From our modern vantage point, the culinary options of bygone cultures are sometimes difficult to comprehend. It seems that hungry people gobbled down anything they could get their hands on, including dormice (rodents), beaver tails, and fish bladder jam. But while some of the choices seem unusual in hindsight, we can at least grasp their nutritional value. Other foods, however, were just downright dangerous to the human digestive system, and certainly wouldn’t have been on the menu had the...| History Facts
The modern English word “history” comes partly from the Latin historia and partly from the French storie (or estoire), but those terms both trace their roots back to the same place. Not coincidentally, that place is one of the bedrocks of Western civilization: ancient Greece. Going back about as far as we can, the word “history” can be traced to the ancient Greek verb οἶδα (heda), meaning “to know.” From there, the Greek ἵστωρ (histōr) arose, which had a variety of mea...| History Facts
The Middle Ages weren’t just shaped by monarchs and wars — they were lived by everyday people whose names appear in the records they left behind. Parish registers, royal charters, tax rolls, and literature give us a glimpse into the history of common names in medieval England and other parts of Europe and what they meant to the people who carried them. Some of the most valuable insights about what people were called, and why, come from medieval books created specifically to record names. ...| History Facts
For a long time, America’s discovery was routinely attributed to Christopher Columbus and his voyage of 1492. But the real story of human arrival in the so-called New World is far more complex than that story would suggest, and spans thousands of years before European contact. Indeed, the very question of who “discovered” America — and for the purpose of this article, we’re focusing on the North American continent specifically — depends largely on how we define “discovery” ...| History Facts
The American workforce has transformed dramatically since the 1950s, a decade marked by economic prosperity, suburban expansion, and rapid industrialization. It’s likely that folks at the time couldn’t have imagined how much the U.S. job market would change over the next few decades — or how quickly innovation would make once-common jobs almost obsolete. Careers such as switchboard operator and typist may have seemed stable and essential in the mid-20th century, but time, technology, ...| History Facts
Much like fashion, the cyclical nature of baby names is influenced not only by cultural shifts, but also by historical events and popular media. For instance, in 1931, the name Bella was ranked No. 985 in the top 1,000 female names by the Social Security Administration, which uses Social Security card application data to determine the popularity of names, before falling off the list entirely for 69 years. We can’t be sure why the name made the list again in the year 2000, coming in at No. 7...| History Facts
Grocery deliveries may be a modern convenience, but the service hearkens back to a bygone era when clinking glass bottles signaled the arrival of the milkman. The milkman (or milkwoman, though the job was usually held by men) is a cherished fixture of American history, as a prominent part of much of the 19th and 20th centuries. While milk remains a staple of the American diet, changes in consumerism and technology have made the once-ubiquitous milkman a relic of the past. Cattle farming was...| History Facts
