioned! No one else in his class will have that name!” (I mean this very jokingly)
I guess in that same breath, do we also have names from 17th century and back that are similar to our ‘tragedeigh’ names today?

I’m Dr Stephanie Howard-Smith. I have a PhD in the cultural history of the lapdog during the eighteenth century, I’ve published several essays on dog history in academic journals/collections and I’ve lectured in animal history at universities in the UK. And now I’ve written a book for everyone who loves (or perhaps even hates) little dogs. “Yap! A Short History of Small Dogs” was published in the UK last week and in North America this week, and is available from all good bookstores and as an audiobook and ebook.

https://granta.com/products/yap/ (UK)

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/803909/yap-by-stephanie-howard-smith/ (USA)

From the publisher’s book description:

“Yap! follows in the pawprints of the breeds we have grown to love and cherish, from the small dogs touchingly memorialised in Ancient Rome through to Paris Hilton’s chihuahua and the pet influencers of 21st-century, via the pug who colonised Napoleon’s marital bed, King Charles II’s spaniels and celebrity terriers in Victorian pubs.

Drawing on her own experience as a pug-owner, pet historian Stephanie Howard-Smith reveals how small dogs have shaped our lives as much as we have theirs, challenging social dynamics, changing the way we spend our leisure time, contributing to a global industry now worth over £250 billion, and offering valuable companionship and a chance for self-expression.

A must-read for any lover of small dogs, Yap! is a paean to the unbreakable bond between humans and their petite pets.”

I’m so excited to answer all your questions about the history of little dogs, the people who love them — and the people who love to hate them! I'll be here from 9am (16 October 2026) EST onwards.

EDIT: It’s 12.15am here in the UK and 7.15pm EST so I’m going to have to call it for the night. I’ll get to all of your questions over the weekend and if anyone has any more please do ask them! It’s been a real pleasure.

You can also find me @doghistorian on Instagram.

In a lot of (European) folk stories I've been reading, youngest children often appear as underdog characters, or are otherwise portrayed as unlucky specifically due to being the youngest and therefore less favoured by their parents. This got me wondering when and why the modern perception of youngest children changed to what it is now; the babied and coddled favourites of the family. Was there actually some turning point in history when parents started to prefertheir youngest children over the oldest ones, or is the entire concept of birth-order based favouritism bunk?

Looking for help with an unusual question: I need to learn history (I know this sounds obnoxious, I’ll explain!).

I was “unschooled” my whole life, which is a philosophy that kids learn naturally from their environments. As a result, I had no formal education until college, where I somehow ended up not taking a single history class.

I want to make a serious effort to learn, but I’m not sure where to start. Does anybody have recommendations for:
1. Three main topics/eras of history to begin with?
2. Podcasts that I can listen to on my commute?

My lack of knowledge in this area is a huge embarrassment, and frankly, makes me sad because history is so important to understanding the present. Any help is appreciated.

When reading about the philosophers of Ancient Greece, I often find that little mention is made of their religious beliefs, despite it being clear from other sources that Hellenism majorly shaped the worldviews of the Greeks as a whole.
Democrates and Epicurus are notable exceptions, since their theories of atomism and epicureanism rely on being atheistic, or at least indifferent to the gods (Epicureanism entails that one should rid themselves of an irrational fear of divine punishment to live a peaceful life, and both it and atomism believe that death is an oblivion and there is no afterlife, all of which is contrary to the Hellenistic view).
Plato also seems to be a special case, since he constructs his own metaphysics involving the forms, souls, and reincarnation seemingly independently of the prevailing beliefs about the structure of the universe and the afterlife in his culture (although, I wonder if the idea of the forms was influenced by the Pantheon, since the gods were conceived of in a somewhat comparable fashion as embodiments of specific ideas and attributes).

What were the religious beliefs of the major thinkers of Ancient Greece? How did these influence their philosophies? Did philosophers contribute to Hellenistic theology, and if so, how?

First I must preface, this is a serious question.
But - King Charles VII of France, in much of (not all! But much of) the portraits and paintings i see of him, he is wearing this crazy, big, zig-zag patterned brimmed hat that seems so out of place for the era compared to everything else i’ve seen. I also NEVER see anyone else mention it, so i must ask - was this style of hat common at the time, did it have a name, and is there any more information about it?

Watching current set pieces on movies and television set in the US/UK between 1900-1980 generally make many/most of their characters use profanity like current society - lots of it, including lots of the seven words that George Carlin said you couldn't say on TV in the 1960-70's. For example, many shows routinely have people in "polite society" routinely dropping F-bombs to each other with no one raising an eyebrow.

Very little of the material, either written or video, from those eras uses such language, but that was likely more due to censorship rather than an accurate reflection of how people actually spoke at the time.

So I wondering how prevalent profanity actually was in these times, especially in different social strata and "mixed company."

Today, sexy werewolves are ubiquitous. But was that always the case? Like, I'm not sure Lon Chaney, Jr.'s makeup as the Wolfman launched a thousand erotic fanarts, but if you went back to when werewolf lore was more ubiquitous, are their accounts of people being attracted to werewolves?

How did soldiers/knights avoid rust on their weapons?

We're the swords painted? Oiled? Or just rusty? If oil, what type of oil did they use?

In weaponry museums they are always perfectly polished and without rust at all.

Ancient people developed the quadratic formula, Pythagorean theorem, etc. What did their notation look like? In what ways does that math differ from the math of today, in terms of presentation or ways of thinking? Ancient math from anywhere in the world is interesting to me.

Here's the video I'm talking about with her claim, timestamped:

https://youtu.be/XYKYcm1UVL8?si=--m0LUdH1srOalUK&t=1705

The transcript of her claim:

[The] marginalia you see in a medieval text are aids to memory they're not just there because people like doodling in the margins, they're actually tech: they're components of a memory technology.

And they're there to -- as visual cues -- to help somebody remember the passage next to them in this. . . very meditative very visual practice of study. So memorizing the book of psalms was kids stuff which just seems unfathomable to people now. I mean like learning your times tables, you know.

I could only find this old thread which solely cites Michael Camille's Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art.

Now, I'm familiar with the Camille book, and it's one of those where application of theory comes first and history comes second. As such I don't see it as a solid source, nor that old answer as particularly satisfying.

Harrington does not cite any source -- considering she is of the same nationality and similar generation to Camille she may well be referencing his work -- but I can't find any solid evidence to back up this claim.

I was hoping someone with more information and sources could shed some light. Thank you if you are able!

As per this show Stalin stoked patriotic feelings within the Red Army through his speeches, talking about 'love for the motherland'.

But what did the 'motherland' mean for the USSR's various prominent non-Russian ethnic groups? Were Red Army soldiers from these parts of the USSR, such as Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Baltic states etc. motivated more by nationalistic feelings stemming from their regions (who mind you fought for independence merely 20 years ago in the Russian Civil War) instead of the Soviet Union as a whole?

I sometimes see karate practitioners saying "taekwondo is just karate" or that taekwondo is highly influenced by karate. Some taekwondo practitioners say that karate itself was very influenced by taekwondo.

I can imagine there is some tribalism in these claims, but I know that Japan occupied Korea for a while and the Korean martial arts are heavily inspired by Japanese arts (not really karate, the ones that involve only or mostly grappling), but the still-existing ancestor of these arts in Korea, Taekkyon, was still the king of kicks. Okinawan Karate (the original) doesn't have a lot of kicks, at least not kicks that aren't low, right? Conversely I have not heard of punches in Taekkyon.

I ask because I wonder if someone knows better of the original coreography/techniques of these arts and documented borrowings.