My dream is to have a job in one of my summary's listed professions. As you can probably tell, I freaking love history. I love everything about it, and what seems to make the present even more closely tied to the past are the artifacts: The clothing, the pieces of wreckage, the bullets, the bones, the letters, manuscripts, paraphernalia... All preserved so that we all may hold a physical remnant of what has occurred before us so that we may study it and perhaps learn from it, or as the show loves to say, "to serve as a reminder..."
That all being said, this show does have a few tiny bumps that I frown at: The one that I find a little grating is the fact that the show sometimes posits a useless question to the audience before commercial break on the possible outcome of some life or death situation in history, when many of us know what happened: I'm not sure if this segment occurred (I haven't seen every episode) but an example that would suffice in paralleling this phenomenon would be Reagan's armored car. He got shot in the chest by a stray bullet that ricocheted off the bullet-proof car from would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr. Most of us who have dabbled in American history, even a quick run-through of the presidents would know that he survived the assassination attempt and was discharged from the hospital after having the bullet removed. But the show, after setting the scene of what was to occur, would ask the audience something like "Will Reagan successfully pull through, or will this assassin accomplish his mission?", or whatever.
These questions at times do help propel the intrigue but for us who know what has already happened, they're kind of moot. But hey, maybe that's a sign that we're more knowledgeable than we realize, ha.
Overall this is a good show to watch late at night. When they have mini- marathons of three, four, five episodes back-to-back-to-back it makes for an entertaining evening. And the experts that are called to showcase the artifacts know their stuff. I recommend this show for any and all American history fanatics, or just a general history fanatic, like me.
