Tidbits of History

There are tidbits of history all about, that wait for us to notice them and ponder ... or perhaps ... just enjoy them for what they are ... stand-alone reminders of events that have passed and of people who have gone before.


I keep notes all the time ... scribble things of interest that I see as I travel about (which over the past few months has been all over the New England area and south to Washington, D.C. in the United States).

Credits: Image of the Lower Trenton Bridge from www.thepolisblog.org

For instance, did you know the slogan of Trenton, New Jersey was “Trenton Makes, the World Takes?” Saw that on a bridge as I was rolling south on the SEPTA train to Philadelphia. Wrote it down at the top of my calendar. I enjoyed rolling that around in my mind, thinking of all the possible positive interpretations of that (Trenton produces/has produced a lot) and negatives (we make stuff and then get left behind) or Trenton got “taken” in the greater socio-economic context of affairs. Then, of course, you go on-line and find someone else has taken an interest in it.



I think too, of the trestle bridge down in the Lake Accotink area in Springfield, Virginia, which you can't miss because it looms over you as you pedal along the Cross County bike trail through the area (I was lucky enough to get a few bike rides in before the winter of our discontent settled in), but you could be excused for blowing off the historical sign there which details out the Civil War history of the Union and Confederate armies fighting over the thing. Some people say there are ghosts that linger still.

Credits: Image from Fairfax County
History Commission
www.fairfaxcounty.gov

I love historical signs, and if you were ever to wander about with me through the world, you would notice how often I stop to read them. (Washington, DC has a ton of these naturally, and New England has a little cottage industry of them). I tend not to be in a rush most times, and I want to honor the history and the effort of people who went to the trouble to put something up. I want to catch these little tidbits as they present themselves.


It's a life-style choice. People have deadlines. They're not in the mood to notice such things, or they're buried in work, or a book, or a video, and often times I can be too, but there's a world out there to notice, and I'm too conscious of these vast moments in history and of big wars and events that have shaped all that has come after.


When I taught media studies, I always began the course with a timeline, testing students with a listing of years, and a grab-bag of media events (the introduction of TV, the telegraph, the internet, etc.), and I was always amazed at the lack of knowledge or even the ability to arrange things. You can't have TV before radio, for example, if you think about it logically, just as you can't have internet before home computers. Sadly, history is something that is not taught well in Thailand.

The following video spells out the timeline rather nicely and I would play it after the students had filled in their answers.

History is more than dates and events and famous people. One of the great books about history, I think, was written by a Pulitzer-Prize winning newspaperman, Henry Allen of the Washington Post, who assembled a series of articles he'd done into a book, What It Felt Like: Living in the American Century, cataloguing capturing in his prose the spirit of each decade in the United States - the slang, the outlook, the fears, and prevalent attitudes. Such a difficult thing, when you think about it, but he managed it beautifully.


The tidbits of history that we see as we travel about, the slogans on a Trenton bridge or a rusted historical sign, may not have the same power as that, but they do evoke something in their stolid watchfulness, allowing us, the traveler, to fill in the places and the people ... to paint the past with our own imagination.