Saturday, July 30, 2011

History Detectives

Mr. Y and I like to watch the History Detectives on PBS.  What fascinates me most about the show, other than the whole mystery-solving aspect of it, is the experts that they find.  Some of them are experts in super-obscure or super-specific fields, like photography during the Spanish Civil War, WWII airplane drones, satellite fabrics, or antique optics.  How do people get to become experts in these types of subjects, and why were they interested in them in the first place?

I also wonder how long it takes them to actually solve the mysteries.  Clearly they taped it after the mysteries have been solved, but it would be nice to find out how they actually did some of these investigations.

My favorite investigator is Gwendolyn Wright.  She's an architectural historian and is a professor at Columbia.  I love how she carries a measuring tape around, and she has such a soothing style of speaking.  I think I would've liked to have her as a professor.

No comments:

Post a Comment