History Yuck vs History Yay
Most of my friends know this about me but I don’t think I’ve ever shared it here. My entire school life, I hated my history classes. Passionately.
Dates, wars, dates, treaties, dates, dates, DATES, and the occasional plague for comic relief. I was sure that if you looked up “boring” in a dictionary, which was our only option back then, the definition would have been “history class.”
I was a good, if not always enthusiastic student, and duly memorized all the dates and other trivia needed to pass the tests. The tests were mostly multiple choice, true/false, and short answers. I don’t remember writing papers in history, although there were essay questions on the bigger tests. I don’t think the teachers wanted to grade papers any more than we wanted to write them.
My family took a lot of day trips to historic landmarks. I grew up in north Jersey and it’s packed with that stuff. I always enjoyed those places. Seeing and hearing about people’s everyday lives was fascinating, but there was still a disconnect with my history classes.
I’ve always been an avid reader, so it was inevitable that I would eventually stumble across historical fiction. Please note: I am not referring to the historical romances featuring muscle bound guys with wild hair saving, or kidnapping, the voluptuous heroine. I’m talking about well-researched novels. It became my favorite genre, nudging mysteries out of first place.
I remember reading a lot of biographies about famous women in grade school, and then in high school I discovered James Michener. But, looking back, I was never able to connect the lives and situations in the novels I devoured with the D=R=Y info in my classes. My love of history didn’t appear until after my formal school years.
All this to say, I love history! It’s absolutely fascinating. But only if I learn about those wars and treaties and whatever from reading about the people living through them and how it affected their lives.
This is fresh in my mind since visiting our daughter, who lives outside of Boston, a couple of weeks ago. We spent the 1993-1994 school year living near Boston and never ran out of great places to go. But this visit, we saw a relatively new museum that hadn’t created until after we left, the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum.
Built in the early 1800s, it was one of the first water delivery systems in the country, Boston was growing quickly and the citizens needed a reliable source of water.
The first thing of note is that it’s a beautiful building. (Why didn’t I take pictures? I was too busy gawking.) I’m frequently amazed at how ornate and majestic old buildings can be. Public buildings weren’t just slapped together because they were for mundane uses.
Inside is one big room, containing three water pumps. It started with two small ones, state of the art at the time. Over the years two more pumps were added, each more efficient than the last. When the system was finally replaced, the building and its contents just sat there. It’s amazing that the pumps weren’t sold for scrap and the building repurposed or knocked down.
It sounds dull but, take it from me, the expert at recognizing dull history, it isn’t.
See it here: https://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=mcafee&type=E211US1485G0&p=metropolitan+waterworks+museum+chestnut+hill