A few years ago there was a series on public TV about an English family that chose to live
in a 19th century house for a few months, using nothing but 19th century transportation, kitchen appliances, toiletries, and so on.
They found it hard going, to say the least, doing without air conditioning, central heating, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, electric light, and so on.
Much of the series (which ran, I think, about six hour-long episodes) was devoted to the mother, who studied the history of the women’s rights movement and spent a lot of time trying to playact a 19th century suffragette. This act got dull real fast, not because of the politics but because she had a 20th century attitude of: “I’m a feminist, why weren’t those women feminists?” She seemed to feel that she was a feminist solely because she was smarter and more courageous than the women of that time.
During the course of the series the family hired a maid to do the laundry, clean the house, and to perform other menial tasks around the house (they were, by 19th century standards, a middle-class family, and could afford a maid). After a couple of days of such work she said that cleaning up was a much harder job than she was used to, being without a vacuum cleaner, wood polish, a clothes washer and dryer and other modern devices. She said she thought the feminist movement was only possible because women nowadays don’t have to spend eight or ten hours every day cleaning up, and so they can get a job, go to college, get involved in politics, whatever. She spoke maybe a few minutes, and yet her analysis (and her complaints about the simple drudgery of 19th century work) was more valuable than anything else in the series. (I had known vaguely of a connection between labor-saving devices and modern politics, but she spelled it out in the most concrete terms.)
It is extremely valuable to understand how everyday things work, because they determine what is possible and what is visionary in the “big things” in life.
(E.g. Knowing how the cotton gin works, and how people picked cotton before it was invented, explains volumes about the economics and politics of slavery, and why it became so difficult to get rid of; you can trace a direct line of events from the invention of the gin to the attack on Fort Sumter.)
As a kid I liked to see the connections between things, and knowing those connections seemed to ground the great events of history in the real world. Books that can combine an analysis of the science and technology underlying human activities, like Cronon’s “Nature’s Metropolis”, McNeill’s “Plagues and Peoples”, or Keegan’s “The History of Warfare” are the sort of books that would be valuable to our students; anyone reading this can come up with their own. But, do our present day teachers know enough about science and technology to understand what they’re teaching?
