A page from history

I mentioned recently that I had made a trip to Washington, D.C. to attend the graduation from law school of my goddaughter. I wasn't able to do much sightseeing on that trip, but one place I did visit, that I'd long wanted to visit, was Ford's Theatre, where President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865.

My hotel was in China Town, just a few blocks from the theatre, so I could easily walk over. If you order tickets online, they cost $2.50 a piece, but there are a number of free tickets available on a first-come-first served basis each day, and I got one of those at the box office, then had to go stand at the end of the line waiting to be let in. They count people entering, and when the numbers equal seating capacity, entry is cut off until the next tour time. You're (politely) herded into the theatre -- can sit upstairs in the lower balcony, or downstairs in the orchestra. There's a very interesting talk by a Ranger -- the site is part of the National Park Service -- about not just the events of that night, but what came before and after, as well. One of the interesting tidbits of information he supplied: in the 1860s the comfortable seats we were sitting in were not in place. There were straight-back wooden chairs, which people were at liberty to move around. "You could see some of your friends over there," the Ranger said, "And just pick up your chair and move over to join them."

He also mentioned the fact that the President and his party arrived about 30 minutes into the play -- which was apparently not unusual -- and that, when it was realized that President Lincoln had arrived, the play stopped, and the audience stood up to applaud him. He acknowledged the applause, then went on to the Presidential box with his wife and guests. Listening to this I was thinking, "How disruptive of the play!"

After the Ranger's talk, as people were filing out, I walked down to the stage to get a look at the theatre from that perspective. From my seat back under the overhanging balcony it had seemed very small, intimate, but from the stage I saw that there were two balconies, and it wasn't really all that small.

I had found it very moving, looking at the box where President Lincoln was sitting when he was shot. But later I picked up a brochure in the lobby, and learned from it that the building was turned into offices for the Army Medical Museum and Library not long after the government took it over in 1866 (it was closed immediately after the assassination); part of the interior collapsed in 1887, killing a number of people, and had to be rebuilt, after which it was used as a government records warehouse. The Lincoln Museum took the building over in 1932, but it looked nothing like the old theatre inside. It was only following restoration, which finally took place 1962-1967, that the place come to look more or less as it had looked in 1865 (except for the seats. :-) )

Thus, I suppose it could almost be argued that this is essentially a theme park, since virtually only the front outer wall of the building is original. But the restoration was very well-done, meticulous in its attention to historical detail, and the history lessons provided are fascinating.

There is also a museum in the basement that can be visited in the other kind of visit that is possible (talk-in-theatre-plus-visit-to-museum), but the time slot I was in allowed only the former, which was actually all right with me. My biggest disappointment was that I couldn't get a good shot of the exterior, which is very handsome indeed, because of where the sun was.  So I've borrowed from the experts. 

I was glad I went.

While looking at "The Collections of the British Museum"

One of the interesting things about humankind is that we are interested in our past. We build large, imposing buildings in which we collect, store and display items from the past. There are people whose jobs are to, sometimes quite literally, unearth, these items that have survived the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and bring them back to the imposing buildings for display. There are other people who do research on them, give little talks on them, write up the informational signs that go with the displays, so that people can read the known or presumed facts about the things they're looking at.

Amazing. Other animals certainly don't do this. Why do we do this? Why are we interested in how our ancestors lived, decades, centuries, millennia in the past? Of course, many people aren't, in the least, but there are enough people who are, to support all those imposing buildings. I suppose a big part of it is just the natural human curiosity about the unknown, the same curiosity that made some people explore our world, and now makes others want to explore space. But I think some of it may also be a desire to see connections to those who came before us. I've said elsewhere that seeing relics of the past helps make the past more real to me, the people of the past more real. And this is especially true when there are unexpected similarities. For example, when visiting the little museum in the Agora, in Athens, I remember being especially delighted by such mundane articles as a child's potty chair, and some pottery shards which had been used to write quick notes ("Bring the saw that is under the bench"), others that were part of a child's practice session on his ABCs. Ha! Those people were just like us! They set their toddlers on little toilets and tried to induce them to do their business in the proper way, they scribbled notes to one another, children pains-takingly tried to master the art of writing.

Why should such connections give us a sense of satisfaction? It shows that the past isn't just words in a history book that we were forced to read in school; it was real people like us, even if, given the times and the culture, they were also, in many ways, very different from us. But still, I don't seem to have answered my own question: why would feeling a connection to the people of the past give a sense of satisfaction?

Perhaps it is the same thing that makes genealogists spend hours on the computer doing research, sends them on trips to small towns in distant states where there ancestors came from, to pour over hard-to-read probate and land records: we want to know where we came from! Who the people were, what they were like, who led to us.

The ancient Egyptians with their pyramids and mummies and hieroglyphics didn't really lead to me, personally, but they were a part of the whole human story, that has ultimately led to me, to my world. How cool. How fascinating. People who aren't interested in history, who never visit those imposing buildings, don't know what they're missing.