Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Debate between the hoe and the plough is an ancient Sumerian disputation poem from the third millennium before the common era where a personified hoe defeated a personified plough to establish the tool's superiority. This literary work elevated the hoe to a cultural icon credited to Enlil, the chief of the council of gods, and celebrated in the Song of the hoe.
The short-handled hoe was banned under California law on the 1st of January 1975 following a California Supreme Court declaration that the tool was unsafe. This legal battle was led by César Chávez and Governor Jerry Brown to address the permanent lower back pain caused by the physical toll of using short-handled hoes on farm workers.
Eliot Coleman invented the collinear hoe in the 1980s as a design featuring a narrow, razor-sharp blade for precision weeding. This tool skims just under the surface of the soil to slice weed roots and is unsuitable for moving soil or chopping.
Archaeologists use the hoe to clean large open areas faster and produce a cleaner surface than an excavator bucket or shovel-scrape. This method allows professionals to stoop with hoes instead of kneeling and troweling backwards to clear large areas of interest without damaging underlying artifacts.
The hoe appears in the Code of Hammurabi from the 18th century BC and is mentioned in the Book of Isaiah from the 8th century BC. These references prove the tool's enduring presence in human history as the primary instrument of early agriculture that predates the plough.
The draw hoe has a blade set at a right angle to the shaft and allows the user to chop into the ground and pull the blade toward them. In contrast, the scuffle hoe operates by scraping the surface to cut weed roots just below the soil line.