historical drift

One of the reasons I love to buy old fiction anthologies is because tastes in literature change so much over time. Take a look inside an anthology that was published even just twenty or thirty years ago and you'll be sure to find more than a few authors whose work has since fallen out of favor for any number of reasons. Some we no longer read because our cultural sensibilities have changed (Rudyard Kipling's racist imperialism makes for an uncomfortable read these days), some because they've been overshadowed by other writers from the same time period (Ford Madox Ford is the poster child for this), some because of a sadly petty resentment of the praise and success they'd previously enjoyed that leads many to drastically downplay their importance (Ernest Hemingway is currently the target of just such a backlash), and some are simply forgotten in the shuffle (Laurence Sterne? William Gaddis? John Gower?).

The non-literary parts of history are also susceptible to the exact same shifts in contemporary taste. Recently, I've been reading The Development of Modern Europe by James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Beard, a college history textbook published in 1907. For your reading pleasure, here are the two passages from Robinson and Beard's preface that made me start thinking about this subject:

It has been a common defect of our historical manuals that, however satisfactorily they have dealt with more or less remote periods, they have ordinarily failed to connect the past with the present. And teachers still pay a mysterious respect to the memory of Datis and Artaphernes which they deny to gentlemen in frock coats, like Gladstone and Gambetta. The gloomy incidents of the capture of Numantia are scrupulously impressed upon the minds of children who have little chance of ever hearing of the siege of Metz. The organization of the Achæan League is given preference to that of the present German Empire
. . .
In preparing the volume in hand, the writers have consistently subordinated the past to the present. It has been their ever-conscious aim to enable the reader to catch up with his own times; to read intelligently the foreign news in the morning papers; to know what was the attitude of Leo XIII toward the social democrats even if he has forgotten that of Innocent III toward the Albigenses.

If you recognized more than two or three of the names above, then you've got a far better grasp of history than I. I don't really have anything else to add, other than that it continually amazes me how much knowledge falls off the back of the cart while we're all busy piling new stuff on the front. So, in lieu of insightful analysis or any sort of real definable conclusion to this post, here is a wholly unrelated picture of former Canadian PM Jean Chretien strangling a protester:

you should probably run

The following has absolutely nothing to do with literature or writing or anything else. It is, however, the most delightfully surreal thing I have seen in a long, long time: