Question of the week, or at least of this Monday: if you could witness anything in American history, what would you want to see?
Let’s refine that slightly. Someone has figured out how to open a gateway into the past. Although nothing sold can go through it, you can look through it just fine. The gateway can shift to see anything within limits, those limits being up to 500 years back and across the North American continent.By pointing a camera, the project can record anything the gateways shows.
You, through some convenient circumstance, are in a position to decide the first events recorded on camera. What would you pick?
I’ll select three, though I admit they’re somewhat arbitrary.
1)A passenger pigeon flight. Back before we wiped them out, a flock of passenger pigeons could fly overhead for a week; the force of their combined wings was said to knock riders off their horses. Film it. Stream it. Take a nominal fee for viewing, the project’s in the black (for convenience, I’m ignoring the inevitable “It’s AI!” reactions).
2)Record the rebel yell. This battle cry was supposed to strike fear into the hearts of the Union forces. Nobody knows what it was like. At a dinner for Confederate veterans, the guests asked one of the men to give the yell while they had a recording device handy. He replied that with no danger and a full belly, there was no way he could make it work.
3)Acting! Theater underwent a huge stylistic shift in the late 1800s, from a highly stylized presentation — specific poses to indicate what your character was feeling — to a more naturalistic performance. Richard Mansfield, who played Jekyll and Hyde in the first stage production, suffered from applying the naturalized approach. In the eyes of critics, he wasn’t really acting, it was more like he was impersonating his characters (his Mr. Hyde still blew them away)!
Like I said, it’s a very arbitrary list. But hey, why not scratch my personal itch if I have the option? What about you, my readers?
Covers by John Ely (top) and Gil Kane.
That would be hard, because I’d want to look at a LOT of American history. If it were all of history, I’d pick a time for which we don’t know a lot — like my favorite time, the Dark Ages — and just see how people lived. We just don’t know much about how daily life was conducted. We know a lot more about that for American history, so it would be hard to narrow down.
I’d go back and see Jimi Hendrix play live. I’d have to do some research first- which concert was really good but wasn’t recorded?- but that would be the second thing I’d do if I had a Time Machine.
(The first thing would be to go back and see some dinosaurs, but that’s outside the bounds of this question.)
If I have to stick to historical events, I’d go back to the Roanoke colony so I could figure out why it disappeared.
I agree that checking in on Roanoke would be interesting, but I think it’s pretty wildly held that the bad winters made them seek shelter with the natives on the mainland, and they just intermarried and gradually became part of the tribes. I suppose it could have been weirder, but most historians are agreed that that’s what happened.
What Greg said.
Andrew Lawler’s “The Secret Token” shows it wasn’t until the 1830s that Roanoke went from a failed colony to The Lost Colony. Partly that was a novel portraying Virginia Dare, the first child born there, as a symbol of white Anglo-Saxon purity, untainted by any relationships with the Native Americans.
I’m a simple man. I would watch lost episodes of Doctor Who and The Avengers.
Oh, you said North America. Fine, I’ll just solve the Zodiac killing or something…
While I did focus on North America, those would be cool picks.
Quite shallow but I would like to go to a boxing match and see Ali in his prime.
I’d watch and listen to the 18 1/2 minutes that were erased from the Watergate tapes.
Good answer; me, too.
In fact, for some reason what keeps coming to mind when I think about this is witnessing (and recording) various crimes by the rich and powerful that you know they committed but have no proof for it. Of course, seeing things like that would also be soul-crushing and probably put you in therapy for years afterward.
Yes, as the continuing trickle of Epstein revelations shows, the rich and powerful have some hideous people among them.
my joke answer would be the Boston tea party because I like a nice cuppa
A more serious answer would be something music-related – maybe the impromptu performance by the “Million Dollar Quartet”
Coming in late with another entry; based on your own suggestion of seeing a flock of passenger pigeons in flight (which is a really cool idea – I emphatically second it), I would like to see and record a herd of bison running across the plains, from back in the days when there would be a veritable sea of them as far as the eye could see. Also, seeing them being hunted by the native peoples who relied on them as a source of food – preferably in the days prior to the use of firearms.