What questions do you have about stuff from History, or am I the only one?

[EverySongbirdSays]

Hi all, HQ here. We're moving this thread over to History Club now where Songbird will be starting a Part 2 thread for more History quizzical shenanigans

The main history thing I've been pondering for the last couple of days since the weather shifted is the history of clothes.

So... how did Early Man manage in the winter, how did they make clothes out of animal skin?

After that, I understand that clothes production as we know it today began with the industrial revolution.

But how did people manage for clothes you know before we had cotton or machinery

How/when did we realise you could knit wool to make a jumper?

I'm sorry if it's a bit of a stupid question

Has anyone got any stupid questions I might know the answer to ?

LRD - oh, that didn't upset me at all, hearing the mere fact of it happening. I mean when there are very detailed accounts of what various procedures involved, and you already knew what theywere years ago, didn't need to hear ever again.

Yes, there is so much more to history than the flippin' Tudors. They were only 118 years of it!

That's really interesting about the King Arthur connection, hadn't twigged that one, just thought it was odd how it was the younger son who had the father's name.

Nominating for classics

Aww thanks, Alice has been on to me and they are moving it to History in the next few days.

Viz - a viz grooming - what I really meant was how did we go from looking like cave people to washing our hair with shampoo and stuff and STYLING?

Ooo another - history of makeup!

Imagine if we lost all electricity tomorrow.

We'd never cope.

I was born in the mid 70s so was of an age where I became aware of current affairs etc in the mid to late 80s as the cold war was drawing to a close. Something that has always intrigued me was that we were told growing up that eg Russia (as that is the biggest, most obvious example) was a secretive paranoid state, where communism had effectively left people as slaves to the government, living in misery. Now I know that certainly there was (and is) a lot of 'bad stuff' that went on there. But then I also remembering studying a topic in geography about access to healthcare around the world, and discovering that the USSR had far more doctors per head of population than either the UK, France, the USA etc.

So it got me to wondering about real people's lives. ie. Could people access healthcare? Presumably education was taken seriously to educate all those doctors? Did people laugh, fall in love, get excited over the birth of a baby, eat cake, have their friends round for a gossip and a drink? and the government was just some far away group of people in Moscow who felt distant from everyday life, much the way most of us have political opinions but on a day to day basis we are more concerned about putting out the bins or getting the kids to bed?

Or was everyone left so paranoid that no one could really be trusted, and people couldn't really make friends? Was life actually relentless misery?Were they so poor that they were actually starving? Or were they just poor in comparison to UK standards? Did people just muddle along much like we all do?

I realise that these must seem like staggeringly naive questions, but I really have no idea.

Flour is just ground up cereal crop though isn't it? Cereals are pretty low in nutrition for the effort to eat them, so grinding them up to make it easier to eat large quantities makes sense to me. Then it would get damp and bubble...sourdough.

Fun but quite modern food fact - all modern farmed corn is descended from corn that was exposed to radioactivity in early C20th in experiments in an attempt to find corn that was sweeter, easier to grow and provided more 'ears' per seed planted. First 'GM' crop. www.drmicozzi.com/the-curious-case-of-corn?

More book recommendations - Time Travellers Guide to Medieval England. Also Wild Swans is amazing about China, communist revolution pre and post (well, post-Mao)

I found Wild Swans: three daughters of china by Jung Chang a intriguing insight into china before and during Chairman Mao - if that any help treaclesoda.

I haven't really found any good books sort of post revolution for Russia - but then haven't looked that hard.

x -post there with Batteriesallgone

Are those the books by Ian Mortimer, I have the guide to elizabethan england which is fantastic. He made a tv program too but I haven't been able to get my hands on it.

Have you checked YouTube, Maudlin? There's a shed load of his work on there.

Batteries you're right but how did someone find the stuff inside one bit of corn and then work out how a lot of it would be worth turning into flour? The ancient Egyptians were grounding corn.

Treacle Cuba today has high ratio of doctors who are regularly sent to world disasters.

What a wonderful thread, though I'll never keep up!

songbird - I don't know much, but I come across a lot of medieval recipes for conditioner, face cream, stuff to remove spots, blusher, lipbalm and lipstick -that sort of thing. Also for dying your hair. It goes a long way back.

What surprised me, recently, was discovering that the oil used for anointing the monarchs of the UK has an actual recipe (a secret!) and was made by perfume-makers. My DP made me look it up after we were watching about Elizabeth I's coronation!

Yes. I have but couldn't get it. I think he made it for bbc so had seen it before but would be great resource for my students.
Absolutely love Dr lucy Worsley too.

It was suggested that because Jewish people tended to observe Kosher practices and kept to themselves they tended to not get ill and catch diseases as much so the finger was pointed at them and people were so superstitious.

Tiptop I suppose a lot of it was acclimatisation. Personally for me, food was very plain and simple in 60s/70s - meat and two veg (one veg being boiled or mashed spuds) or something on toast when farher wasn't about (even more so during the power cuts when mother cooked on the fire).

The other way (in our family) was to get the children to do it - from age 7/8 it wS my job to peel and cut veggies).

There was also a method. I don't have heating in the kitchen so, first thing I did this evening was to put the saucepan on for spuds. I had some rocket I'd just picked which needed washing. Yup it was cold at first but by the end my hands were burning - plenty warm to chop the rest of the salad veg. And having a shut door meant all cooking heat was retained in the kitchen.

Another good book is At Night's Close by A Roger Ekrich. It explores what life was like pre gas and electric light. Curfews because of how dark the streets were and what imagined terrors lurked in the dark etc The most interesting for me was how we used to have two sleeps, your first sleep up to maybe 2am then you would wake and potter about for an hour then go back for your second sleep. Having decent light when dark to work and read meant people stayed up later and no longer had the need for two sleeps, also industrialisation meant a large number of people were shift workers and had to be at work for a certain time.

I'd like to know if people were constantly half cut before clean water was readily available. The only safe drink was alcohol and while weak beer and watered down wine was common a constant consumption of alcohol must have had an effect by night time!

Well some men particularly seemed to be regularly falling prey to gout.

You get used to alcohol.

I think I could acclimatise to having all my liquid intake be 2% small beer.

Yes Ian Mortimer. His books on Edward I and III are great too. He's got some wacky theories on Ed II but clearly owns up to that.

Doctoring is quite communist really, it's a straightforward way of giving/sharing your skills and knowledge with others.

Pet I grew up in the countryside where we all chewed corn if hungry and it wasn't dinner time. Bark and other such hard stuff serves a similar purpose I think. Presumably early people chewed most things just to see what it's like - babies do it, presumably it's an instinct thing. How does anyone find the nutritious bits of any plant? By chewing it, eating it all and over time isolating the best bits. Early cooking would have been less about what tastes nice / how to make things taste nice than about how to get as many calories as possible.

I have no idea if this is how it went, but boiling bones and other carcass left overs in water is a pretty old way of extracting further goodness from them. Adding ground up cereals/roots/absorbent bits of plants ground up small to that seems an obvious next step to me - from watery broth to more sustaining gruel. A way of thickening blood too to turn it from drink to food(ish).

Presumably separating the parts to get 'white' flour and all that business would have come much later.

Someone had to eat the first Oyster! I wonder who?
I always maintain that the Wheel was mans best invention! I get funny looks ( surely its electricity or penacillin they say? ) but when i put forward the argument that everything was because of the wheel , the light dawns! Man certainly started going places then.
Clothes were a wonderful invention too.
Its amazing how we have evolved.

The last thread like this led me to a wonderful book that I have re read so many times since.

I think it's called Down the Common by Anne Baer and it's a year in the life of a medieval woman. I can't recommend it enough, one of the best books I've ever read.

Tiptop- I never did get used to the cold in unheated home. At 18 I skipped off to find some warmth! The only semi warm room was living room right in front of fire, but the bedrooms and bathrooms in particular were always cold. I was propbably constantly dehydrated as never wanted to drink much as then it meant I had to use the freezing loo!
Today we have children and visit my parents ideally in spring, and summer only!

Oh gosh yes freezing bathrooms.

We had central heating but for a period of 5-10 years there was no money for fuel. And then one of the windows rotted so we had permanent holes to outside in one room. Clothes etc will get you so far but a freezing cold toilet seat is the stuff of nightmares. And squatting is easier said than done when juggling layers!

Man certainly started going places then

MrsJack It's difficult to be certain about the perpetual drunkenness issue; it's one of those fascinating things in social history that can't be measured for sure, but certainly some historians think it was not unconnected to the levels of violence in the medieval and early modern eras. Along with the different age composition of the population: a world dominated by half-cut teenagers and twentysomethings would be somewhat more volatile. I like this theory but am not certain that the alcohol /violence aspect would withstand cross cultural comparisons (ie similar levels of violence, but people didn't drink alcohol continually)

oldsilver - thanks