TRAIT 4: History – Proud but Empty VS Neglecting but Plentiful

History is my favourite thing. Ever since childhood, I have been fascinated with the past and the abundance of fascinating stories kept within it. I remember learning with amazement about the countless kings and queens that have ruled over my country, the abundance of battles and wars that the British have gone through to keep their lands, the magic of the medieval people, the horrific but fantastic take overs of the Romans, the Vikings, the Celtics, the Germans, the French, the Normans, the Danish, the Anglo-Saxons (who I think are a mix of the Anglo or English people, and the Saxons) – the list goes on. I even remember learning about the earliest people to be in Britain, the hunter gatherer types who enjoyed the vast amount of fresh water that flowed in the land and the seemingly endless supply of green vegetation. Anyway, my point is, in this blog, even people like myself who are fascinated with history are examples of the ‘typical’ British person who in some ways, take the huge amounts of history in their country for granted. Let me explain…

My happy place

As I mentioned, I grew up in the UK with a great fascination for history. I would make myself sick with excitement when we were to go on a school trip to a historical site or a museum – I can even feel the excitement now that I am recalling it. I would imagine the people who built them, imagine the characters that lived their lives there, imagine the stories that the walls could tell. I always get swept up in history like some sort of magical spell – my creativity would flow and my mind wouldn’t be able to stay in the present. Of course, I got very good at pretending that this wasn’t happening to me – as if I didn’t get picked on enough at school, I didn’t need them to laugh at me about this as well! I knew how silly it was. It was cooler to think that history was stuck in the past and that there was no relevance in it. I think I even remember myself once agreeing with a kid that history was the most stupid subject because it doesn’t mean anything to us now – what use is it to know the names of Henry the eighth’s wives over learning a language or learning how to add up your Freddo’s (for you Americans, Freddo’s are Cadbury’s frog faces and they are amazing) and divide them by how many days you have left in the week? The truth is, I find that a lot of people in England feel that way.

History is just a walk in the park

One day, back in Britain, I went for a nice lunch with my mum. It was a beautiful day and we found this quirky little café in the middle of a national park. We ordered and decided to sit outside (in Britain you have to make the most of the nice weather because it only comes around for a few weeks in the year!). After basking in the sun for a while, I noticed that in the next field was an old monastery or abbey ruin. I asked my mum about it and she said, “Oh, I don’t know. Go and have a look at the sign.” I walked over to a tiny sign, nestled in the bushes with a picture of the monastery on it. I couldn’t read the writing so I sat back down again and carried on the conversation about how good the food was. That monastery must have been at least 500 years old, probably even more, and it wasn’t a tourist site, it didn’t have guides walking around it with an overtired but enthusiastic crowd of sightseers, it didn’t even have a very good sign. I didn’t think too much about it then, but since I have been here in America and anything that is more than fifty years old is a historical landmark, I am beginning to rethink my outlook on the history of Britain.

*Note: the abbey in the photo is not the one I spoke of, because I didn't bother to get a photo of it at the time. I guess that backs up my theory!*

 

 

Is there too much of it?

The advantage that we have in Britain is that there is an astounding amount of historical sites that have been well preserved for us to appreciate. However, I have known many people (including myself) that will live in an area their whole life and have no idea about its history. History is very much like a whimsical tourist activity that you appreciate when you are visiting somewhere, but we do not really instinctively think to appreciate it in our own town. I used to visit lots of places in the UK growing up and all of them had some sort of historical element (because it is really hard to go somewhere in the UK without a significant amount of history). However, in my hometown of Chester, one of the most preserved Roman cities in the UK, I had no real clue about its past. I had never gone on a bus tour, I had never read the signs on the cobbled roman street, had never walked the Roman wall without it being a necessity to get somewhere. I don’t think I even noticed the archaeological site of an amphitheatre in the middle of the city until I took one of my foreign friends on a tour one day (see photo above, taken on said day in Chester in the amphitheatre - back when I was experimenting with my hair colours... you should have seen it during the green stage...). Well, I have to admit, I noticed that the site caused traffic every so often and I didn’t appreciate that, but I didn't really think anything of it or get excited about it.
Could it be that we are so rich with history where ever we go in Britain that we forget to appreciate it? In America, there is little in the way of preserved history – so what they do have, they cherish and it is the highlight of the town. Dover, Delaware for example, the “city” that I live in at the moment (you would understand the quotations if you ever visited this tiny village-like city) proudly calls itself a historic city. It appeared in the early 1700’s, founded by a man named William Penn and houses were built in the next hundred years – some of which are still around today. These houses are classed as historical and are seen as important history. The only thing that I can think of that is classed as history nearby my village is Plas Teg Manor House, which was built in 1610 - but to be fair, if it had not been a grand house built by someone important, I don’t think we would know about it. On that note, I don’t think many people who live in the area do know about it. I certainly can’t imagine a normal house built in the late 1700’s by an unknown person still being around today, and if it was, there wouldn’t be tourists admiring it, that’s for sure!
I also found it bewildering when I realised the extent to which Americans build structures that appear to be old, with all of the traditional old stonework that you might find in a historical landmark in Europe, but it was built two years ago. My local post office in Dover Delaware is a prime example of this, a new building that looks like an ancient Greek temple from the front. Baffling.

Maybe in the UK we have no need to take care of the everyday people’s history because we have so much famous and flashy history – maybe we have just let the other stuff slip through the cracks. It could be because we are such a small country so we need the space for new and functioning houses to put a roof over our citizens heads – America is in no way short of land space to simply build somewhere else rather on top of an old house.

Why not the natives?

I found it hard to understand when I arrived in America, why they don’t seem to count the Native American history as their own. The Native American people have been on this land ever since there were humans on this land, and they have just as much history as we do in Britain. Yet, Americans go crazy for a hundred year old house that is still standing, and state that their oldest historical site is a structure that was built when the first settlers came over in in early 1600’s (but have been heavily modified to make it structurally sound, to the point of little original recognition). I understand that to Americans, their blood is everything. Where they came from and who their ancestors were are paramount to their idea of history. I will discuss this in a blog post in the future, but in terms of this discussion, I wonder why the history of settlers coming over is so important to them, and why they seem to value every speck of that history so much here – when it can be considered quite recent. And why, even though the Native Americans might not be in their blood line, they have not taken on their history as much as the settlers? I feel that in Britain, we do not consider our blood as a mark of our history quite as meticulously – there are many civilizations that took us over, just as the Europeans did in America. There is no way of telling what is in my blood, and whether I have the same lineage as the person next to me. We just see the general history of our country as it is, rather than concentrating on one part of it and one civilization who settled. So, in that sense, America says that it is a young country, but is that really true? Why isn’t the history of the land classed as the history of the American people, rather than just the history of America?

Nostalgia

In America, everything seems so new. It might be just me being accustomed to ruins and wreckage in our history, but the atmosphere of the historical sites here just don’t feel the same. It will definitely have something to do with the fact that the historical sites are not as old as ours, but even with the Plas Teg manor that I mentioned before, it is around the same age as some sites in America but it just has this feel to it that makes me go weak at the knees. You can smell and touch the past in the sites in the UK – it just happens all around you. Why do I not get that same feel from American sites? I feel that the desperation and passion for history here, the same emotions that allow small working-men’s houses in a village to become historical sites, force the sites to be overworked and unintentionally modernised. The need to preserve and share a rare site might erase the very thing that I love the most about history. Of course there is the issue of building materials. In the UK, the historical sites are all made from stone or a hard substance – much like we use to make our houses today. The historical sites in America tend to be made from wood or such substances, much like they use to make their houses today. The settlers would have come to the new world and found an infinite amount of wood, free for the taking. It would have been a perfect choice for house building, as it still seems to be for them today (I am writing to you from an apartment in a building made from wood). However, as good as wood is for a cheap and quick build, it is not good for preservation so the historical sites of buildings made from wood would be hard to protect without modernising it sufficiently. Still, I miss that feeling of my happy place – the whirl of excitement and possibilities, the smell of the past, the cold feel of ancient air on my skin and the promise of lives come and gone before me on this very spot. I feel so lucky to have this in my homeland and wish I could have understood what a rare thing it is to have it in this world without having to see it for myself.

*Note: The photo was taken at Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House (the Little Women house) in Concord, considered a historical area just outside of Boston. The house was occupied by the writer from 1858.*

Next time…

Well this post was quite a trip down memory lane for me, wasn’t it! Next time I am going to tackle a subject that has frustrated me from day one of living in America and I dare say, apologetically, that it might be slightly biased because of that. I think that it might be the only subject that I will face on this blog where I truly think we British are doing it better. So, next time my dears, I am going to talk about the somewhat currently relevant topic of healthcare. See you then!