Transported back in time
David at Forking Mad asks an intriguing question: If you could be transported back in history to a period of time, when would it be and why?
David chose 1850s to 1900s, a time of rapid technological process. Which is extremely fair and very tempting to me also.
The recipient of this question, Elena, chose university in the mid 1990s to see the birth of the internet and live without mobile phones. A great answer, how exciting would that be.
Elena raises the point that anything pre-1970s would not be safe for a woman. The phrasing of the question isn't entirely clear and I don't fancy leaving everyone I've ever known to go catch a plague or get burned at the stake.
But in David's longer blog post he mentions being a fly on the wall rather than live in the time and also wanting to 'hop about.' So let us not trouble ourselves too much with reality.
Basically, I'd go anywhere and do anything. Even times and places that seemed uneventful. Just to see what it was like - less uneventful than the history books would have us believe. Humans are human.
Then I thought maybe bash around and solve some mysteries bugging archaeologists and historians.
Maybe I would go back to the building of Stonehenge. Knowing who, how, and why would knock a lot of boring debate on the head. Similarly, what happened to the princes in the tower? There are plenty of other mysteries. Who wrote the Voynich manuscript? Does Atlantis have any basis in fact? Who was Homer? What were those Roman dodecahedrons used for? What is the Antikythera mechanism?
All that got me thinking about books with a time-travelling historical mystery-solving agency. Which, lucky me, is a whole genre.
Filed under history and time travel
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