After the girls were off to school, as I was dashing out the door for work, I decided to throw a load of laundry in the washer -- towels (with four of us in the house, we use a lot). It occurred to me as I got into the car to leave that such a luxury -- letting the laundry wash while on the way to do something else -- would have been unknown to my grandmother, just two generations before me. When we put a casserole in the oven and set the temp to 350 degrees, we are enjoying a degree of precision that my great-grandmother would not have known. Recipes in the late 1800s tended to use hot oven or warm oven because a thermostat controlled oven was a rarity -- and even then, relatively unreliable. When we think of history we tend to think of Presidents and wars and Constitutional amendments. But the social historian in me focuses on the seemingly little things that we take for granted that have more immediate impact on the way we live our lives than the big issues that fill the chapters of our history books.
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 14:29:46 +0000
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