Low on iPod fodder for the six-hour drive to my parents’ house this past Christmas, I trolled the web for new listening material. History has always been prominent among my various geekeries, and this tendency led me to discover the podcast Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History. Carlin’s style and delivery are a little bit AM-radio for my taste, but this is only a small quibble – the subject matter is right up my alley, and his enthusiasm and curiosity are infectious. By the time I returned to LA, I’d already devoured nearly all the available Hardcore History episodes.
Perhaps my favorite was the one devoted to a conversation with James Burke, a British historian, author and producer of TV documentaries of whom I’d previously been ignorant. I can’t possibly do justice to all of Burke’s theses, but in the most general sense his work has emphasized the endless inter-connectivity of people and ideas down through the ages. He is critical of the modern trend of scholarly hyper-specialization:
With formal education today, learners may study either history or physics, or perhaps only Renaissance history and astrophysics. People tend to become experts in highly specialized fields, learning more and more about less and less. Unfortunately, so much specialization falsely creates the illusion that knowledge and discovery exist in a vacuum, in context only with their own disciplines, when in reality they are born from interdisciplinary connections. Without an ability to see these connections, history and science won’t be learnable in a truly meaningful way and innovation will be stifled.
His ongoing project aims to provide an antidote to this syndrome, and it is an opus about as magnus as they get: Knowledge Web, conceived to eventually become a virtual-reality environment in which a user will move through and interact with human history on a path of his or her own choosing. Duuude… human history, in Second Life format.
To illustrate his principle of connections on a smaller scale, the K-Web site has a few snippets of historical linkage laid out. It’s kind of like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (or as my friends and I called it in the 1980′s, before that title was coined, “Segue”) using history instead of movies. For example, they have a nifty chain of circumstance between Frederick the Great and the bottle cap.
Naturally, I couldn’t resist giving the game (so to speak) a shot myself. It may not quite be Mozart to the Helicopter, but here’s what I got:
Visionary historian James Burke1 attended Maidstone Grammar School in Kent, England, during some of the same years as…
Tenor Philip Langridge, who would become best known for his interpretations of the music of…
Composer Benjamin Britten, who was said to have had a thing (but not acted on it) for adolescent boys, particularly his onetime pupil…
David Hemmings, who would gain recognition as an actor in such films as Blow Up (pictured), and who in 1967 recorded a pop album whereon he was accompanied by members of…
The Byrds, who that same year performed at the Monterey Pop Festival in a lineup of acts that included…
Jefferson Airplane, a band whose personnel changed over the years, but at the time featured…
Lead singer Grace Slick, who in the 1950′s had briefly attended Palo Alto High School at the same time as…
The woman who would eventually give birth to Me, the author of this blog.
OK, fine — seven degrees.
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Wow. A slight stretch, but an admirable effort nonetheless. I loved Connections, btw. Throughout my entire childhood, my father (chemist by profession, astronomer by avocation and answering to either Dr. John or Daddy) would force me to watch PBS with him and probably half the time I was bored to the point of drooling. But Connections was one of the few non-Pythonian/Faulty Towers/Julia Child-esque exceptions that I’d sit through without whimpering and eventually pissing myself.
Oh my gosh, what a blast from my past! In my elementary school we used to have the tv rolled in front of the classroom and the teachers would play James Burke history documentaries for us and I was completely mesmerized every time! He might just be the reason I love history so much today. He explained everything about a time period in such simplicity as if you never heard anything about it and you left completely entertained and educated.
James Burke totally rocked my elementary world.