teaching history

full disclosure: I've never taught history.
I've no formal background in history.
What follows are simply reflections on history as perceived by a non-historian.

In high school one of the history texts (sorry, can't recall title or author) remarked that Socrates would feel more at home if transported to Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia than would Franklin if transported to Philadelphia today.
Socrates' Athens was lit by fire. Transportation? - walking and horse.
Franklin's Philadelphia? Lit by fire. Transportation? walking and horse.

The dominant technology for most of pre-history? Chipped flint.

The dominant technology for most of written history? Primitive metallurgy - copper, bronze, iron. Wars waged with spears, slings, arrows... and their larger brothers: catapults and trebuchets.
No one ventured much more than 20 or 30 miles from his birthplace during his entire life.
Your life pretty much mimicked your parents'.
Most of us were close-to-starving peasants, praying that the crop would come in.
Praying that rain came in summer & spring... and NOT in the fall!
"Hand-to-mouth" meant just that.
Technological innovation was unknown.
A Roman aristocrat lived in pretty much the same world as a medieval peasant - both relied on this year's harvest.
Famine and starvation were common.

That festering wound? - forget it, it'll kill you.
No antibiotics.
In the best of all possible worlds you could afford the services of a surgeon who could, without benefit of anesthesia, amputate the affected limb.

Ships were driven by wind.

Indoor plumbing? No.

Diseases were believed to be caused by 'miasmas' - bad airs.
Bleeding by leeches was a prevalent therapy in post-Revolutionary America.

By contrast - IN MY LIFETIME!
-Computers have evolved from huge heat-generating contraptions requiring large air-conditioned rooms to devices you can hold in your hand.
- travel by airplane is no longer a luxury, but common.
- vaccines have all but eliminated most early-childhood diseases.

Slightly more that 100 years ago the dominant forms of transportation were still walking & horses.
The first fully electrified public building? - The Savoy Theater in London, mid-1880s - 130 years ago.

The pace of technological innovation today would be incomprehensible to our not-so-distant ancestors. We live in a very different physical world. Electricity lights our homes. Fireplaces are decorative. Automobiles and airplanes allow us to travel the globe.

How does a high school history teacher communicate these basic facts to his/her students? How can a 15-yr-old be induced to recognize the very different physical world in which his not-so-distant ancestors lived?

On the bright side: the PEOPLE living way back when weren't all that different from us. All were motivated by faith, love, greed, lust, ambition, patriotism, hatred, and fear.
The OTHER has always been despised and feared.