"Houses are amazingly complex repositories. What I found, to my great surprise, is that whatever happens in the world--whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over--eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment--they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked into the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the pain on your walls and the water in your pipes. So the history of household life isn't just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves, as I had vaguely supposed it would be, but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has ever happened. Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up." (5)

(Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.)