Junopsis
Ephemeral Spectre
- Joined
- Oct 31, 2005
- Messages
- 280
The idea that cultures change over time, and that norms change, and that you literally can't be familiar with norms that you do not know about, is really important in education.Regarding beach towels. Terrycloth is first produced in the 1850s. This was used for toiletries but not beach towels. The only people with beach towels prior to that were the Ottomans, and they used linen. So that means that there could be beach towels in these photos, but there are not. So where are the towels? They are in the bathing boxes, where people were using them to dry off. Nobody took to lying on towels much until Coco Chanel, as that would have been considered stupid. Why would you lie on your towel and get them sandy or wet when you need them to dry yourself ? Lying on towels comes about as the result of sunning yourself, and Coco was the person who popularized that (for better or worse), and she doesn't start doing that until the 1920s, ergo, no beach towels. Note that there is a deck chair present in the bottom photo, and the first deck chairs were invented around 1887, so we can use that to provide a rough date for these photos i.e. the top one is before 1887 and the bottom one is after.
It's also not taught nearly widely enough, at least in US schools. If you don't teach someone, and if they don't realize themselves, that they might not be able to assume that their concept of something applies to something from fifty years ago, or two hundred, they will wildly misinterpret things.
Stuff like "well, women must not have wanted to vote", or, "it wasn't in the Constitution because of (insert current cultural boogeyman here), not because the writers wanted things that way". Someone assuming that a lack of beach towels can't be real because their culture uses them is right up that alley.