Yesterday was the culmination of ME200 – a class at Stanford concerned with the historical significance of things. With about 30 students last term Reilly (Brennan), Jon (Feiber) David (Kelley), and I explored how cars connect with history. The objective – to judge which of the cars entered for the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance was…
the shape of history
a pilgrimage in search of deep time
Jedburgh, just off Dere Street, Scottish Borders. On the Berwickshire coast at Siccar Point James Hutton found an exposure of the sandstone, shales and greywacke, with the strata of the sedimentary rocks lying at an angle to each other – what is now called an unconformity. Another, inland at Inchbonny by Jedburgh, is now known…
Flodden Field
Today is the 500th anniversary of Flodden Field – the battle near the village of Branxton in Northumberland, just south of the Scottish border. Here is what I wrote about the site on a visit back in 2007 [Link] In the tracks of northern antiquaries, summer 2007 September 9 1513: in the low rolling hills…
Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance
Yesterday The Revs Program was at Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance – one of the greatest car shows in the world [Link] Some of our students attended the show as judges to award The Revs Prize for the most historically significant car in the show – a 1963 Porsche 901 prototype belonging to Don and Diane…
matters of authenticity and simulation
Is Disneyland authentic? This is a question I have pondered for a number of years, since I visited what was Eurodisney in 1992 (and explored in my book with Mike Pearson – Theatre/Archaeology – [Link]). It is too easy to say that Disney is superficial, or fantasy, or ideology. Here are a couple of cases…
the rhetoric of remains
Grosser Mercedes 770 – Hitler at Nuremberg in 1935 Twenty artifacts, twenty cars — how do you decide which is the most historically significant? This was the challenge of one of our classes in the Revs Program this term. We have considered the obvious criteria that might be applied — a car associated with an…
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