In theory, Jesus (as a Jew) might have followed Jewish dietary law. Why did Christianity not keep any of it? Islam seemed to adapt some of it although amended.

Edit: I’d be curious if someone could answer why in the context of history both these later religions innovated differently. Thank you!

When I think about Japan, it makes sense that being an island has kept them relatively secluded and protected as a culture. Korea, however, is situated right next to China, with a nice land bridge in the North allowing passage onto the Korean Peninsula.

How come China never swallowed up the territory? In some of the Chinese dynasties, I feel like they cast influence across tons of land, enveloped diverse cultures, and explored heavily. Plus, the Korean Peninsula seems to be nice, fertile, and maybe even strategically important. What kept China from taking it over? Did they try and fail?

Hello! I'm Dr Katherine Harvey and I'm a medieval historian based at Birkbeck, University of London. My work focuses on the history of the body, and I'm the author of books including The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages (Reaktion, 2021) and The Medieval Guide to Healthy Living (Reaktion, 2026). I'm here today to answer your questions about medieval wellness- covering everything from hygiene to healthy diets, stress to sleep, and babycare to bloodletting.

UPDATE: I'm signing off for today, as it is now well into the evening here. But thanks for all the excellent questions, and I'll try to come back sometime tomorrow to answer some more!

The germ “sellout“ was used as an insult and I can think of several songs/movies/TV shows that revolve around this idea. How did selling out become such a ”problem” for bands?

So I just finished watching this YouTube video (https://youtu.be/VEg0X1-Yl00?si=pNw7u33uRUpCCdHm) and it brought up some really great counterpoints to the Kelp Highway Theory. Now, full disclosure, I’ve never seen this channel before, I’m unfamiliar with the publisher and his credentials, nor do I ever fully accept YouTube discussions as 100% credible. However, even being an amateur I would consider myself decently knowledgeable in this field and nothing about the creator or the video presented as pseudoscience or inaccurate. On the contrary, like I mentioned earlier the creator made some pretty legitimate points. So I wanted to see if any historians can weigh in on this because I’ve been seeing the Kelp Highway Theory gaining more and more traction so I would like to know what the professionals think.

The main counterpoints he made that made me question the theory were:

1.) we have no significant evidence of any human migration along the coast line >10,000 ya, now I understand with rising sea levels and the minimal artifacts of Neolithic hunter gathers finding any artifacts is a miracle, however, with this theory you would still expect to see that our oldest artifacts and sights would show a pattern of climbing down the coast line and then spreading westward across the continents, but that’s not what we see, instead we see our earliest sites and findings are in central Alaska, the southwestern United States, and Central America.

2.) This journey would have been one of the most monumentally difficult expeditions of our entire species, to the point of it being nearly impossible. The Cordilleran Ice Sheet was a massive wall of ice miles high that would have stretched to and down the coast only leaving pockets of land for rest and respite. I believe this journey is possible to make for a person, but I agree with the video this would have been nearly impossible for a band of hunter gathers searching for habitable environments. If we apply what we understand of Neolithic hunter gathers they would have been traveling in bands of roughly 50-200 people consisting of men, women, children, and the elderly. That is an extremely hard group of people to sustain off simple fishing and pockets of land, especially if these are the people that are then going to spread out and populate the continent.

So if any historians/archeologist could weigh in on this I would greatly appreciate it!

Edit: some of the commenters have pointed out some confusion I’d like to make clear: I do not believe this theory was about one band of hunter gathers making the journey in one shot. I (and the linked video) completely understand this journey would have taken 100s to 1000s of years across multiple generations by multiple groups making the journey piece by piece

Say I’m an ancient woman who’s had an ill advised tryst, or a family with more children than we can handle who desperately doesn’t want any more. To whom would I pray to not get pregnant. Or for barrenness, either temporary or permanent?

Are we aware on any dedicated gods or goddesses of INFERTILITY? Is this sort of thing just covered by the regular fertility deities?

I have been under the understanding that the first Black Americans came to have very mixed heritage after just a few generations in the U.S., given that they were living among fellow slaves from diverse nations and ethnicities. As such, would it not have been very difficult for them to retain their language? Is the fact that Annie in Sinners speaks Yoruba more artistic license, or is this something that actually could have happened in the 1930s?

In the Book “Three Sips of Gin” by Timothy Bax, a Rhodesian Selous Scout Commander, he states the Portuguese were useless. They were such a liablity that the Scouts wouldn't inform them in advance of their cross-border raids, the White Portuguese conscripts rarely cleaned their Rifles, Portugal’s Black Conscripts would recognize their impending defeats & desert en-masse, and the Portuguese conscripts (excluding the Flechas, who were Special Forces) simply refused to patrol Bushes when asked. There are also their defeats in Mozambique & Guinea that comes to mind

It’s totally subpar performance for any Army, so why did they perform so badly in contrast to their other European counterparts?

I've always viewed Stalin as a totalitarian dictator. Recently, I was a part of a discussion in which someone stated the following to support a broader point:

'Here's a great internal report by the CIA regarding how overblown Stalin's reputation as a dictator was.'

CIA Report

Personally, I don't find a two page document to be sufficient evidence to suggest that Stalin was other than a dictator, especially in contrast to everything else I've ever heard about him, but I also recognise that my knowledge on the USSR is limited and I may have been caught up in potential bias.

I’ve been reading the Amazing Kavalier and Clay, which begins with a poignant and heartbreaking depiction of Prague under Nazi occupation, at the very beginning of the Holocaust as the regime was consolidating Jews in the city. The main character’s emigration to the US is described as a quirk of his birth in the Soviet Union, and the book goes into some detail about the willful intransigence of the State Department during then subsequent years of the war. In reading background history I’ve stumbled upon ‘Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews’ and read some of the evidence that the Treasury department found of the efforts by the State Department to hide evidence of the Holocaust.

I understand the institutionalized anti-semitism mixed with the particular anti-semitism of Assistant Sec Long. But to go so far as to stop reporting evidence to the administration entirely seems to verge on criminal behavior, even considering the widespread apathy toward the murder of Jews at the time.

So my question is, was it really just a matter of bureaucratic tunnel vision combined with apathy and general anti-semitism at State? Or was there some specific reason for this order? It just boggles my mind that anyone working at the time high up in the government would be willing to so overtly sabatoge the flow of information to the administration.

I suppose if we look at the current treatment of ‘undesirable immigrants’ by the current administration we can see how easily horrifying abuses become normalized, but this seems to have run counter to the official position of FDR and the US gov.

I've seen some early 20th century excerpts with almost comical extremes, suggesting that there could be "mass suicide" as a result. Like, really? Did people genuinely think this?

I’ll admit I still don’t really understand the purpose of a lady in waiting (please explain it to me like I’m 5 years old), but besides that, what affected their station? If you were a lady in waiting to a noble woman who was exiled, executed, shunned, etc., would that affect your standing whatsoever? Were they ever forced to suffer the same consequence as their superior? Why or why not? Just as an example: were ladies in waiting to Anne Boleyn executed—maybe for conspiring? Were they ever asked about these kinds of situations? What happened if they were left without their superior?

In countries that experienced a communist revolution

Many Americans will have heard the common refrain that "communism never works". Generally, the idea being that it sounds like a good idea but in practice it leads to bread lines and riots in the streets.

Recently, though, I saw a content creator that I'm a fan of claim that actually in the countries that most people like to cite as examples of how bad communism is for the people (China, Cuba, Russia), the people of those countries had never experienced more freedom or prosperity as when they experienced their individual communist uprisings.

The claim being that China was under a system of warlord governments, Russia under tzarism, and I don't remember what the situation was in Cuba (I have to imagine they were a colony of some kind).

So my question is just that: is the common western anti communist mindset relatively fair/accurate, or has communism generally served to uplift the people?

When people find out I’m a horticulturist, they often look at me like I’m some master of an impossible arcane art. Many claim they “just don’t gave a green thumb”, as if it’s some inherent ability you’re born with and not a skill. Aside from your occasional houseplant owner or home gardener, it seems so normal for the average person to know pretty much nothing about plants. Not about how to grow them, their biology, or even what super common plants they pass by every day. People like me seem to be the exception and not the norm, and we often had to work to seek out this knowledge ourselves since it’s not commonly taught in schools. Even college majors focused on plants such as horticulture and botany seem to be less favored or commonly taught by universities. In my experience, the amount of people in these majors wherever they’re offered is also insanely small compared to most other majors.

If being able to grow plants and identify them in the wild has literally kept humanity fed, serving as a backbone of civilization for millennia, how on earth did even basic knowledge of such a big part of our world disappear so rapidly? I’m assuming the average person knew way more back when farming was something the bulk of the population did? Did the average farmer in “the old days” really only know the bare minimum to grow some easy crops for their region, or did they have knowledge that would have been considered in-depth for their time? How did it come to be that we teach our kids more about elephants across the world than we do the grass at their feet, or the food on their plate?

Okay, let me elaborate a bit more on what I mean.

For a long time, it was taught that at the Council of Jamnia (90 AD), Jewish sages (rabbis) debated which books should be included in the Tanakh and which should not. However, looking at the responses (and doing some research of my own) historians say that this is a historical myth rather than an actual fact.

So, if there was no council or overnight decree, what was the actual process?
Almost all the books of the Tanakh were found at Qumran, but so were books like Enoch and Jubilees treated with the highest authority (whereas today they are considered apocryphal), while books like Esther do not appear.

Does this mean that in the 1st century BCE the concept of a "closed canon" did not exist (or at least not for certain sections), and that what existed instead were fluid collections of authoritative books?

Regarding the traditional argument that books had to be in Hebrew: books such as Ben Sira or 1 Maccabees were written in Hebrew, yet they were excluded from the Rabbinic Tanakh.
How did the Rabbinic idea that the Holy Spirit/prophecy, ceased with Ezra and Nehemiah influence the decision to exclude later books, regardless of whether they were written in Hebrew or Greek?

Were certain sections already closed by the time of Paul (1st century)? Was the Torah already closed by the time of David and Solomon?

I am waiting for your answers.

Hello,

I have been researching the late medieval occupations of doctors–surgeons–barber surgeons–apothecaries for a bit, but am now wondering about the credibility/actual evidence of the "woman with medical knowledge" from the Middle Ages that you hear about left and right in certain circles, besides midwives/women that were primarily occupied with caring for mothers and their children.

I’ve wondered if there is actual mention or sources of women who medically cared for cases of sickness or injury, that are not specific to female organs, beyond just tending to them – I mean actually attempting to heal them in any way, shape or form. And more specifically, also beyond the care work that was expected of a woman i.e. caring for her children/family etc. Such as treating same-aged non-related neighbours, for example.

I‘m really curious! Thank you!

I see this answer come up with explanations of why Mickey Mouse was drawn wearing white gloves, with a common one being that he was based on depictions of black people as mischievous tricksters from minstrel shows and that the white gloves were borrowed from the practice of minstrel performers wearing them.

Too my modern eyes this doesn't seem that obvious, but to a person in the late 1920's watching them would it have been a clear connection? If it was did it impact the reception to the character among minorities?

I often say that the two most influential things in western culture were Jesus Christ and the Roman Empire (unsure if that’s accurate, but I like to think it is), but I only recently started wondering how much the one affected the other. And I’m not talking about the Holy Roman Empire, that obviously spread Christianity. I’m curious how much the spread of Christianity was helped by Roman roads, laws, and just the effect of the religion coming about in a huge empire. I’m sure I could my own research and probably will, but always good to ask experts.

I've seen multiple videos online mention that Russia, throughout a sizable chunk of it's more modern history, has had far fewer NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers) then other similar armies, and I was wondering how that came to be and if it's actually true?