I have asked myself this question many times. After all, I am a person with a high level of potential to be interested about topics. I am somewhat intelligent, if IQ test scores mean anything, but I think more importantly I am a thinker. I am never satisfied with what I know or think I know. I am always willing to evaluate it based on what someone else thinks THEY know, which as I bump into more and more people, I think is my most rare quality and actually comprises what most people mean when they say 'smart.' It is an issue of personality and values rather than wiring.
History fascinates me. I am always amazed that I have ancestors that have survived the deplorable conditions that preceded electricity, modern medicine and the industrial revolution. I always wonder what would happen if someone with me on the inside encountered a pre-modern world on the outside.
The Tudors are really the best indication of what it would be like for that to happen. Before that, everyday life was very sparsely documented, archaeologically and anthropologically it is all guesswork at this point. But during the Tudors' reign things like everyday life started to be recorded at a pace never seen before. Additionally, while I don't believe that monarchs really are different than anyone else or deserve special attention, they were the most readily recorded of all who lived there. They are a window into what it would be like to live before antibiotics, electricity, free expression of religious conscience, Copernican astronomy--a lot of the things that modern people take for granted.
Because I like history and am always voracious in my appetite for it, I have been a wee bit frustrated about The History Channel lately. Probably not in proportion to what it deserves. But I have been needing to vent about it.
http://www.helium.com/knowledge/140962-network-reviews-history-channel
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