A Day in the Life of . . .

On October 17, 2006, thousands of people in Britain contributed diary entries to what the BBC called “Britain’s biggest blog.”

Sponsored by the National Trust, it was an effort to capture a snapshot of ordinary life in the British Isles at the beginning of the 21st Century.

Historian Dan Snow said about the project, “What we want this to be is a detailed account of people’s normal lives when they’re doing nothing out of the ordinary; what they did when they got up, what they ate, how they got to work, what they did at work. It’s those mundane details, those boring details that will seem extraordinary to people hundreds of years in the future.”

Before blogs and the Internet, the project had a precursor in Britain called “ the Mass Observation Archive,” which was started in 1937 by three young men who wanted to create what they called an “anthropology of ourselves.”

These projects, separated by almost three-quarters of a century, were both inspired by the belief that the ordinary events in our lives, the everyday patterns that we take for granted, could be of historical interest and insightful.

Think of it this way: were the details of the life of a milkmaid in the time of Charlemagne less “historical” than the details of the emperor’s life?

A history teacher I knew wanted to instill in her middle school students a sophisticated sense of historical skepticism that was related to this “history of the everyday.” She had each student select and describe five significant events from his or her life. The class discussed and compared their choices and looked for common threads and patterns.

Then the students interviewed parents or someone one generation back and recorded their five significant events. The results were discussed and analyzed. Finally, a third round of investigation gathered the significant events from grandparents or someone two generations back, and those results were analyzed and compared and contrasted with the previous two sets.

This process sparked a sense that everyone has a personal history and that one’s judgments of significance evolve over a lifetime. The teacher then asked her students, “Everyone has a history, so who gets to pick the significant events that go into the HISTORY in the history book? Who are the significance-pickers, whose stories gets told, and whose stories gets left out?

(Please read the rest of the blog, which goes on to suggest projects that spin out of these ideas and the title, at blog.trintuition.com.