100
Many babies were indeed fed mashed food, typically of cooked vegetables and fruits. While it's true that not all foods can be prepared like this, keep in mind that pre-modern families rarely have access to the kind of dietary diversity as modern developed economies anyway. So this was likely not a realistic concern for most.
Nonetheless, there is a variety ...
96
When on a month-long kayaking trip back in the USSR, we did not bring dish detergent with us, so I have a peculiar opportunity to tell the history of soap from personal experience ;-)
You scrub dishes with sand to remove hard residue (e.g., the burned food strongly attached to the walls of the pot).
You remove fat using ash (we cooked on open fire, so ash ...
84
Japanese AC power outlets were first standardised in 1926 with the publication of the "挿込型接続器標準仕様書" (lit., "Standard for a Insertable Connector"), which became JIS C 8303. At the time, Japan was barely an industrial nation, and generally relied on imported power outlets. The leading designs up for consideration were thus the German Schuko and the American "2-...
48
Mother's milk, overlapping with more solid food, was typically a major part of a baby's diet for much longer than we now think of in many western countries, where starting weaning at a few months and completing within another few months has become common in the last few decades, and breastfeeding is by no means guaranteed. Substitutes for breastmilk weren't ...
40
Given the broad nature of the question, what follows is more of a (roughly chronological) potted history than a comprehensive account of dishwashing before detergents became widely available. All highlighting is mine.
SHORT ANSWER
Among other things: sand, fats, ash, alkaline salts (which are often used in modern detergents), cuttlefish bone, horsetail, ...
36
Snow removal takes a lot of effort. It was easier to switch out wheeled carriages for sleighs. Sleighs work better with more snow, so that according to this article:
in the 18th and 19th centuries, "snow was never a threat" to road
travel, "but rather it was an asset."
The more densely packed snow became, the better. Some municipalities even had ...
35
Homo sapiens evolved near the equator so have always had to deal with hot temperatures. There are a lot of articles about how people stayed cool in the days before air conditioning:
Staying out of the sun at the hottest periods and possibly napping or otherwise reducing activity (the siesta in Spain)
Buildings with thick walls to stay cool all year round (...
32
Actually, by 1881 the use of children as chimney sweeps had been abolished in the UK.
In 1840, the UK Parliament had passed a revised Chimney Sweeps Act which had raised the minimum age at which children could be "apprenticed" to chimney sweeps to 16. Unfortunately, the act was never enforced, and it was widely ignored. Finally, the Chimney Sweepers Act ...
32
Methods for making fruit and vegetable purees existed long before the modern electric blender.
A mechanical food mill is usable on most cooked fruits and vegetables with very good results. I don't know about early historical times, but these things were very typical throughout the 20th century in locales where blenders were not common, for example in ...
31
It stands for "Titi filius Titi nepos", meaning "son of Titus and grandson of Titus" (filius and nepos mean son and grandson, respectively).
This is because the consul Titus Flavius Sabinus was the son of the (non-consul) Titus Flavius Sabinus, who was in turn the son of Titus Flavius Petro. So as @SteveBird observed, the abbreivations are "filiation", i.e. ...
25
First, Jesus did not live in Judea, but in the more rural and distant province of Galilee. The major population center was Sepphoris, Herod Antipas' seat of power. Historians generally agree that Jesus would have plied his trade in that city:
Sepphoris... was moneyed. It was the center of trade for the area. And if Jesus were growing up in Nazareth, ...
23
England in 400BC was a broadly Celtic culture with Pictish remnants in the North; 1600 years later it had gained a lot of influence from Roman, German, French, and Norse invasions. Language, food, architecture, laws, and so on were much different. These are the obvious changes.
Your middle age Englander transported to Iron Age England would perhaps guess ...
23
It certainly meshes up with my memory of the way things were in the early 70's. But my memory may be exaggerated too. (I was anti-smoking way before it was cool.)
It wasn't true that everyone smoked all the time, but it was certainly true that there were no real restrictions on locations smoking was allowed (short of near propane tanks). The first local ...
23
Leather was probably the most common material.
The most basic transportation technology of the medieval era was the foot ... Those who did not go barefoot ... wore simple shoes. These shoes were made from leather, including the flat sole.
- Wigelsworth, Jeffrey R. Science and Technology in Medieval European Life. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006.
...
22
The largest city in Europe was Knossos in Minoan Crete, which according to Wikipedia reached as much as 100,000 people by 1600 BCE (Pendlebury & Evans 2003, p. 35). In comparison, the cities of Ur in Mesopotamia and Memphis in Egypt attained 60,000 people by 2000 BCE.
The Mycenaean culture of Greece is well known to us via Greek legends. A warlike ...
20
According to historian A. Roger Ekirch's At Day's Close, peoples in pre-industrial societies actually went to bed as soon at it was too dark to work, and slept (and still do sleep in such areas today) in two fourish-hour phases, interrupted by a short period of activity. He found numerous references to this in literature, from Medieval literature to Homer. ...
20
By the 1970s, smoking in the USA was starting to come down from its peak in the early 1960s.
(Note that this is slightly deceptive in the early years of the 20th century, when cigarettes were relatively rare but cigars, snuff, chewing tobacco, and pipes were relatively common.)
I don't watch Mad Men, so I'm not certain of the characters' ages, but I ...
20
People still often wash dishes without dish detergent. Searching for the situation in India, I found a very detailed article on the market situation:
“The Cleaning Edge”, by Alokananda Chakraborty, February 25 1997, Business Standard
(Ignore the incorrect 2013 “last updated” date at the top; the article is from 1997 as mentioned at the end and on the ...
20
SHORT ANSWER
Ancient Egyptians kept cool by using, among other things,
Mud brick walls to keep houses cool
Windows for cross draft
Vents in the roof to help air circulate
Matting for window shades
Damp reeds and water pots for evaporated water to cool the air
Roofs to sleep on at night
Simple, light clothing, but clothing was also dictated by fashion and ...
19
This does seem to be the case. Since the story is set in Paris, we can look at some relevant info.
A reference relates fear of bathing to the plague, spoken of here:
The habit of bathing took another big hit during the 14th century
when medical experts at the Sorbonne in Paris declared washing a
health concern. Warm water opened pores, and so could ...
19
In a world where you don't have access to a backpack, and thus have to use one hand, the sensible thing to do would be to build some kind of machine to help you lift the load. Since you're broke, you're going to be making this machine yourself by hand with whatever is laying around, which means it needs to be a simple machine.
There are (classically) 6 ...
17
One kind of shoe not mentioned in the other answers are those using bast soles. "Bast" is fiber from tree bark. Bast shoes or lapti, were once worn by poorer members of Northern European cultures. These were usually made from birch or linden. They are woven like a basket, and so are quite distinct from the wooden clog or hard wooden-soled shoes mentioned in ...
17
As with today, there were many different terms used in medieval times and what a little girl would have said would have depended very much on her upbringing / social background and perhaps the immediate environment in which she found herself.
She could just use the verb piss as it was not considered vulgar until circa. 1760. Here are a few possibilities (...
16
Your guess is correct.
Bathing in Rome was one of the common daily activities. While nowadays bathing is seen as strictly private activity, bathing in Rome was a public activity. Rich Romans could afford themselves bathing facilities in their villas, while other classes bathed in thermae, public facilities for bathing, similar to nowadays spas. They were ...
16
Never mind pre-Industrial Revolution. As late as 1910 and 1920 the most efficient way for most people in Toronto and Hamilton to get ice in the summer was for it to be harvested off of Hamilton Harbour (aka Burlington Bay) in the winter and stored in Niagara Escarpmnt cliffs.
Canada in the early 20th century may not have been an industrial powerhouse ...
15
Yes, most men smoked
For men born in USA between 1900 and 1930, about 80+% of them had been smoking at some point; and during 1920-1950 ~70% of them were current smokers.[1] This matches other countries - at ww1, for example, all soldiers generally received also a tobacco ration with the expectation that most of them will need it. For UK statistics, see [2]....
14
Tyler Durden's comment does a great job with the first two parts of your question. This answer addresses when playgrounds began to look like the things we have today.
Short Answer:
The modern American playground was championed by progressives in the 1880s-1890s; the most common playground equipment was all invented by the 1920s; and New Deal money made ...
13
It is a widely used epitaph of the time for beloved wives (see here and here), and seems to refer to Luke 10:38-42: (New International Version (NIV))
At the Home of Martha and Mary
38 As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him.
39 She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s ...
12
I passed the question to Cathy Raymond. Although she does not earn her living in either history or in textiles (due, I suspect, to her preference for a non-gruel based diet), I've read her research for a couple of years, and I've come to trust her opinion. One of the reasons I place faith in her opinion is that after answering the question, she offered the ...
12
It certainly was condemned in the late Middle Ages. The Oxford English Dictionary has this delightful quotation, dated to circa 1450:
"Pike not þi nose; & moost in especial..to-fore þi souereyn cratche ne
picke þee nouȝt."
In other words, "Don't pick your nose, and
especially, don't scratch or pick in the presence of your sovereign."
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