What Do You Need to Know?
10th September 2026
Alma Boykin.
Is it important to be aware that hitching bulls to a wagon might not go well? Should younger people learn about suckling pig and the reason we eat pigs young (if they are old-breed animals)? How vital today is the knowledge of the death march drums, and military justice, or the sequence of plow-sow-harrow-weed-harvest with sickles?
I”m always somewhat surprised by what some of my students don’t know, and don’t realize that they don’t know. But then they’ve never been around horse and ox farming, don’t see really old wagons and hand tools, have no idea about crafts of the pre-industrial or even pre-WWII world. To describe, oh, Deism as “the watchmaker g-d” makes no sense to people who have never seen the interior of a mechanical watch or clock.
When and where I grew up, horse and ox-drawn farming was not that far away, and some people still had Conestoga-type wagons for reenactments. We read things like the Little House books in school, and I read the McGuffey’s readers. My grandparents had wash pot and washboard, and explained how they were used. I saw people making soap (not fun) candles (only the semi-fun part) and was encouraged to learn how weaving and so on worked. We had a big garden that was attacked by rabbits, which had to be thinned via air-rifle. Composted manure? Taught me about how fertilizer and crop rotation happened before nitrogen fertilizer was invented. “History” wasn’t all that far away, or at least, historic technologies like water-powered grist mills, windmills for water, and so on were not far away.