I was a teen when I watched Chariots of Fire. I loved the movie: the English countryside, the romantic scenes, the upright main character… and I wished I could run. I liked the story and I thought that the scene at the Olympics was just another scene. That scene when the trainer is in his room and sees the flags raised and knows his guy won the gold and so bites his knuckle and punches through his straw hat out of happiness… I had no idea that all this quiet celebration was because coaches were banned from the Olympics. I learned this today, listening to Michael Lewis’s podcast Against the Rules (episode: The Unfair Coach). In the episode he interviews a historian who talks about the British class system in 1924, when coaches were frowned upon.

On Steven Levitt’s podcast, People I Mostly Admire, (episode 62), the historian Brad Gregory says: “A good historian is somebody who evokes and enables us to understand that even though somebody might have lived dozens, or hundreds or thousands of years ago, the three-dimensionality, the lived-reality of their human lives were every bit as real as the lives that we’re living now. When history is reduced to lists of names and dates and important battles and treaties and so forth, that’s when the blood is sucked out of it, so to speak, and I think that’s partly why people don’t like it.“

The point is: history is full of interesting stories; research makes them come alive.