I was browsing one of the Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers* while on the pot and came to a part talking about Butch Cassidey and the Sundance Kid where it mentioned one of them lived until 1939. Now, I pondered this for a moment, and suddenly realized that in his 73 years of life he lived through:
[ul]
[li]The reconstruction of the south[/li][li]The Wild West[/li][li]The Indian Wars[/li][li]The Spanish-American war[/li][li]World War 1[/li][li]The Great Depression[/li][li]The Titanic sinking[/li][li]The Lightbulb[/li][li]Electricity[/li][li]Radio[/li][li]Prohibition[/li][li]The end of prohibition[/li][li]Movies[/li][li]Movies with sound[/li][li]Women gaining the right to vote[/li][li]The Hindenberg bursting into flames[/li][li]The invention of the automobile[/li][/ul]
I’m sure I missed some major things, and that’s just the United States’ events. It just reminded me how short it’s been since all that happened; the wild west/etc seems like ages ago when I think about it, but in actuality someone’s grandparents could have been from that era. Made me stop and think for a bit. :eek:
A great bunch of books. If you love useless trivia pick them up, you won’t regret it.
I got this from George MacDonald Fraser while reading the footnotes in a Flashman novel. People who crossed the US by covered wagon lived long enough to make that same crossing by car in the 1950s. That just blows me away. People who had to worry about Indian attacks on their wagon train lived long enough to see Sputnik.
My great-great grandfather lived from 1887-1991 (I was born in 1981 and thus had the honor of meeting him several times.)
He lived through almost everything listed in the OP plus:
-Powered flight
-World War II
-Korean War
-Vietnam War
-Star Wars
-Man going into space
-Man walking on the moon
-Early cell phones
-Early PCs/Internet (though, admitedly, he probably never saw or used the internet, it was in exsistence while he was.)
-Cars (He lived most of his life in Arkansas because his wagon broke down on the way to California and the town needed a blacksmith.)
-Television
My grandmother, who died in 1974 at the age of 94, didn’t see her first automobile until she was 19 years old. And before she died, she saw men walk on the moon.
I just finished reading Darius Milhaud’s autobiography (he was a French composer who lived from 1892-1974) and it made me realize how much can happen in the world during one person’s (long) lifetime. I have new appreciation for old people now.
I appreciate the “whoa” factor - for those of you who spent time with these relatives, what can you tell us about how they dealt with these developments?!?
History seems to be “fractal” in the sense that to some degree you can take smaller and smaller slices, and find it still dense with important events.
I’m not yet 40, much, much, younger than many of those mentioned, and in my own life I’ve seen:
The end of the Vietnam War
Watergate
Humans walking on the moon
The beginning (and likely the end) of the space shuttle program
The Challenger Disaster
The Columbia Disaster
9/11
A president forced to resign from office for criminal activity,
The only unelected president in US history (Gerald Ford)
A president impeached and nearly forced to resign from office for political reasons
A president re-elected despite responsibility for 50-75,000 deaths while removing the legitimate government of a foreign nation
The fall of the Berlin Wall
A transition from a time when nuclear war was considered nearly inevitable to when it’s considered vanishingly unlikely.
A transition from a time when nuclear terrorism was considered science fiction to when it’s considered nearly inevitable
The desktop computer
The Internet
The virtual demise of Communism as a world power
The destruction of New Orleans
The SDMB
And that’s just off the top of my head. A few of these (the political ones) might fade into history, but I suspect most people will still have heard of these things a hundred years from now.
A history book on WWI pointed out that many of the senior officers just didn’t understand how deadly machine guns and bolt action rifles were because for most of their service years, the state of the art was muzzle-loading, black powder rifles. These men had all of their formative, junior-officer experiences with weapons and tactics that left them unable to handle 20th century warfare.
http://www.utahoutdooractivities.com/wolferanch.html
When he built it this was a little one-room cabin in the middle of nowhere. His daughter visited the ranch as part of Arches National Park, with access roads and everything and a fluorishing tourist inmdustry nearby, before she died. From settlers to tourist industry in one generation.
Kind of similar to the immediate pre-WW2 US Army with its field uniforms including wool tunics, ties, shiny brass insignias, and for the officers, breeches and riding boots. They couldn’t even march in riding boots; imagine going into combat…