A country village

To cap off my week of history, I visited Old Sturbridge Village. It's a living history museum that recreates life in the 1830s in rural New England, with a few tweaks. For instance, the village boasts both a printer and a tin-worker, neither of which were common in most 19th-century villages. But once you're there, the inaccuracies don't seem to matter; the whole village shows such a foreign way of life that being there is like stepping into another world.

Every room is furnished and set as though the inhabitants had just stepped out for a walk or an errand. Papers left scattered on the table, dinner still cooling on the tavern dining table. I visited on a cool, rainy weekday afternoon, so there were only a few costumed interpreters to talk to.

Except for the groups of middle-school students running from house to house and bleating at the sheep, the village was very quiet. Eerie, even--like the whole town had up and left one morning.

I love living history museums, and this one was no exception. You're immersed in the time period, and you can move around within it at your leisure. At the same time, it's nothing like 1830s New England, since the fields are empty of farmers with their plows, and most of the hearths are cold. Plus, you're always on the outside looking in, even if you're helping churn butter. You're always going to head home to your television and your electric stove.

One of my dreams is to live in a country village, to return to some of those rhythms of life. I'd like a little clapboard house with a red door, and a kitchen garden out back. Some chickens in the yard. I'd like to be able to walk down the street to visit a friend on a moment's notice, and watch the neighborhood kids playing outside on the green. Sometimes that dream seems close enough to touch. And sometimes it seems very far away.

You can get anything you want

I spent the better part of yesterday at an education conference in Massachusetts. Once registered, you could choose to attend any workshop you wished, so I ditched my original pick to sit in on a discussion of how to use popular music in the history classroom. The presenter walked us through the twentieth century decade by decade, starting in the twenties with the advent of radio and cheap records, and ending in the present day. All we did, for 6 hours, was listen to song after song, from Bing Crosby to Bill Haley and His Comets to Buffalo Springfield to Bruce Springsteen. (I'm noticing a trend here...) The presenter really knew his stuff: he'd brought piles of CDs, and at the mere mention of a group or genre he'd slip a disc into his player and select the perfect song.

My freshman year of college, I took a class that studied the formation of modern American culture in the twentieth century. We watched movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers because they exemplified the fear of Communist infiltrators (or so the professor's thesis went). We watched Jimi Hendrix burn the American anthem to shreds on his guitar at Woodstock. That class changed how I looked at history, from something that I liked to study to something that was fierce and alive, something I wanted to possess but could never quite grasp.

Yesterday, in our cold presentation room, I felt a little echo of that breathless feeling I first got in college. It's amazing how music can do that to you; every song buried me deeper and deeper into my understanding of the past.

I'll leave you with one of my favorite songs from yesterday. Stephen Stills originally wrote it to reflect on social unrest in LA, but it was later co-opted as a commentary on Vietnam. It still gives me chills.