Historians: who are the most important historians and theorists in your subfield?

Thanks!

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As there was really no way to wash off other than in a river or lake or other such water source and soap is (as far as I know) relatively modern, how did people avoid dying of infections and being filthy and disgusting?

As a follow up, were people stills grossed out by things that were common place but we consider gross now? Feces in the streets, smelly people, unwashed sex partners, etc?

Particularly, the recently released game Kingdom Come: Deliverance, set in 1403 Bohemia, has locks nearly everywhere to give the player lots of opportunities to practice his lock picking.

Were locks really that common, or could most thieves have just broken a chest open with an axe or whatever (assuming they weren't worried about noise)?

respectively Sorry about the typo

How did the first European explorers communicate with the natives in the South Asia, North America, or Africa? How did they get "translators" so quickly? Like, what would they first try to communicate about or say to the natives?

If we could use a time machine to go back, when could the average person go back to and still be able to understand what is being said?

My father-in-law died recently and one of the thing we found was a photo album from his father. It has tons of pictures of his ship, USS Smith Thompson, and the rest of the Asiatic Fleet. It also had pictures and postcards from Cheefoo (Yintai) and Tsingtao (Qingdao) in China and a letter from a sailor on the HMS Despatch. I have done as much research as I could, but I'm running up against the limitations of my local library and I really want to be able to reconstruct as much of his time in the fleet as I can for her.

Thank you!

History has very few opportunities for laboratory experiments, but it seems to me that the organization of societies in the Americas is one of the best natural laboratories we have. Separated from Eurasia for tens of thousands of years, American societies evolved in much the same way that Eurasian societies did, developing agriculture, ever more complex social structures, religion, writing, astronomy, abstractions for time, innovations of all sorts, the list goes on and on.

What do you think it says about the universality of human behavior that American societies, isolated from Eurasia for thousands of years, developed in much the same way?

Before the advent of ironclads, did the development of steel or iron or bronze have any major changes in the design or creation of ships?

I keep seeing information about how the Macedonian phalanx was possibly inspired by a famously effective Egyptian pike formation, but can't find anything on what that actually was or why it was so well-known. Could anyone shed some light on that? :)

For instance when discussing polling: "In 10 universes where elections are held Trump wins 3, we're in one of the 3 right now." is an example of what I'm talking about.

Was the concept of using parallel universes to illustrate ideas as common in the past or is it specifically unique to our time period? Is there an earliest known reference to the idea of a parallel universe?

Just learned America is named after Amerigo Vespucci and became curious as to how the oceans received their names

When thinking about how the Habsburg realms that were consolidated, eventually from disparate holdings into the Austrian Empire and beyond, I stopped to wonder why Austria remained the most prominent area/name identified with their realm. They even remained the "House of Austria". One might think that, from 1526, when the Junior branch more or less permanently secured the Electoral and Royal dignity of Bohemia, they would emphasize that. Or perhaps when they gained St. Stephen's crown. All the same, Austria remained the primary title/identifier.

Why? Surely Prague was as fine a place (if not finer) than Vienna? I suppose I ask became it had such an important impact on the foundation of the Austrian nation later. I suppose if they were primarily Kings of Bohemia, the area would just be something of outer Bavaria or something to that effect. I can appreciate their grasp on Hungary was small at first, and it was outside the Empire, but that wasn't a problem with Bohemia, certainly

I understand the reasoning behind the proposal (reducing the lame duck period), but why did they have to make it an Amendment if inauguration dates were never even mentioned in the constitution?