{"id":1429,"date":"2004-05-23T18:12:05","date_gmt":"2004-05-23T22:12:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/nateptest\/2004\/05\/23\/rda-of-history\/"},"modified":"2004-05-23T18:12:05","modified_gmt":"2004-05-23T22:12:05","slug":"rda-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/2004\/05\/23\/rda-of-history\/","title":{"rendered":"RDA of history"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve become addicted over the last week to Colonial House<\/span><\/a>,
\nPBS’ “reality series”, where 21st century people get plopped into a
\nsituation as close to 1628 as can be made, and we get to watch them try
\nto live 400 years ago.  It’s reality TV for nerds.<\/p>\n

It’s quite amusing to watch people try to live in 1628 without the
\nrealization that they would be entirely different people had they lived
\nin that time.  One of the women on the show, Michele
\nRossi-Voorhees, would not attend the mandatory Sabbath services,
\nbecause she found the religious expression there antithetical to her
\nown beliefs: she doesn’t believe in God but she does believe in the sun, moon, animals, nature, and what she finds
\nthere that challenges her to think about her place in the order of it
\nall.  She asks at one point how a person like her (a religious
\nnon-believer) would have lived in 1628, noting that she probably would
\nhave had to just keep quiet about her beliefs.  But she fails to
\nunderstand that she wouldn’t have had her beliefs in 1628!  Even
\nis she wasn’t so enthused about church, she would have been outwardly
\nobservant for the sake of social propriety, and I highly doubt she
\nwould have dared to express any such thoughts to others.  And she
\nalmost certainly would not have doubted the Judeo-Christian God’s
\nexistence.  Such a set of ideas would have been outside the
\npurview of existence.<\/p>\n

Other examples of mental anachronism abound in the show.  And I’m not
\nmeaning to rag on these people who lived like early American colonists
\nfor four months.  But it really does demonstrate to me that we as
\nsocial beings are extremely formed by the times and places in which we
\nlive.  We can do our best to live in the 17th century, and the
\npeople of Colonial House<\/span> did
\nan extraordinary job of adapting the mentality and physicality of life
\nin 1628 New England.  But even so, the entry into that world
\nrequires a massive surrender of what we know and hold dear and a
\nremarkable sense of humility toward the social order of their
\nworld.  The people of 1628 were not stupid — at least no more
\nthan we are — and their “strange, offensive” rules had a purpose and a
\nlogic.  The purpose and logic for most of those rules<\/a>
\nno longer obtains or exists, and we have rightly come to understand
\nthat many of their social arrangements regarding women, servitude,
\nsexual matters, and religion were unfair, rooted in particular not
\nuniversal understandings, and in need of change.  (Perhaps the
\ngreatest irony that the CH participants found was that the colonists
\nwho came for religious freedom were as quick to impose strict religious
\nrequirements and homogeniety of belief as had the hated religious
\nofficials of the old country.)<\/p>\n

Anyway, the final half of the series is on tonight and tomorrow night from 8 to 10 PM.  Check it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve become addicted over the last week to Colonial House, PBS’ “reality series”, where 21st century people get plopped into a situation as close to 1628 as can be made, and we get to watch them try to live 400 years ago.  It’s reality TV for nerds. It’s quite amusing to watch people try to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rmaunsdionmg"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5G3PH-n3","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1429\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}