George Wilson, The Man Who Walked His Life Away

> The culture of the past feels so unrelatably foreign that it really feels like a fictional world.

One idea for teaching history is to emphasize that which you, as a time traveler, would find startlingly strange ("wait, WAT?!?").

A 1700's British officer, traveling with American militia, is utterly boggled... the American officer, he is talking with his men, asking them what they think!?! A WWII American officer, with not-unfamiliar clothes, familiar language, many familiar ideas, and culture... and then he shares his commonplace views on negroes. A familiar city in the 1950's, with familiar still-there office buildings, in the summer... without any AC (so people sit by open windows to catch a breeze). Making arrangements to meet at highly specific locations and times (at noon under the clock at Grand Central)... because without cell phones, mobile incremental rendezvous is hard. The Sun goes down, so you stop working, because you can't see in the dark - it's been suggested that the greatest US technological triumph of the entire 20th Century was... rural electrification. Small-village farmers in Egypt, part of the Ottoman empire, using strikes and slowdowns to discipline local elites, who fear the attention of "what's wrong here and how do I fix it" imperial officials. Sales guy, eventually to head IBM, is said to have gone into stores with competitors' cash registers... and smashed them with a baseball bat. Fights and drawn knives on the floor of the US Senate. The opulence of Versailles... human excrement is cleaned off hallway floors not once, but twice a day! And so on, and on...

> Can you imagine hearing that some dude is walking really far and going to see an improvised carnival with an entourage of “bodyguards” with whips keeping people away from some guy walking thousands of laps around a track?

The right person could absolutely pitch this as a reality TV show.

The culture of the past looks different because the material conditions are different, but what are people really doing here? There's gambling, an ordinary person gaining memetic celebrity, and an audience watching someone struggle with physical endurance. All of those are present in the culture of today as then as in ancient Rome. Just their focus and intensity differs.

I liked the specific note that two brothels were established there.

Makes sense to me. If you spend your whole life mostly doing one thing then you’ll end up amazing at that thing. When you compare to everyone else, even across generations, you’ll still be ranked among the best because most people never focus that intensely.

We used to celebrate eccentricity in Britain, but these days sadly it's often under attack.

It's no wonder he had to walk it off everyday... it was probably his only stress relief.

This is just an observation more than an opinion - you know how it's common knowledge that women had no power not that long ago and were kept under the boot of men?

His wife not only cheated on him, when he found out she arranged to have him arrested and thrown in prison, and then was seeking to imprison him for life. As far as the article says, absolutely nothing has happened to her as a consequence of this.

Hard times make hard men, I'd venture.

Watches were used for navigation. They also had both minute and second hands in those days; you can verify the latter by looking at them on ebay.

One interesting distinction is that many of the modern protections that have in many ways shaped modern society, are not protections against other people - but protections against governments themselves. This is a recurring theme in the constitution. For instance the constitution does not grant you the right to free speech. It observes that you, by nature of being a human capable of speaking already inherently have the right to free speech. The constitution simply stops the government from passing laws to take that right away from people.

Most of the bad acts people can commit against other people have been illegal for time immemorial. The revolution that started with the United States was the founders of a nation passing legislation to protect the people from the government itself. Things like debtor's prisons, as you mention, are of course state-driven institutions. There are also things now illegal that we can't even imagine. For instance the third amendment prevents the government from forcing you house soldiers which is so far away as to feel unimaginable. Other things we're constantly reminded of, but they have become so socially ingrained that we take them for granted. For instance protections against unreasonable search and seizure, protections against being forced to testify against yourself.