“The past is a rich treasure trove from which we can borrow all the marvelously romantic ways and means to turn our own homes into deeply satisfying environments.” It reads like something from a 1930s society magazine, in the throes of the colonial revival. In fact, it’s from The Treasury of Ethan Allen American Traditional Interiors catalogue, dating to 1976. This particular section, devoted to the “Heirloom” line of Ethan Allen furniture, has a tagline more prescient than the authors ever intended, echoing the phrase coined by literary critic Van Wyck Brooks in 1918: “the usable past.” If the past is, after all, a treasure trove, what are we waiting for? 

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Who are you in a period room? It’s a tricky question, and it depends in part on your personal understanding of how time travel might work. You could imagine yourself exactly as you currently are, teleported back through time to, say, the Federal period or the Gilded Age. You might revel in certain aspects of it: the clothing and hairstyles, the furniture, the food and drink, the humor and music, novels and poetry, even the history unfolding around you. But more than likely, you might be ready to hop back into the time machine after about ten minutes of life in the nineteenth century.

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