My fellow regular daily viewers of Jeopardy, that classic American TV game show, hosted until earlier this year by the legendary and dearly missed Alex Trebek, will no doubt recognize the title of this post. I admit, it’s an homage of sorts to that daily bread which my parents and I partake in five days a week around dinner time. I love how the Jeopardy clue writers play with English, and occasionally other languages, in their clues, the twists and turns, even the multipart answers that often I tend to have trouble with.

This post isn’t about Jeopardy, however, but instead is about rhymes in time. My old boss, Dr. Becky Davis, at UMKC, to whom I am deeply grateful, often used the old Mark Twain quote, “History doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes” (or something to that effect) to help contextualize how themes seem to reappear throughout history, especially American history. I’ve found that to be a handy way of thinking about history, and our place in it, because as odd as it may sound there are certain times in history that do seem to me to rhyme with our own. There are moments in the past that seem far more familiar than others, far more relatable than others.

Consequently, those tend to be moments well documented among my fellow academic historians; they’re the popular topics of the day. I wasn’t always interested in being a Renaissance Europeanist and Atlanticist (yeah, those are real words), I kind of settled into these fields out of a combination of circumstance and curiosity. Luckily, neither has killed this cat yet.¹ I looked into a pretty wide range of historical fields before settling on this one. They included late republican Rome, early medieval Ireland, late medieval England, Renaissance England (my MA thesis), early Stuart England, Georgian London, Dutch colonial New Amsterdam, French Upper Louisiana (aka Missouri), the First French Empire (aka Napoleonic France), (1804–1815), France under the July Monarchy (1830–1848), the history of Baseball, Old Hollywood, and the history of the US restaurant industry. As one of my friends said, I’m interested in too many things for my own good.

Of those considered fields, I do see clear rhyme times with our present moment in a couple, most notably with Georgian Britain, and the late eighteenth century in general. Our social narrative seems to have taken itself to a similar moment where we are at Robert Frost’s diverging two roads. One could take us towards progress, towards addressing our societal ills, the other toward likely political instability and society becoming fed up with the gridlock resulting likely in revolution.

Like Georgian Britain, we live in a highly class-conscious society, one where wealth defines much. Like Georgian Britain, our society has come to value profit over welfare, the maintained power of the few over the well-being of the many. Like Georgian Britain, just as in late republican Rome, a vast majority feel unheard by the ruling big wigs. We’ve seen divergent camps of the unheard, the have nots to borrow a term from a later early Victorian writer of note, who have adopted varying messages and manifestos born out of similar fears and troubles.

Times are not the only things that rhyme: often, I’ve found, our ideas, our hopes, and especially our troubles have a tendency to rhyme as well. Let’s talk about those rhymes, because there’s a chance that beyond the demographics that often divide us are commonalities that could well unite us. Maybe that’ll take us down the better road, the one that’ll benefit everyone. After all, no one of us can walk down it without the rest of us carried along. We will rise together, or we will fall together. It’s up to us to heed our rhymes.

Notes

¹ Meow