No idea why people confess! I literally cannot watch the end of Bones episodes — people are in the all-black FBI room, about to face the horrificness of the American court system, and when they are confronted with evidence they always break down and say 'but it was an accident!'
I just watched a documentary series on US Netflix (originally from BBC2) about sex crimes in the UK called 'The Detectives' and these people did awful heinous things and it's very clear from the evidence that they did do them, but in all the taped interviews when it gets to confession time they just say 'no comment'. I don't think most criminals are stupid enough to confess!
I have not read too many of the books, but in at least one case I was impressed by how the murder side of it was so clear and logical. And then I watched the episode and the murder plot was completely insane! On TV the murders are completely mysterious riddles, but in the books the murders are actually well constructed. I love the TV show because of the excitement and glamour, but when I realized how badly the murder logic was being botched, I felt a bit miffed.
There's nothing holding you back!
Then there are the paleo people. But wasn't our diet so much better, really, when every time the hunt or the harvest failed the weak starved to death?
For reconstruction done well, have you seen the BBC series that include 'Victorian Farm' and 'Edwardian Farm'? I *love* both those programmes, and the follow-ups 'Secrets of the Castle' 'Tudor Farm' and 'Wartime Farm' were interesting if not as good.
In one of them, they decides they needed to change the acidity of their fields, so they decided to make tons of quicklime using old-fashioned techniques. Which was AWESOME. In another episode, they wanted to rebuild the kiln at a blacksmith's forge, so they made 1000s of bricks using two different Victorian techniques. No half measures here!
Although I have heard on the internet that the programme makers were not the best at hiring the craftsmen they needed. And sometimes their banter is a little thin.
To be fair to her, writing books about domestic subjects is *the most Victorian* way for a middle-class woman to make her living. Unless she wanted to be a governess.
Yes!!! You've solved their problem, they definitely should have been born today. I'm trying to imagine what would have happened to a couple in the 1880s/90s who said "We really feel we should have lived in the 1760s/70s, so we're going to wear big wigs and panniered skirts and embroidered waistcoats and get rid of this new-fangled telegram and gas lighting and mains drainage".
By the 1880s/90s cholera was solved and sewage was basically modern, so that wouldn't be an issue. Which begs the question, how do you decide which decade to go to??? The 1880s/90s feel quite modern, they've got all kinds of technology that we'd recognise (telephones, typewriters, etc) but not got a lot of others (such as many labour saving devices in the home). I would be tempted to go big, to go back to the seventeenth century, and live without plumbing, use tallow candles, and wash my clothes in ash and piss rather than 1880s/90s soap. Or to wimp out and go to the 1930s — no internet, no antibiotics, but mostly similar to today (apart from all the fascism).
"Yes, I believe those with horses and armour are better than those without. Everyone else can't move 10 miles away from where they were born. That is my politics." (my knowledge of the feudal system is a little sketchy)
I know, I had so many conflicting feelings about it. Yes, it's fantastic to study the past through the objects they used, and especially by actually using those objects. Although reconstructing these as 'more authentic' objects is ridiculous when most things made in the American 1880s/90s were mass-produced and helped destroy hand-crafting. The Arts and Crafts movement was against the flow, not with it.
And describing living like this without exploring all the gender and racial and class divisions that shaped the society...? The whole description is very much about the things they have, which are awesome, and super interesting, and I feel jealous, but history isn't just about objects.
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dyingofthatroar 
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