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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