: - What do you get when you cross Law & Order with
Antiques Roadshow? Something not unlike History
Detectives, a new PBS television series that aims to bring
history to life by placing experts on the scene to solve the
abundant riddles posed by antiques and other historic artifacts.
The ten-part series is set to debut on Monday, July 14, at 8 pm
eastern time/pacific time. To the strains of Elvis Costello's pop
hit, "Watching the Detectives," each installment opens with the
four hosts striding confidently towards the camera, a la Law
& Order's ensemble cast. Decidedly more scholarly than
Sam Waterston or Angie Harmon, the learned presenters of
History Detectives include two auctioneers, Wesley Cowan
and Elyse Luray, and two professors, Gwendolyn Wright and Tukufu
Zuberi.
Antiques and The Arts Weeklyreaders may remember Cowan as
the owner of the Cincinnati-based firm, Cowan's Historic
Americana Auctions, specialists in historic artifacts and
memorabilia, folk art and Native American art. Co-host Luray is a
former Christie's auctioneer who presided over the sale of Judy
Garland's ruby slippers for $690,000. Both Cowan and Luray are
guests appraisers on PBS's Antiques Roadshow.
The show's other two hosts hail from academe. Gwendolyn Wright is
a professor of architecture, planning and preservation at
Columbia University. Tokufu Zuberi is a professor of sociology
and the director of the Center for Africana Studies at the
University of Pennsylvania.
A decided plus, each History Detectives mystery (there are
three per hour-long show) is shot in multiple locations, the
camera following the investigators as they trace artifacts to
their places of origin and seek out archives containing clues.
In episode three, a rough cut of which was provided to
Antiques and The Arts Weekly, the cast visits Mystic
Seaport in Connecticut, where the detectives begin their search
for evidence that the whaling ship Charles W. Morganwas a
seagoing extension of the underground railroad, transporting
Southern slaves to freedom in the North. The detectives continue
to the whaling city of New Bedford, Mass., where firm proof is
uncovered. After Mystic, it is on to Salem, Mass. There, a house
that was long reputed to have belonged to Martha Carrier, hanged
as a witch in 1692, is, through wood testing conducted by Oxford
Lab in England, proven to postdate Carrier's death. The final
mystery takes viewers to Worcester, Mass., and the American
Antiquarian Society to explain the unusual imagery on a 1890s
jigsaw puzzle.
History Detectives is a co-produced by Oregon Public
Broadcasting and Lion Television and distributed by Alexandria,
Va.-based PBS, a nonprofit enterprise owned and operated by the
nation's 350 public television stations.
