Having returned from my month of travelling, I was putting off my first post because -- eesh, the pressure! So many fun adventures, so much archival dorkiness, so many folks to thank for a fantastic trip. R and A -- thank you so very much for your hospitality and fabulous fun! An afternoon of candy-making, an evening of ravioli-making, a night of a murder mystery game (with lawyers, which makes the "questioning" portion ten times better), and two fairly creepy movies about magicians, along with lots of other fun. In fact, this trip made me reevaluate DC, a place I had formerly written off as my least favorite place I've ever lived -- I think it was just where and who I was living with then that made it so, I really enjoyed it this time around and I'm happy to be wrong.
As for the first week back, not much to tell other than unpacking and doing lots of catch-up work on the to-do list. E & I watched an episode of Colonial House last night, a PBS reality series from a few years ago that I got on Netflix, and wow. A group of fifteen people settle on a 1,000 acre plot of wilderness in Maine and have to live like they're in 1628. It's a show about (surprise) class and gender and race, in history and in how people today live. We weren't even twenty minutes into the episode when the "governor's wife" (actually a Texas Baptist Republican preacher's wife) spewed some frightening racism to her little kid about native Americans (see title). I can already tell what a great teaching tool this show would be. It's reality TV, public television history nerd style! Bring it on.
2 comments:
Wow. I'll have to add this to my list. It made me think of the book we were reading S - "Little House on the Prairie." Which is good, I think, on early farm life, but I edit-as-I-read the parts where she goes on and on and on about Native Americans (described as scary, "savage," black-eyed, brown, smelly and dirty).
True enough. Although personally, I would embrace a description of myself as "savage" due to my inherent hatred for a "civilized" society that breeds hypocrisy, duplicity, and the nauseasting submissiveness of the slavish masses resulting from the pursuit of the mirage of security ascribed to social order.
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