I have a post in the making, but since it involves tech and another person (i.e., is out of my control entirely), I don’t want to post it and run the rish of jinxing the whole thing. Instead, I will sing the praises of my new favorite show “Who Do You Think You Are,” which is on NBC, I think Friday nights. (Due to the “set it and forget it” nature of DVRs, I no longer have to remember what night anything is on, and often don’t. The DVR is doing for TV what a contact list has done for phones. Soon I won’t have to remember anything.)
At any rate, this show takes a different celebrity every week and tracks down their ancestry. Since most of us couldn’t tell you who the hell our great-great grandfather was, we can get vicarious thrills through their discoveries. (Okay, I get a vicarious thrill, your mileage may vary.) For instance, last week, Sarah Jessica Parker tracked down relatives that participated in the gold rush and others who were arrested for witchcraft in Salem in 1692. I got chills. Chills, I tell you. She had no idea her relatives were so rooted in such historical moments, which sort of makes you think (okay, it made me think, again, YMMV) “Hey! My relatives could have been involved in important things in this country’s history!” When the semester’s over, I’m seriously considering paying money to ancestry.com to figure out if they were.
My favorite part of the whole show, though, was that they use historians to tell the celebrity about the parts of history in which their ancestors were involved. My jaw literally dropped when I saw who was explaining the Salem witch trials: Mary Beth Norton. Her name might not mean anything to you, but I’ve had to read a number of her works over my academic career, so to see her on TV lent the project an extra air of legitimacy for me.
I was prepared to be a hater when I TiVo’d this show, or at the very least a meh-er, but I came away loving it. Can’t wait to see what comes next!
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I thought the information they were finding was really interesting and cool, but I think SJP herself did a little too much overacting. But maybe that’s just me.
At least she wasn’t quite so orange on *that* show.
Not orange, but I seriously want to brush that woman’s hair. Because OMG, now I understand why my mother used to tell me my hair looked like a rat’s nest. Because it looked like that, with the five million flyaways.
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I don’t have much history in the US as my parents are off the boat and I’m 1st generation American. No idea what, if anything, my family did back in Italy that would be of note, but who knows, we might go all the way back to Ceasar!