Published on 12, July, 2020
What is your specialist subject, the thing that makes you feel happiest and eager learning about? That makes life feel better?
I think mine mine is Ancient Civilizations. I’m listening to lots of different Books on Audible. Lots of Great Courses, which are amazing, as they are university level lectures presented by doctors who are absolutely passionate about their subjects. I’m listening to one about Mesoamerica another about Native Americans and an audio book about Ancient African Kingdoms. No one I know cares about any of these though. Nobody ever talks to me about their academic passions. I have no clue if I’m on any spectrum but all the people I have known in the past who said they had Asperger’s were much more cerebral than the average person.
I'm a documentary historian ... I work with old written stuff. Sometimes I change history, in small ways..
I love the census. I could read them for days, although I find the hand writing hard to read sometimes. I love the programme ‘A house through time’. If it wasn’t for historical documents the lives that inhabited the houses would be lost. It would be a dead house. The documents bring the bricks to life.
NAS88864 said:I love the census. I could read them for days,
I literally have!
NAS88864 said:, although I find the hand writing hard to read sometimes
Well, it gets worse after the 1911 census because the census was filled in by each household everyone has different handwriting, right? An official did it before then, so it's more consistent.
NAS88864 said:. I love the programme ‘A house through time
I haven't seen it, but yeah - it's a fun thing to do!
These days I mostly look at older stuff - 15th-18th centuries... if I'm very lucky I might get something medieval.
NAS88864 said:reading their job title is the most exciting part of it but I couldn’t do that on all of them
The problem can be made worse because some jobs then don't exist any more, like a Marine Dealer, for example - and also because the enumerator used a lot of abbreviations - imagine if you had, say, 200 households to collect data from, and a third of them had the same job! The ubiquitous Gen. Lab. for example - in any urban setting, there were a great many of those...
NAS88864 said:everyone had coat of arms back then. Is that right
Yeah, it can look like that... everyone didn't, but societal changes had created the middle class, simply put - and they wanted to have the stuff that the aristocracy had, build the houses, get the arms, etc.
Fashionable acquisition, like people do now.