Who writes history?

In an episode on meat packing on the History Channel’s Modern Marvels, the narrator stated that until the 1920s, only wealthy people ate bacon.

My parents’ families would have been surprised to learn their winter hog killings and their smoke houses put them in an upscale food class.

It might have been that among city dwellers only the wealthy could afford bacon, but history writers should not limit stories only to populations of their own kind.

In the same vein, authors of a textbook I had to use in teaching history commented that even with the advent of household electric devices of the 1920s, housewives found they were taking as much time to vacuum floors as their maids had with carpet sweepers.

I don’t think either of my grandmothers would have considered herself a housewife. I do think, though, that both would have taken upper-class bacon over a vacuum cleaner. For one thing, a vacuum cleaner would not beat a broom cleaning a wooden floor. And, in the 1920s, neither grandmother had electricity.