We think history is so far removed from us, but sometimes I’m reminded how very close we are to each other on the timeline.
My paternal grandfather was born in 1906 (I have older parents). He and my grandmother came through Ellis Island.
My vocal coach’s grandparents survived the 1906 San Fransisco earthquake and fire.
My great-grandfather lived to the age of 106. He often spoke of how strongly he remembered his nursemaid’s taffeta skirts rustling as she walked when he was a child. He was born in the 1870s. My grandmother recorded him on video in the 1980s talking about those Victorian bustle skirts he grew up with.
On my mother’s side, we tracked down a marriage record for her 17th-century English ancestors, their signatures still crystal-clear and confident on the yellowed parchment. The church where they were married still stands in London.
Samuel J. Seymour was born in 1860 and at age five, he witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Almost 100 years later, at age 96, he went on live television and recounted his firsthand account of the death of the president. You can watch the interview here.
The last survivor of the sinking of the Titanic, Millvina Dean, died in 2009.
The oldest person ever, Jeanne Calment, lived to age 122. She died in 1997 after recording a pop album, the same year The Spice Girls were topping the charts; but she remembered that as a child, Vincent Van Gogh once visited her father’s paint shop.
It’s easy to think of history as abstract, black and white, theoretical. But do some digging–you’ll probably find that it’s within arm’s reach.
A person could be born in a world before commercial passenger-carrying steam railways, yet live into a world with commercial passenger-carrying aircraft.
The Stockton & Darlington Railway first carried fare-paying passengers on September 27th, 1825, just over ten years after the Battle of Waterloo and seven years after the death of Jane Austen…
(BTW, the wagons in this photo are replicas but the locomotive is the original!)
DELAG (Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-Aktiengesellschaft – German Airship Travel Corporation)
opened for business with Zeppelin LZ-6 which flew pleasure cruises in 1909…
…followed in 1911 by LZ-10 “Schwaben” which added an intercity service
that finally expanded to connect Düsseldorf, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Dresden and Leipzig.
…and the world’s first heavier-than-air passenger plane service ran for several months in 1914 between Tampa and St Petersburg in the USA.
A child whose father flew across Tampa Bay on this service might have flown across the Atlantic by Concorde, and the little girl watching the Zeppelin might have watched the Apollo Moon Landing on live TV…
Writer Note: these changes happened really fast. Other, earlier changes happened more slowly, but they happened.
Fantasy cultures shouldn’t stay – sometimes proudly so – exactly the same for hundreds or even thousands of years. Clothing, weapons, customs, language and all the rest shouldn’t be trapped in amber unless there’s some outside influence* having an effect.
*(Say after me, “Always winter but never Christmas…”) :->
Here’s one for the young’uns on this site:
My family in the late 1980s and early 1990s was lower-middle-class.
We didn’t get our first VCR until 1992. We couldn’t afford one.
In my lifetime I’ve gone from “watch it live on TV or not at all” to VHS—when it was played on VCRs, not “VHS players”—to DVDs to having a LAPTOP that plays Blu-Ray and on-demand streaming (and a TV that connects to the internet)—and that laptop is more affordable, even at 2018 prices, than the VCR was in 1992.
Penhales 