I Want to Time Travel

As a history major, I’ve been trying really hard to avoid this sentiment.

This is because 1) sometimes I like to pretend I can take things seriously and 2) it makes me really sad to learn about all of the time periods I cannot go to. I’m not talking about Renaissance fair crap. I don’t have an idealized portrait of the past where everyone dresses like a princess and eats turkey legs and watches jousting (that’s what they do at Renaissance fairs, right?). I’d like to maybe see a couple bloody revolutions, or chill with some peasants. We live in a time when travel to exotic locales is encouraged, and experiencing new cultures firsthand is nearly required for undergraduate students. I would like to admit right now, though, that I want to study abroad in Anglo-Saxon England, preferably before any major Viking raids.

I think time travel would be the ultimate history test. Think about it.

Could you blend in? Or would everyone figure out you were from the future and burn you as a witch? I think I could do really well in Virginia just before the Revolution. I think I’ve read enough. I’d know who to marry, whose side to take politically (even in smaller races, like governorships), and what profession I’d have (or made sure my husband had).

I could also go back in time to the Enlightenment, possibly to Paris,

and hang out at a salon (which was where a rich person would host groups of thinkers in their house and let them chat with each other) with all of the philosophers I love, like Diderot, Voltaire, or Rousseau… Or I could even establish a salon of my own and invite whomever I want. And look people up beforehand and try to encourage fistfights with questions like, “does God exist?” and “what is the ideal form of government?”

I’ve even considered the logistics of time travel. In fact, it’s a great way to

justify taking dead languages like Latin, Old French, or Old English. Maybe if I take into account the way speech has changed over the centuries, which people actually study, I could talk to people. Though I haven’t figured out yet how to deal with poisoned water supplies or limited access to showers. (Carry a Brita filter? Suck it up?)

Sometimes I also wonder who I would be if I were transported to a different

time period as a historical version of myself. Given my ancestry, I’d probably be a German peasant if I were sent back anytime between the years 500 and 1900, and would spend my life on the brink of starvation as I farmed to survive. That’s no fun, though. I’d like to think that if I had to go back to the Middle Ages, I’d enter a convent, at least for a little while, because it’s probably the only place I’d be able to learn to read or write. If I had to go back to the 19th century, I’d find some way to magically hit up every single World’s Fair while they were still awesome and sort of racist, and also wear really fancy dresses.

Another kind of time travel I think about a lot is somehow showing modern

technology and innovations to people from the past. What if I put a bunch of manuscripts on my iPhone, and went back in time and showed them to a monk who spent the past 500 hours writing out a single copy of something by hand after they had to kill about 200 calves to make the pages? Or, the classic example: show Thomas Jefferson exactly what happened to the American government after he died and watch him cry.

One of the main problems with studying history is the fact that we spend a

lot of time and effort trying to reconstruct another culture, but we will never be able to go to those places and see if we’re even close to the truth. It’s like reading hundreds of travel guides for really cool places and never being able to visit them. There’s also the problem that I spend a lot of time ignoring the present/the twentieth century and beyond, which is maybe not the attitude I am supposed to graduate college with. I guess all I can hope for is that all this thinking about time travel will actually help me think about the present and understand it better.