Learning about the past is a mind-altering experience that changes how we think about the present. This is one of the gifts of learning history that should make it into the history classroom more often. All it takes is the germ of an idea, a little imagination, and the willingness to step out of the narrative canon. Fooling around with ideas like time travel to see where it leads is one way to do that.
Any US History teacher can launch a lesson with questions like these:
How would you explain a traffic light to Benjamin Franklin? How about carry out pizza?
How would you explain buying a Big Mac at a McDonald’s drive-through to John Adams?
If you have this conversation with students, or adults, you’ll quickly realize it’s gonna take a lot more explanation than you first thought.
Frank and John don’t know anything about cars, lights, or even paved roads. They’re not going to know about plastic, cardboard or processed cheese. Have they ever had pizza? Do they know what a hamburger is?
That’s an easy, thought-provoking activity that can infused into any history course and yield much greater appreciation for inventions, industrialization, and complexity. Just keep asking “and what about?”, “and what about?”
Leonard E. Read’s essay I,Pencil, which explains how no one person in the modern world could make a pencil from scratch can spark any teacher’s inspiration for this type of questioning.
Time travel thought exercises can also drive you and your students to places you never thought about before.
How about a time travel thought experiment that considers what it would be like to travel back in time and tell any randomly chosen person about 21st century phones? Ask students to consider how a person from the 50s would react to learning that most Americans in the future will have handheld devices giving them instant information, entertainment, and communication. It easy to assume that most people would be shocked, but then again that’s just the sort of science fiction future they might have already seen in Disneyland’s “Land of Tomorrow”. It might not surprise them too much.
Something else about that device might surprise them more.
What would a random adult in the 1950s think about a company recording not only what they watch read and listen to, but also when they go to bed and wake up and how much they toss and turn during the night? That device that gives the 21st century person traffic and weather reports also tracks how far they’ve walked in a given day – where they drive, when and where they shop, and often how they go to Church, Temple or Synagogue. It records who their friends are and when and how often they communicate with them.
Would the the 1950s person dread the future?
Maybe not, not many people in the 2020s seem that worried about the intimate surveillance of their daily lives. Explaining this to random person in 2025, might not elicit more than a shrug.
This sort of thinking energizes history lessons with interesting thoughts because their destination is unknown. This thought exercise started with trying to figure out how to explain carry-out pizza to Benjamin Franklin and ended with the digital surveillance of the population and what can be done with that data, answering Franklin’s “if you can keep it” admonition.
This excerpt from Network Propaganda below shows where our thinking about explaining 21st century technology to someone from the 50s can lead us.
