Good info so far. Here is some more to cause your cranium to collapse. Shallow hardening steels like 1095, W1, W2 and real 1084 can be quenched in oil when we are talking about thin pieces like knife blades. The bad news is that it requires an extremely fast true quenching oil like Parks#50 or the Houghton version, (Q Quench, IIRC) to get the job done properly. Parks #50 is almost twice as "fast" (7 sec) as Brownells Tough Quench (12-13 sec), which is a "medium/fast" Houghton product. I suspect that folks on a traditional forum like this might balk at using "modern" low alloy carbon tool or spring steels like O1, 5160, 52100, etc. but the hardening process for those steels is quite a bit easier. Good mineral oil, etc. will work for them. HOWEVER, that comes at a price with some of these steels. You are not going to get the optimum performance out of say O1 or the new Crucible CruForgeV without soaking it prior to quench to get all of the alloying elements back into solution. The same applies to shallow hardening tool steels like W2 that have additional alloying elements like vanadium.
The advice most often given to new bladesmiths is to use 5160 or 1075 because they are as foolproof.........or fool resistant as you can get. 1075 or one of the other lower carbon 10xx steels would probably be as close to "authentic' as you could get to the plain carbon steels of yesteryear.