I am enthralled with history. I cannot get enough of learning about previous time periods, and what happened, what could have happened differently, why what happened did in fact happen. Any conjugation of the verb "to happen" just gets me excited, to be honest. (Just happens to get me excited?)There are several periods which really keep my attention, and have over the years. My good buddy Herc, as you can read from his blog, is consistently interested in the Civil War. (The US One. Not England's. Theirs had Puritans, ours had sideburns. Totally different.) Actually, the English Civil War is a period of time that does continually interest me. But the big ones, the ones that I come back to over and over, and make efforts to read books about and even occasionally watch films about, are three: late Victorian England, and to a lesser extent the same period in the US; Elizabethan England; and human "pre-history," or, "the time before we bothered to make long books about our wealthy."
I'm not sure why these three periods interest me, above all of the exciting and insane historical events throughout time. I know if I had a machine to look into the past, I would instantly zoom to these places and look. (Not go. I'm not crazy. I like it here. Maybe I'd peek in the future and see if it gets better. Or if I could take a whole town with me. But I'm not going backwards by myself.)
The England connection is obvious, since that is my cultural heritage. Ours, as a country, in a large part. I'm almost half Irish, and the rest a mix, with a huge chunk of English in there. So, them's my people, back there. If I could zoom in on the Barkers in Elizabethan Manchester (we're long gone by Victorian Manchester. Lucky us) I'd... well, be horrified, possibly. I don't really know. We were tanners, or shepherds. Barker can mean either of those, and a few others. Old English was pretty frugal with nouns. But regardless, I'd love to look.
And prehistory is the stuff of possibilities. I'm always a sucker for that. It's so far back, we have no clue what it was like. Even the land would look and smell different. Some of the animals are no extinct. It was not like our world, and I love that. It's almost science fiction.
1 comment:
I remember a simpson episode once where marge was trying to comfort lisa,and she said"think of england.it always works for me,but im not sure why".and I thought WOW!me too.why is that?Tolkien met a man from kentucky during the war,and said later that he used alot of his femily names in the hobbit,cause they just sounded so right.I watch the brit coms every sat.here,and the terms the use are so old folk west virginia.the renaissance is cool,but the DARK AGES!!!WOW.bring the time machine around,im with ya.oh,and bring a sword.
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