Connecticut Yankee - Television Tropes & Idioms

"...we now live in a world where kings and noblemen rule the roost. And they've turned all of central Europe — our home, now, ours and our childrens' to come — into a raging inferno. We are surrounded by a Ring of Fire. Well, I've fought forest fires before. So have lots of other men in this room. The best way to fight a fire is to start a counterfire. So my position is simple. I say we start the American Revolution — a hundred and fifty years ahead of schedule!"

—Eric Flint, 1632

Sometimes, the Time Traveler never intends to go anywhere. He's just minding his own business when an Alien Space Bat sweeps him into the past, or the future, or an alternate world... and he has no hope whatever of ever getting back home.

Once he has resigned himself to the situation, then, there's nothing for it but to make his new world a better place to live in. Whether this creates a new timeline or wipes out his old one, he'll probably never know.

This trope typically ignores the implications of language and biology. Individuals who find themselves transplanted in the Medieval period are able to communicate without difficulty with people whose language bears very little resemblance to their own (for example, middle English is not the same as modern English, and so forth). Furthermore, those same individuals never have to worry about the disease or poor hygiene practices that made living during those ancient periods extraordinarily hazardous, by modern standards. Likewise, they never have to worry about infectious diseases common in their own time spreading wildly among a population with no immunity, the way that smallpox and other plagues spread in the New World after Europeans showed up.

Well, hardly ever. Aversions and subversions of those parts of the trope are increasingly popular.

The original victim, Hank Morgan of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, failed to permanently industrialize Arthurian Britain and was sent back to the nineteenth century as mysteriously as he'd left it (incidentally making this Older Than Radio). Most of his successors, however, have had better luck.

When the phenomenon takes place on a collective scale (say, an entire city rather than a single person), it's an Island In The Sea Of Time.

Compare Trapped In Another World and Summon Everyman Hero.

Examples:

Anime and Manga

Jin: The title character, a present-day Japanese doctor, is sent back in time to the end of the Tokugawa Era.
Rave Master: Sieg Hart is trapped fifty years in the past, and makes sure not to interfere with the upcoming history to occur. However, he does end up setting up a Stable Time Loop and pulling off a gambit to call for aid in time for the final battle.
To A Distant Town: Middle-aged Salaryman Hiroshi finds himself back in the body of his 14-year-old self, in the early 1960s.
The anime and manga Zipang sends the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force vessel Mirai, an advanced version of Kongo class destroyer (in turn a modified version of the American Arleigh Burke class destroyer), back to just after the Battle of Midway. Similar to The Final Countdown, where a Nimitz class aircraft carrier gets sent back to just before the attack on Pearl Harbor, but much better done.

Comic Books

The Marvel comic book 1602 has a time-displaced Captain America sent back to Elizabethan times. When asked to return to the future, he insists on staying to try and build a better America from the beginning - which he does in small ways, such as helping a group of colonists survive a winter that should have wiped them out, or warning the natives against selling their land to unscrupulous capitalists. The final touch comes when, because of his actions, the American colonies declare independence from Britain 174 years early.
- And it's got dinosaurs.
- It also has consequences beyond his control- his presence causes the Marvel Universe to impose itself on the past, and period versions of the X-Men, Avengers and other superheroes start appearing.
Sasmira: A young couple from the present day somehow find themselves sent back to the turn of the 20th century.

Film

Ash in Army Of Darkness.
In Back To The Future Part III, Doc Brown resigns himself to the fate of living in The Wild West - which he's actually quite happy about. He even goes as far as to give Marty instructions to not pick him up. Being an inventor, though, he does manage to invent some technology of the future. He doesn't share his inventions with anyone else, as he's mindful to not risk changing the future. At the end of the film, he does create another time machine out of a stream train. However, it's uncertain whether he chooses to live out the rest of his life in the past - or move back to the future. The Ride and The Animated Series, though, both have Doc ultimately moving back to the future.

Literature

Deconstructed in Poul Anderson's short story The Man Who Came Early, in which an American soldier stationed in Iceland is sent back to the Viking Era after being hit by lightning. Luckily the Icelandic language has not changed much since then. All his attempts to change history fall flat on their face. When he tries to show the Vikings how to make compasses, he has no idea where to find or mine magnetic ores. When he tries to show them how to build more modern sailing vessels, the Vikings point out that such vessels are too cumbersome to dock anywhere where there is not a ready built harbor, an obvious rarity in that time period. The Vikings find the matches he brought with him impressive, but he has no idea how to make more. The only knowledge he has of any use is modern martial arts. In the end the soldier runs afoul of his ignorance of Viking legal customs and is killed. The story's main point is that this trope is unrealistic because most advances are useless without an advanced societal infrastructure to support them.
The Axis of Time trilogy by John Birmingham. World War 2.1: Weapons of Choice, World War 2.2: Designated Targets, and World War 2.3: Final Impact. A multinational naval task force from 2021 is sent back to World War II, where it (literally) impacts with the American fleet steaming for Midway. The consequences are extremely far-reaching.
The Arthur C Clarke novel Time's Eye is the extreme form of this, involving Alexander the Great's army, Genghis Khan's Mongol hordes, six people from 2037 (three UN peacekeepers and three Soyuz cosmonauts), and a British outpost from the days of the Raj, with Rudyard Kipling in it.
The Cross-Time Engineer and sequels by Leo Frankowski. Polish hiker Conrad Schwartz, in a drunken stupor, bypasses all kinds of security and stumbles into a historical-research time portal (created, coincidentally, by his cousin) and awakens in thirteenth-century Poland, where he has just ten years to industrialize and unite his nation before the Mongol hordes arrive and kill everybody.
- This one has been accused of being one big bit of Mary Sue-starring wish-fulfillment. Bad enough the original publisher dropped him.
- Language difficulties are handwaved in a justification that "all Slavic languages are pretty much the same." Diseases don't really rear their head until the 6th book, Conrad's Quest for Rubber where they have to deal with unfamiliar diseases in Africa, but is semi-justified by Conrad's cousin going back in time to make Conrad sterile (no, not like that... he's rather prolific, really).
  - Most of the Slavic languages are actually very similar, closer than the Romance languages in the West.
Inverted in The Centurion's Empire by Sean Mcmullan, the premise of which is that ancient Rome developed a medicine that allowed the human body to survive being frozen, and promptly started storing its best and brightest. After the empire collapsed the one survivor set up shop in an English village, being unfrozen when they needed his military expertise.
In Terry Pratchett's short story Once and Future a time traveller called Mervin finds himself not only trapped in the past, but in a past that never existed; the Anachronism Stew that was King Arthur's time. Working as a doctor for a village in Sir Ector's demenses, he quickly realises that what they need is a great and noble leader, gimmicks up an electromagnet to hold a sword in a stone, and waits for a candidate whose body language suggests he's sensible enough to take advice. It works, although not quite how he expected.
In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel Night Watch, Commander Vimes is eventually torn between trying to fix the timeline so that he can get back to his own time, or attempting a Connecticut Yankee on the Ankh-Morpork of thirty years ago. He eventually decides to take the latter course of action, but historical inertia forces the former one. Mostly.
Nimue Alban's situation in David Weber's Safehold series lacks time travel, but otherwise fits perfectly. Nimue (or rather a Ridiculously Human Robot with her personality) is awoken in the last human world of Safehold, which has been trapped in Medieval Stasis for almost a millennium thanks to its delusional founders. Nimue's objective is to undo this and bring humanity back into the era of space travel. Many details listed in the description are averted, since robots can't get sick, and Nimue has to learn Safeholdian English before she can venture out among its people.
Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp. Martin Padway is struck by lightning and finds himself in sixth-century Rome, on the verge of its ruin at Justinian's hands and the onset of the Dark Ages. He may be able to save civilization, if he can only get the ruling Goths to grasp the value of his innovations...
- Brought later full circle with To Bring The Light which is usually bound with Lest Darkness Fall in most editions. In this story a woman from Justinian Era Rome gets sent back to the founding of Rome and must use the inventions of later Rome to help found it...
Temporally inverted in Philip Francis Nowlan's Armageddon 2419 A.D., or as it's better known, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Rogers, in the various versions of his tale, brings lost knowledge and a certain 20th-century vitality to future America and/or Earth as a whole.
Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen by H. Beam Piper. Pennsylvania cop Calvin Morrison runs afoul of the Paratime Police and is accidentally transported to a medieval alternate Earth where a corrupt theocracy controls the secret of gunpowder.
It Takes a Village to Raise the Tech Level: A recent twist, this plot sends an entire community into hostile territory. Rather than a single hero, the town as a whole can be considered the protagonist.
- The Islander Trilogy by S.M. Stirling. The island of Nantucket is whisked into 1250 BC, and must contend with Bronze Age cultures and their own crop of power-hungry renegades.
  - This one does contend with language difficulties, uptime diseases, and so forth; the Nantucketers manage to wipe out huge numbers of Native Americans before they even realize what's going on, because the first party sent to the mainland contains someone with a sniffle. Their language difficulties are moderately eased by the fact that the languages of Europe are, at that point, much closer to still being "Proto-Indo-European"...
- The Assiti Shards milieu by Eric Flint and others. Cast-off shards of transdimensional alien "art" bombard Earth and transpose large chunks of it with other times and places. Several alternate histories are planned in this meta-setting, including Time Spike (several separate Shard events deposit a modern maximum security prison, the Cherokees on the Trail of Tears, a band of conquistadors, and multiple pre-Columbian Indian settlements into the Cretaceous), 1776 (the armies of George Washington and Frederick the Great both find themselves in ancient Rome during the Crisis of the Third Century), and By Any Other Name (the Assiti themselves make unwilling contact with Elizabethan England), but only two has seen any publishing. The first one has, however, seen a lot:
  - 1632 and many, many sequels. The West Virginia coal-mining town of Grantville is translocated to southern Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years War, utterly shattering the power structure and world view of Reformation Europe.
  - Once again, this setting deals with language and diseases fairly well. Although in this case, it's the uptime people of Grantville who have to worry about the risk that the pandemic plagues of the 1600s will devastate their community. On the bright side, they're at a recent enough point in the past that their English is recognizable in England, and their German-speakers are understandable to the Germans around them.
Parodied repeatedly in this short story (scenario 6).

Live Action TV

Life On Mars. Sam Tyler, a policeman from 2006, mysteriously wakes up in 1973 and does indeed have problems communicating with his police colleagues.
Lost: When Daniel, Sawyer, Juliet, Jin and Miles finish traveling through time after Locke pushes the frozen donkey wheel, they arrive in 1974, and end up in the DHARMA Initiative. They blend in well, integrating well into the Initiative and going about their lives. Three years later, this all goes to hell when Jack, Kate, Hurley and Sayid time travels to 1977 and kids are getting shot, then kidnapped, vans are set on fire, physicists start shoot outs and hydrogen bombs and Daddy issues start coming into the picture. All it takes is about 3 days for everything to fall apart.
In the Doctor Who episode "Blink", the statues send their victims back in time to when they are no longer capable of harm, and let them live their lives to the end.

Video Games

The plot of Final Fantasy X revolves around Tidus being plucked out of the futuristic city of Zanarkand (while said city is destroyed) and dropped in the world of Spira. He finds that Zanarkand was destroyed 1000 years ago and has no way of getting back, so he helps a summoner on her quest to destroy the local world killing god whale.
- Fully subverted when we find out Tidus, along with the rest of Zanarkand, is a dream of the fayth.

Western Animation