If you had a time machine , what periods of history would you most want to go back to - just to experience what it was like ? - ( returning safely to the present , of course )
The Chinese curse is right: the most interesting periods were bl**dy dangerous!
It would have been interesting to have been around at the time of the renaissance, and at the time Martin Luther was at long last challenging the (then) corruption of the Roman church.
I should also like to have been present at the debates following Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species, and I should also have set the machine to the time of the abdication crisis in 1936.
Tudor times at the court of Henry the Eighth would do me or even Queen Elizabeth I would just love to see the costumes and look all those famous characters in the eye.
Failing that would love to go right back to the beginning of life on Earth when there were no humans around to see an unspolit planet.
Ooooooooooh, yes the Roman era would be fabulous.... and I'd like to be a wench during the Middle Ages.... the knights/ chivalry would be fantastic.... but all diseases barred.
I'd also fancy doing the Nordic Viking thaaaaaang... t'would be rather cool, methinks.... and hey, why not throw in a bit of Caveman too..... all good!!!!
Great question by the way, very suprised it has so few responses!
In always fancied Tudor times swanning around in the Palace and watching all the intrigue at court till someone pointed out i would most likely be a peasant eeking out a very meagre living from the land I had to rent at a high price ( a bit like now )..I soon lost interest in that period!
I would love to go back and make love to Jane Russell and Marylin Monroe and Joan Collins and just as an afterthought I would stop the first and second world wars
There are many things I'd like to find out, mainly theories that are presently pooh-poohed by various authorities - like did Europeans get to the Americas 20,000 years ago? Did the Egyptians actually reach Australia? Chat with the architects, and see how the pyramids were actually constructed, and how did they raise those huge single stone columns? Had they imported any cocaine from the Americas lately? Ooooh! just loads of questions to be answered.
I'd love to see Carthage fall...and Rome burn...and Henry VIII...and the English beat the Spanish armada...and Hiroshima and Nagasaki being destroyed by the atom bomb (I'm sorry, I'm macarbe)...and JFK being assasinated (I'd watch from the grassy knoll to see who really did it)...and I'd listen to Wilde's 'love that dare not speak its name' speech from the public gallery...and I'd smack Wordsworth for being soooooo boring...and I'd watch a Shakespeare play in the Globe...I think that's about it :-)
Madamspud, I have some newspapers from that period and they all regarded the 19th Century as coming to an end on 31 December 1900 � so you'd be a year too early!