Historical Details--in a Place Near You

I do historical research. My main focus is the lives of people. Nobody needs me to explain Gettysburg. But they might want me to tell them how a shovel was made.

We can find the dates of the Civil War battles, but local variations and frontier skirmishes are harder to track down. Sometimes you get lucky with a local historical library. Many of them feel a budget cut when the economy starts to slip. They can't always afford to collect the best, so they take what they can get. Sometimes you have to dig. You have to gladhand your way into the basement, and bring a flashlight.

There are still people in America that know how to hitch a twenty-mule team and drive it on a stone pass along the side of a canyon (as they did for General Cook as a matter of course, during conflicts with the Apaches), loaded down with barrels of pickled beef. I would like to find the people that know this.

What was a soldier's uniform made of? How much did the manufacturers stint on the fabric? (Because they did). How long before the dye started to fade? What was the effect of wool on human skin in the middle of guard duty in the Sonora desert?

You can find these things out. They will take up, in a historical novel, about three phrases. But they lend realism. They are priceless because they grow in the reader's mind, add richness of detail, make the reader believe he can taste the dust and feel the prickly heat in the small of his back. They create empathy.

Historical cookbooks
What did people eat and how did they eat it? How did they cook it? I have this great but unfortunately small collection of historical cookbooks. If I can get them in facsimile edition, (originals are beyond price) then I do. They are not just about cooking, but cosmetics, medicines, soaps, and the change in technology and household management. A facsimile edition gives you the typefaces, the illustrations, the weird spellings.

I have one such cookbook that struggles to teach women how to cook a tasty roast in an oven, by which I mean the meat was not barbecued any longer over a hearth. The lack of flavor had to be 'remedied'. I learn which tools were available and which not, what they were made of. I learn about import-export by the fancy ingredients reserved for 'best dishes'.

The True Meaning of Horror
Besides home remedies, what did they do for medicine? I sat in a medical library on and off for a year, reading old medical journals. Did you know you can cure syphilis with elderberry tea? No, I don't think so, but it was in a proceedings journal for 1851, in a box of decaying old papers. The article was written, as so many medical articles back then, in an anecdotal form. "I met this sailor with a difficulty . . . . two weeks later, he was cured."

If you know the epidemiology of syphilis, you know that initial symptoms of syphilis disappear in about two weeks. Some cure, eh? That beats any horror story you ever paid seven bucks to read.

So, food, medicine, clothes, tools from spoons to forceps to anvils, ways of doing things that are now unfamiliar. The sad thing is, these items were always taken for granted. Everyone knew how to tie up a horse or dress a chicken, load a revolver, dial a rotary telephone. The information's not gone, but it's going. Things change so fast. We can preserve an artifact, but not a memory.

How We Are
Our everyday actions and terminology are part of history. We should not take them for granted. We should write them down, so that historians of tomorrow can know us for who we are, and not just what made us notable in politics, war, economic triumph. It's the little things that so often make us remarkable.

Somebody who made it through Iraq should be writing down how he avoided getting blisters, and then just keep on writing from there.  A car mechanic should talk about how he removes grease from his hands and a truck driver should tell how she stays awake over long miles. They should talk about what things smell like, taste like, feel like. Somebody who raises children should write down every theory she ever read and rejected in favor of sitting in the sandbox, singing Mother Goose or Billie Holliday to her four-year-old.