Colonial Williamsburg Quotes

Maybe I could get a job in Colonial Williamsburg,” I say, trying to get into the spirit. “I could churn butter. Wear period garb. Like, a calico dress with an apron or whatever they wore in Colonial times. I’ve heard they’re not allowed to speak to each other in modern-day language, and kids are always trying to trip them up. That could be fun. The only thing is, I’m not sure if they hire Asian people because of historical accuracy…” “Lara Jean, we live in the time of Hamilton! Phillipa Soo is half-Chinese, remember? If she can play Eliza Hamilton, you can churn butter.

The truths embodied in historical stories are thus not absolute or universal, but relative to the cultural context in which they are made.

Chef Frank Clark knows this recipe well—there’s even a video on Youtube of Clark, in eighteenth-century garb, capably preparing the dish. Clearly, Clark is no ordinary chef. As the head of Colonial Williamsburg’s respected Historic Foodways department, he oversees a staff of five interpreters who research and replicate eighteenth-century

And so we visit the past as tourists. Sometimes this is literally so, when we take in Colonial Williamsburg and Plymouth Plantation, or travel around to Civil War battlefields. But it is also true in a metaphorical sense. The past has become a strange and distant country, full of odd people and mysterious customs. And thought seeing how these people built their homes or raised their children can broaden the mind, most of us don’t go back home determined to learn how to use an axe or a hickory stick. Knowledge about those strange customs might be interesting, but it is not essential–it does not change our way of doing things. In the end we will always prefer our own land in the present. At the end of the tour there is an air-conditioned car and a comfortable hotel room waiting, complete with cable television and refrigerated food. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with enjoying the past this way–it can be a lot of fun, in fact. But it could be so much more. The thousands of people who visit Boston and have only a few days to walk the Freedom Trail, visit Fenway Park, and eat a lobster dinner cannot even scratch the surface of what the city is really like. They have not inhaled the comforting mixture of exhaust fumes and roasted cashews that hangs in the city subways on humid summer days, or learned to love the particular slant of the New England sun on a winter afternoon. The same would be true of a Bostonian on a day trip to Chicago, Tokyo, Budapest, or Khartoum. The visit would be exciting, but would not make them cosmopolitan. Becoming something more than a casual time-tourist requires a willingness to be challenged and changed, just as living in India or Ghana or Peru will upend any American’s assumptions about money and wealth. (pp 26-27)