Early boots were separate pieces strapped into ankle armor
Boots cover the foot and ankle, sometimes rising to the knee or even the hip, for weather, work or style, and most have a heel distinct from the sole. The first ones were separate leggings, soles and uppers worn together; around 1000 BC those parts were joined into a single piece.
That distinct heel is why a high-top trainer, though it covers the ankle, is not usually counted as a boot. Boots guard against water, mud, snakebites and insect stings, heat and cold, sharp objects, corrosive chemicals and radiation, and they steady the ankle on rough ground. Some jurisdictions require steel-toed safety boots on building sites, and specialist designs protect steelworkers who might step in molten metal or keep feet alive in Antarctic cold with insulated or inflatable linings. Work boots were once studded with hobnails and metal plates at heel and toe. Waders reach the hip for anglers, and before socks were common people wound footwraps inside.
Ancient Persian labourers, preserved by natural mummification, wore cleverly built leather boots suited to cold, uneven ground. Riders have worn boots for millennia, knights included, which is why heraldry shows boots as riding boots, sometimes with spurs; shoemakers' guilds put them on their arms and shop signs.
Cowboy boots took shape in the 19th-century American West, inspired by the vaquero boots Spain brought over in the 1600s. The tall shaft and angled heel keep the foot steady in the stirrup. They spread after the Civil War, got a boost from Hollywood westerns, and returned to fashion in summer 2022 at festivals such as Coachella. Skinheads and punks meanwhile adopted Doc Martens and army boots, which later moved into mainstream and women's fashion.
Boots have filled the language. A bootstrap is the tab at the top of a tall boot, and pulling yourself up by it came to mean succeeding without help in 19th-century American English, later giving computing the word bootstrapping. Military recruits are boots, hence boot camp. Critics of World War I German stormtroopers' hobnailed jackboots coined "jackbooted thugs," and an old discarded boot can even become a musical instrument called the mendoza.
Source: Boot
