Last spring, the wife and I booked a trip with another family on a cross-country flight to Virginia. “Visiting family?” our friends would ask. No, we were actually touring Civil War battle sites.
To which they would inevitably say, “Why in the world would you ever want to learn about history?!?”
I understand not grasping the appeal of a Civil War battle site. At the end of the day, they are, after all, medium-sized national parks with some earthworks you sorta have to squint to see. But I do take umbrage to my friends’ distaste for history. For them, “history” was a stuffy course that they had to suffer through in high school. That’s not how I see it. You can’t spell “history” without “stories”: real accounts of people going through incredible adversities that we in the Modern Age can only imagine.
I lay the fault on unimaginative history teachers. They reduce the thrill of humanity’s achievements into a dry list of dates, names, and places that must be memorized in order to ace the midterm exams. Clearly, they cannot be trusted. It’s up to armchair historians on the internet to bring history to life again. Mental Floss does a fantastic job re-interpreting history in modern parlance. Where else could I learn that porches on old houses were so big because that’s where folks spent their days cooling off in the sweaty days before air conditioning? Over on the webcomics front, Kate Beaton has made a name for herself mainly because she knows that even the most mundane historical details can be endlessly fascinating if you present it right.
You don’t even have to go into teacher mode to make history more interesting. Sometimes, the setting will suffice. Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove makes Incan civilization accessible and less alien through Chuck Jones style antics. (The always classy vocal talents of the late Eartha Kitt contributed some, too.) In the same way, the subject today’s review makes Greek antiquity a fun place to visit.
Today, the Webcomic Overlook takes the wayback machine to the days when “Amazon” just wasn’t an online bookseller and reviews Gastrophobia, a webcomic written and illustrated by David McGuire.
