Over at An Eccentric Culinary History:
If you want a single dramatic example of how much America has changed in the last century or so, stop talking about trips to the moon and super computers and start talking about this: in 1910, two brothers, Temple and Louis Abernathy, saddled up a pair of ponies and rode alone from their home in Frederick, Oklahoma, to New York City, almost 2000 miles away, to see Teddy Roosevelt give a speech. At the time, Louis, called “Bud”, was 10 years old, Temp was 6.
It's a good story.
2 comments:
Ho. Lee. Shit.
I once watched a remarkable movie about what I think was a Mongolian family that lived in a yurt on a freezing plain tending camels, which were shorn for their wool. Something about a white camel? An important plot point was sending the family's two very young sons--I think the elder was maybe 7 years old--off to the nearest town, a several-day trek, for some kind of supplies. The supplies were somewhat urgent, but the sense was that this was not really an extraordinary thing to ask of the children. No one agonized over it.
Somewhere along the line we seem to have forgotten that young people need to grow up knowing they are valuable active members of a team, not just little lumps who will spend every day alternating between being passively entertained and rigorously indoctrinated, all under close supervision. And then drugged if they're too uppity or too depressed.
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