A confession

I am an actor who is not good at imagining.  At least when it comes to the objects and things that might surround a character who lives in a time/place from history that is different than my own.  I need some help - a place to jump off and get started.

So I love love love when I can visit historical homes and museums like the Tenement Museum in New York where you can walk through a tenement apartment building and see different apartments restored to reflect different time periods in the building's history.

And I had a great time when I went to Dublin's Georgian House Museum, which is a house from 1794, restored and filled with objects from that time.

And I was super excited to learn about this book, which came out of a joint project between the British Museum and the BBC.  It is what it says - an attempt to cover all of human history, using 100 objects from the collections of the British Museum.  Each object gets its own essay/presentation and was originally presented over a period of 25 weeks (one object/day M-F) as a radio series on the BBC.  And it's archived here.

So, if like me, you aren't the best imaginer, the objects in this book, and in museums and historic homes everywhere, are a terrific resource for our actor imaginations.