Having reached a ripe (not-quite-old) age, I am regularly aware of the distance from where I am now to the memories and the world of my youth. Each of us, regardless of the length of time upon which we look back, is likely quite aware of how much things have changed. Whether we mark things in terms of prices/inflation (gas for 16.9 cents/gallon), memories of sports teams (I was not worldly-conscious the last time the Lions won a football championship), or world events (JFK assassination), we all have markers of how the world was when we were young.
As a historian, it’s part of my job to look backwards—usually further back than I was alive—to see how things were back then. It’s easy to toss off references to Napoleon, or Plymouth Rock, or Plato, without fully resonating with the distance from their worlds to now. I (at least) make a mental jump back as best I can, but it’s a leap; it’s hard to connect directly, piece-by-piece with the more distant past. I have a good friend who is rather into genealogy; he can trace several lines of descent back to the 17C, plotting each generation along the way. Most of us can go back (at least in awareness, if not in actual contact) to our great-grandparents (for me, that’s the 1860s-70s), but not much further; and that’s only a tiny slice of history: one particular family tree and contemplating my own lifespan in terms of the larger development of history seems a step beyond.
How do we grasp the time spans so as to put the changes of history into perspective? How do we respect those of the past who stood in the same relation to their own past as we do to ours? It is difficult to reconstruct their mentalité. Perhaps we can get at it a bit through framing their past as we do our own.
So, here’s a few ways to look at how my lifespan stacks up.
The end of the Soviet Empire in Central and Southeast Europe and Central Asia also precipitated the end of the Cold War. New countries emerged from within or from under the shadow of Moscow to chart their own courses, each reflecting their own peculiar mix of domestic and global factors. Democracy has often struggled in these places with limited history of a coherent political community. Economies have adapted to the 21C style of industrialism and consumer markets. Cultures have blossomed in sharply differentiated directions.
Some of these countries were in the Russian (/Soviet) orbit for less than fifty years, some for centuries. At what stage do we consign the period of imperial control (now 34 years old) to “ancient history?” At what stage are Romanians, Uzbeks, and Estonians to be considered on their own, where they can’t plausibly blame the cold hand of Alexander II, Stalin, or Gorbachev for their condition? The same question can be asked of the dozens of countries that emerged from European domination in the middle of the 20C. Spain controlled Latin America for about three hundred years, but that was over two hundred years ago. Much of Africa was swooped up by Britain or France in the 1880s and ‘90s. They ran the shows for 70-80 years, but that, too, was now 60 or so years ago. Certainly those periods still echo today in many ways, but in terms of causation (much less blame), they are really of much less significance than the actions and attitudes of those who had no sense of those periods of formal domination. Blaming the former colonial overlords may make for good politics when things are tough, but in most cases, there’s much less there than meets the eye.
Each generation has a set of such landmarks from which they construct their own frame of reference about how the world is (or should be). They’re hard to escape. It’s useful, therefore, to remember that “objects in the mirror are closer than they appear” and to recognize that the distortions are of our own making. The “echoes” of history that each of us recall are largely a product of those particular frames that we construct.
As a historian, it’s part of my job to look backwards—usually further back than I was alive—to see how things were back then. It’s easy to toss off references to Napoleon, or Plymouth Rock, or Plato, without fully resonating with the distance from their worlds to now. I (at least) make a mental jump back as best I can, but it’s a leap; it’s hard to connect directly, piece-by-piece with the more distant past. I have a good friend who is rather into genealogy; he can trace several lines of descent back to the 17C, plotting each generation along the way. Most of us can go back (at least in awareness, if not in actual contact) to our great-grandparents (for me, that’s the 1860s-70s), but not much further; and that’s only a tiny slice of history: one particular family tree and contemplating my own lifespan in terms of the larger development of history seems a step beyond.
How do we grasp the time spans so as to put the changes of history into perspective? How do we respect those of the past who stood in the same relation to their own past as we do to ours? It is difficult to reconstruct their mentalité. Perhaps we can get at it a bit through framing their past as we do our own.
So, here’s a few ways to look at how my lifespan stacks up.
- It’s been 56 years since humans landed on the Moon (1969), which was 62 years since the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. I was 15 for the Apollo landing, my grandfather was 71, but he was 7 when the news from Kitty Hawk (eventually) made its way to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where he grew up.
- I was talking to some people in Nairobi recently, a bustling metropolis overrun with Kenyan population growth (almost 6 million people); hub of Eastern Africa. I worked there for a few weeks in 1981 (44 years ago, population under 1 million). Another 44 years would take us to 1937, when it was a sleepy (pre-war) colonial capital of about 100,000. For Kenyans of a certain age in 1981 (whether of African or English lineage) the move to an independent Black-led country in 1964 was still the defining event in their history. Now, fewer than 10% of the population were part of that moment.
- We are running up to the Semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence (1776); 250 years before then would take us to 1526, the midst of the Protestant Reformation in Europe and not too long since Magellan’s crew returned from their inaugural round-the-world adventure. Such events were deeply embedded in the world of the “Founding Fathers”; much as the Declaration is now part of our ‘furniture.’
- For my (recent) students (born (e.g.) in 2004), the fall of Communism (1990) was about the same period before their birth as the start of WWII (1939) was for me. These students formative years were slammed by the Great Recession, just as my parents (and theirs) faced the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The end of the Soviet Empire in Central and Southeast Europe and Central Asia also precipitated the end of the Cold War. New countries emerged from within or from under the shadow of Moscow to chart their own courses, each reflecting their own peculiar mix of domestic and global factors. Democracy has often struggled in these places with limited history of a coherent political community. Economies have adapted to the 21C style of industrialism and consumer markets. Cultures have blossomed in sharply differentiated directions.
Some of these countries were in the Russian (/Soviet) orbit for less than fifty years, some for centuries. At what stage do we consign the period of imperial control (now 34 years old) to “ancient history?” At what stage are Romanians, Uzbeks, and Estonians to be considered on their own, where they can’t plausibly blame the cold hand of Alexander II, Stalin, or Gorbachev for their condition? The same question can be asked of the dozens of countries that emerged from European domination in the middle of the 20C. Spain controlled Latin America for about three hundred years, but that was over two hundred years ago. Much of Africa was swooped up by Britain or France in the 1880s and ‘90s. They ran the shows for 70-80 years, but that, too, was now 60 or so years ago. Certainly those periods still echo today in many ways, but in terms of causation (much less blame), they are really of much less significance than the actions and attitudes of those who had no sense of those periods of formal domination. Blaming the former colonial overlords may make for good politics when things are tough, but in most cases, there’s much less there than meets the eye.
Each generation has a set of such landmarks from which they construct their own frame of reference about how the world is (or should be). They’re hard to escape. It’s useful, therefore, to remember that “objects in the mirror are closer than they appear” and to recognize that the distortions are of our own making. The “echoes” of history that each of us recall are largely a product of those particular frames that we construct.
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