Looking at the long and short of history


When I stumbled across this billboard, which is on the Duke University site ROAD (Resource of Outdoor Advertising), it struck me why I like my history unfiltered. And there's really no better way to say it than "the long and the short of it" - the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful. And from my point of view, it's all beautiful, and fascinating.

This billboard, which was in San Francisco, by the way, during what I guesstimate to be the turn of the century, but not much later than that, was advertising clothing for women. And in spite of the fact that most historical fiction portrays people as tall and slim, well, they weren't. Just like today, they came in all sizes, shapes, and colors.

But I really can't blame movies for wanting to portray an idealized world, where every woman is "divinely tall", and every man has eagle eyes the color of steel. It does, however, make for a very distorted view of what life was life "back in the day". And when you see men, like me, wearing glasses and squinting a bit, or a woman wearing a size fifty, it can make you wonder if people were all that different back then. And I understand.

When I go history adventuring, I look at everything, warts and all. And somehow it seems to make me more comfortable with the world I live in now, because life really hasn't gone to "hell in a handbasket" as the old-timers often say. Theirs is a distorted world, colored by artificiality, which sold books, and movie tickets, and also their own childhood, which to everyone seems idyllic (I know that mine was, back in the 1960s!).

In my lifetime I've seen certain things become, as they say nowadays, "normalized". People come in all shapes and sizes, and I just love seeing it. And that's the long and short of it.
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