.
Which brings us to . . . .
Number Two: There is no official checklist as to what is, or isn't, Historical. .
History is a personal subject. What's historical to me, could be little more than a rock pile in the way of a four-lane highway to another person. My family's history would probably soon bore a good percentage of the people in this room were I to go into it in detail, but I'm deeply interested in it and could talk for a few hours about it. .
There are checklists for historical properties that look at who lived in them, their style of construction, events that happened in their vicinity and other such things. But I think that for every item these lists bring to the fore, they are probably ignoring at least one or two "quirky" factors that truly make some properties unique. By relying on such lists to determine if a property is historic we"re likely heading towards a day when we"ll have nothing but historic "little houses on the hillside. And they"re all filled with tickey tackey and they all look quite the same." .
And I would hate to see History become the same way by people thinking they can codify and define what is or isn't historical. .
Sad to say, but some of the greatest practitioners of "pure" history are probably those people we joke the most about. They're our football and basketball coaches who are also teaching our kids history. Often they don't care about the whys or hows, but only the whens of history. Why? The material they're working with comes in a nice lineal format and if all you have to is confirm that the dates for each event, the number of people killed or the cost of it are correct, it's much easier to grade. So, just give them .
"a chronological record of events" and they're happy. .
Another example. When I ran the Arkansas Air Museum we had a fantastic collection of civilian aircraft from the Golden Age of Aviation. We had replicas of racing aircraft, aircraft that used to fly in and out of the Grand Canyon overloaded with bat guano, one that had been used to fly baby chickens in and out of Northwest Arkansas, and others that were perhaps nearly the last aircraft of their type.