Cross posted from my new blog.
So here’s a fun game to play and an interesting way to relate to historical events.
In the next couple of weeks, and for the next few years, we’re going to hear about things that happened a hundred years ago today, as we progress through the centenary of the First World War. Schoolchildren will have special history lessons related to the Great War, because of the historical date tie-in. That’s all well and good, and it will catch some impressionable young minds and give them the history bug, but my game works better for grown-ups, especially ones more than thirty or forty.
Instead of doing the normal thing when looking at a century anniversary, of just looking at the date itself, or imagining what it would have been like to have lived back then as someone affected by it – say a young man heading off into that War to End All Wars – project yourself back as if you had been born exactly a hundred years before you actually were. That is, if you’re reading or rereading The Guns of August this month (and if you’re not, you should), don’t be bothered with projecting yourself into the mind of a person of those days who is unlike your current self. Instead, imagine if the headlines of that day (and you can find newspapers of the period online or at your library quite easily) were happening right now, and you were you, at your current age.
Maybe you are young enough that you would be volunteering for that war, as huge numbers did, or maybe you would be terrified your kids would soon be sucked into it. Imagine what is about to happen to the world around you, to the young people around you, to the economy and the psyche of everyone you know.
But also – and this is where the game becomes a whole project you can continue as long as you like, off and on – imagine who you would be in that period. And to do that, start looking back over your life, projected one hundred years back. If you are a baby boomer, that means now you were born in the late 1840s or early 1850s. But researching the year you were born is less interesting, because no one actually remembers events of those days. If you were a baby boomer, think back to the turmoil of the 1960s, remember how you experienced it, and then think about experiencing or hearing of the American Civil War when you were that age. Remember when Kennedy was shot? A hundred years earlier, a few months earlier in the year, was when you heard the news of Gettysburg.
The reason this works, especially for people with several decades behind them, is that the numbers make it easy. If you were old enough to be conscious of things passing in the world in ’69, it’s easy to transfer that date to be 1869, and put the you of that age into an earlier time. Of course you can do it with an offset of 50 years, or 175, but that extra little stumble of doing the math for each date keeps it from having the immediacy of thinking back to ’69, or ’45, or ’89, or ’01 in your mind.
Let’s bring some younger people into the game. Do you remember when the Berlin Wall came down? A hundred years before, what was going on in the world, or in your part of the world? Wikipedia tells me the Eiffel Tower was built that year, the Oklahoma Land Rush occurred, and four new states were admitted to the union (all four right around the date the Berlin wall was to fall in 1989). And that’s one reason this is fun just now. I’m sure many people have amused themselves with this thought project and historical research game. But now it’s so easy. Think of a topic, or a person you think might have been around in the period you’re imagining. Or just think about a particular year. Head to Wikipedia, and not only will you find out about what you looked up, you will also find links to related things you wouldn’t have thought of. Paper encyclopedias and almanacs were always fun this way too, but much slower, and they hyperlinks were less random.
As you think about who you would have been growing up a hundred years earlier (not just a hundred years ago), you can branch out, and think about what happened not long before you were born. Who would your parents have been – what would they have lived through, and what would the stories have been that you’d have heard all your life? If you were born in the late 1840s in America, you would not remember the Gold Rush or the Mexican War, but as the events you had ‘just missed’, you would have heard the stories all your life. Your father or your uncles might have been involved in either. In Europe, the revolutions of 1848 loom in the same way in that period. And you can go the other direction, too. What is it your own kids would just have missed, the way they actually just missed, say, the Moon Landing, or 9-11? And for that matter, what would they have to look forward to?
From there, imagine what your parents, and friends, and children would have cared about in that age, and what you would have. The technophiles of the 1860s might have been early adopters of the camera. In the 1890s, the phonograph, among many other things. Social activists of the 1840s to 1860s (especially in the US) would be Abolitionists. Later in the century and up to ‘now’, they might be prohibitionists, or women’s suffragists, or both.
If you (or someone you know) are a lawyer, a cop, a factory worker, a plumber, an insurance salesperson, a librarian, a teacher, or a reporter, take a look at what your job would have been in those days. If you’re an electrician, a pilot, a computer programmer, a molecular biologist, or a car mechanic, think about what abilities, interests, and serendipities drew you into the field, and see if you can figure out what those circumstances might have drawn you into in the same period, one hundred years earlier. Research. Wiki is your friend.
Look at events and new creations during your hundred-years-earlier lifetime as if they were new. Not just major political events and important new technologies, either. In the early 1860s, the intellectual world was afire with discussion of Darwin’s new theory. The first Impressionist exhibition took place in 1874. What do you remember from 1974? Remember all the great films of 1999? In 1899 film as entertainment was a new, exciting, and strange art form just beginning to test its possibilities. What books would you have read when they first came out?
And finally look at the things that would be new to you, whether new and exciting or new and distressing. Douglas Adams has a quote about this:
“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
Do you kvetch about the flickery, whiny, flat, cold light of the compact fluorescents you’ve had to buy? How would you have liked the switch from gaslight to electric? Brighter, sure, and steadier. But maybe you would have missed the flicker and the color of the old technology better. And you can’t dim these newfangled things! What about the interruption of the telephone, and the fact that it begins to replace calling on people in person. More efficient? Definitely. Less mud to walk through and time wasted, less insult given when one pretends one is not in. But so much more impersonal, and eventually what’s lost is the expectation that you can call on someone unexpectedly (because there’s no way to warn them) and be invited in. We who are struggling with our own advances in telecommunication and the weird combination of distancing each other while enmeshing us ever more can use those feelings to understand what the technologies of a hundred years ago would have meant to the lives of our alter egos, or to our ancestors. And then we can picture them better, and have an encouragement to learn a little more, and then a little more, about their lives.
So that’s the game. Or project. It’s something you can keep on doing, whenever you think about it, or whenever you happen across some new fact about the past. You can project yourself and the people you know into the context of that thing, based on its date and the relationship of that date to the life you’ve already imagined for yourself, offset a hundred years. It also makes for great after-dinner conversations, and a way for all the people with their smart phones actually to have the same conversation all together for once, even if you can’t pry them away from their screens. And if they get interested, it can be an ongoing conversation and a new point of reference for everyone, relating to each other and to history in a new way.
Oh, and it works just as nicely for two hundred years ago. And so on back.