I collect memorabilia of business scandals, crises, etc. and getting a newspaper or magazine from the early days of an event is often eye opening when contrasted to the final version that ends up in the history books
My favorite was browsing a 1902 Ladies’ Home Journal and finding a lament about how commercial Christmas had become, and essentially, how much better things were back in the good old days.
It’s amazing how evergreen that general sentiment seems to be.
Likewise it is very true for almost everyone. Younger people and kids first don't experience anything like the usual shopping rush associated with Christmas so "back in the good old days" it was indeed less commercialized.
The transition to longer daylight during winter solstice in the less-connected, less-commercialized times made for more grounded local, personal engagements. Writing that letter, making that treat, giving that gift, sharing that moment during the colder, darker times. Many of these individual productions are no longer created. Lost and replaced by layers of conveniences and alternative social interactions developed with each generation. Piled on through centuries of commerce. No wonder its evergreen.
For that time of year, as an aging introvert, the darkest days remind me to keep working on my one-on-one engagements.
Unlike the other replies claiming it's always been that way, I'll agree with the author of that article. The commercialization of Christmas as we know it really started in the mid-19th century.
> It is the month of December, and yet the city is at this very moment in a sweat. Licence is given to the general merrymaking. Everything resounds with mighty preparations, – as if the Saturnalia differed at all from the usual business day! So true it is that the difference is nil, that I regard as correct the remark of the man who said: "Once December was a month; now it is a year."
A lot of people like to say "people have always been saying that." Fewer people notice that in light of the fact that history has not been on a monotonic universal upwards trend everywhere that many of the people complaining about the younger generation in fact had a point and that generation in particular they were complaining about did in fact get into a lot of trouble.
The problem with the statement isn't that the people saying it are always wrong; the problem is that it is always being said to some extent and therefore carries no particular information content in its mere statement. Rates of statement might be relevant but we have nowhere near the data we'd need historically to determine that.
Scientific american has that nice section of "50, 100 and 150 years ago". They flex their history and also provide snapshots of the past. I haven't read in a long time, but I assume they still have it.
'Nature' does the same, for 50 and 100 years ago. A recent issue has the prediction from 1973 that beef wouldn't be eaten by the year 2000 because of the production inefficiencies, and a 1923 review of a book about cryptography. I've been reading Nature on and off for about 40 years. When I started, the '100 years' ago pieces were from the late 19th C, and often conjured up an image of amateur gentlemen scientists writing letters to learned societies in London, very different from today.
The 1957 issue of Life that includes the first coverage of Psilocybin Mushrooms in the Western World also has an advert for a local KKK sponsored baseball team. Wild.
> "Seeking the Magic Mushroom" is a 1957 photo essay by amateur mycologist Robert Gordon Wasson describing his experience taking psilocybin mushrooms in 1955 during a Mazatec ritual in Oaxaca, Mexico.
I fully maintain that a lot of information known by the general population back in the day has been (or will be) lost to the sands of time. Sometimes it feels like information I find online for certain trades, like cooking or carpentry, is just a series of blogs all parroting each other. Old books contain an abundance of helpful tips, knowledge and ideas that I usually can't find as easily online, and I find them fascinating to read.
The biggest reason is probably that nobody makes anything anymore....
Plus, about half those old books had information a modern person generally hopes to never use, even if they do still make things. Much as I love living history, I don't want to mill lumber by hand or do anything that involves the phrase "Measure out the white lead and mix it into the...".
There's lots of stuff that would be interesting and potentially useful, but information these days seems to spread based on immediate usefulness (Except math. Everyone just accepts people all should learn a pretty large amount even though only some of them will ever use it), and people don't really think about uncommon scenarios.
But now it seems like we're right on the edge where even modern practical things are being forgotten, and "I don't know how to cook" is starting to literally mean "I doordash every day and couldn't make a pot of spaghetti to save my life, and I think an impact driver must be a porn star name".
Those things are useful, but not exactly constantly used for most people, and they don't require anywhere near the level of math people actually learn just to get by in everyday life.
Most people almost never do these things themselves, unless they like the process of planning things on paper without tech, or they do these things so often you'd be seriously slowed down without being able to them mentally.
Everyone should learn math, because it lets you do the things that need it, and because for a lot of people, the mathematical beauty seems to be the motivating factor to do those things in the first place, and those things tend to pay well and might save the planet.
The problem is when people act like we will be balancing checkbooks, picking stocks by hand, and adding fractions on paper every day.
People hear that and think it's useless because they are confident they won't be doing those things, because... I've never seen anyone use calculus in my entire life. I'm not sure I've seen algebra either.
I've heard about geometry, but mostly extremely basic things, or for things that would be easy to do in CAD.
Honestly I'd probably make a FreeCAD sketch instead of doing the math by hand if I was going to find the height of a tree with the Pythagorean theorem, being able to actually see it all would be an extra confirmation I did it right and the measurements were at least approximately good, and I'd have something to screenshot to prove the method works, to people who know even less math than me.
Fractions mostly show up when dealing with material that is sized in fractions, and half the time they're not really fractions, just nominal names for things, And you'll need to look up or measure the real size anyway.
It's not like people are hitting brick walls and thinking "Oh well, can't do this project, the math is too hard, shoulda stayed in school", it's more like people say "This doesn't pay well, maybe if learned math I'd have a totally different job and be doing totally different stuff I can't even imagine".
It's not like a hammer that you know exactly when you need it even if you don't have it.
Plus, scientists get things wrong sometimes, and there's tons of flaws in papers, so even just for pure understanding the world you need a lot more than math to actually be able to read a scientific paper or a political survey, and without all the other stuff the math looks less useful than it is.
Every time you make change you use fractions.... Ever hear of a quarter?
I use percentages constantly to analyze choices every single day, in my personal life... Not doing so implies lack of due care and consideration.... I have to ere on the side of people not being lazy, willfully ignorant and unthinking, right? Ere go most people must use percentages constantly as I do.
Angles? Telling someone what angle something is, is something I do regularly... It's a right angle, or 15 degrees or whatever...
I've recently got into old-school valve (tube) based electronics and it makes me wonder how much practical knowledge has been lost over the decades in that field or worse obscured by grifters trying to sell snake oil to audiophile types.
While there's insight in your observation, comparing old books to current blog posts is like comparing current books with old bar talk. There is plenty of high value sources in print.
I came across a copy of a 200-year-old newspaper for my town (not a big city) and the little thing that jumped out at me as I flipped through was that there were multiple advertisements for local shoemakers. Of course now there are no shoemakers around here, because who goes to a shoemaker right? You just buy the same Nikes or Dr Martens that are available everywhere. But before Zappos and before Payless and before the Sears Roebuck catalog, people still needed shoes, so we needed folks in each town to make them. It's one of those things that is completely obvious in retrospect but must have been a huge change to both shoemakers and shoe buyers as the transition happened.
Once in a great while, I find myself in the market for a cobbler, aka shoe repair shop. They do exist in my metro area, but they are indeed few and far between. The extant ones are very old businesses and they're usually run by some old codger who won't be selling or handing on the business to a successor.
The last shoe repair shop I used was very nice, had merchandise for me to purchase; I picked up a few aromatic cedar shoe trees, some polish and brushes, and had a couple pairs of shoes repaired very nicely. The owner was the only worker there and utterly overwhelmed; he gestured at his backlog which was immense. He cranked the 80s hair metal while he worked. There was supposed to be a shoe shine service, but no shoe shine boy to do it. He was kind to the homeless and passers-by, and people could sit and hang out in his store if they wanted.
He was murdered by a homeless fellow while trying to be kind to him. The homeless guy had gone to use the bathroom, and found the owner's gun lying on the counter, and for some reason used it against the owner himself. I will really miss that owner and his store.
I've noticed that rural areas tend to have more of these kinds of businesses.
I live in a town of <15k people, and there are three cobblers. All three are marketed a bit differently: one is "<Name> Shoe Repair", on is "<Town> Saddlery and Footwear", and one is "<Name> Leathergoods". The saddlery has found a niche in working with the owners of working horses, but all three offer the same services at the end of the day.
When I lived in a medium-sized city in Virginia, there were none that I could find online - or even in the phone book, which I tried considering the clientele that they seem to serve. I was finally able to find a competent leatherworker by asking around in the local Hispanic community that was largely made up of Salvadorians who worked in the trades. They didn't have a storefront or really even a business name; you just had to know who they were, drop by their home, and pay cash.
Definitely - searching for bespoke shoes yields quite a fair number. Before the reddit blackout, /r/goodyearwelt was the place to discuss fine men's footwear across the price spectrum.
They tend to be dress shoes or workboots nearly exclusively, and as styles have changed, there's little growth in the industry.
I don't think most people are very good at doing that, rather the media ends up shaping their reality itself both subjectively and eventually objectively.
And consider the relative cultural relevance of today's magazines and the historical ones you've chosen.
For all the moaning about how we've lost a monoculture because we don't all watch the same TV channels, I think those people are too young to remember things like LIFE magazine, the big, unavoidable, pictorial shared American experience, never really breaking news but always showing us the zeitgeist in broad strokes.
Today's magazines have niche or tabloid appeal at best.
I've been meaning to create a single page website that shows the front page of the New York Times and/or Fox News from one day, one week, one year, and 10 years ago.
I really like reading international economics and politics from the 60s and 70s. You realize that a lot of non fiction gets recycled often, and the no-nonsense analysis they did back then gets watered down a lot with the current touchiness of talking about different cultures. There was a lot of bias back then too, to be sure... But comparing different biases is the best way to filter some of them out.
My PhD alma matter had a library until a year before I graduated and I found myself there once every few months just to browse and find a random Science or Nature issue from the 80s. It was a fascinating read for sure. Definitely much is lost even in science, people discovered a lot more with far fewer methods. I suppose the science was also easier and simpler.
I used newspapers.com heavily for research in my first book. "No hindsight" was my strict rule, so learning what people thought THEN was indispensable.
It has a monthly subscription, and searching is, well, tedious. Like, you want to go to the Business section, and binary search of the pages plus guessing is the only way.
I've always regretted that I didn't keep one magazine from each month of my life --- unfortunately, most of the older ones got pitched a couple of moves ago. Articles which I'd like to revisit:
- Popular Mechanics and the first mention of a CNC which I read of --- the U.S. Navy putting one on an aircraft carrier at the cost of half-a-million dollars
- the computer magazine which had a review of the GRiD Compass (I later bought a GRiDCase III spending way more than I should have)
- the issue of Newsweek which had the 16 page insert ad for the original Apple Macintosh
- the issue of Time which had an article on gun control where the photo of weapons from a gun buyback prominently featured an inexpensive air pistol
- the news magazine which had a tiny sidebar article covering an international incident which I actually had direct knowledge of
I have my stack of Byte magazines still, but I much prefer going back through the Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia (1977-) pile.
I’ve been pondering the possibility of an app that could archive magazines over the eras, make them searchable, etc. something like this could be very neat to browse all magazines in public domain.
In the early 20th century there were guides published for every business in the state - like a proto- yellow pages, but hard bound and carefully illustrated.
I found a listing an ancestor of mine had for his booming asbestos business in San Francisco.
You can learn a lot about the times through the businesses and products that were thriving (elevators!).
You also have to be careful not to interpret the past through the lens of the present gestalt. Perhaps what now could be deemed as "toxic masculinity", was considered "masculinity" back in the day.
I mean, interpreting the past through our present lens is a valuable exercise.
Just because past generations didn’t have a label for “toxic masculinity” doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, or that we can’t learn from its historical effects.
Same goes for plenty of modern social and relational concepts that were either ignored, or not-understood in the past.
Macho "traits" and the 50's "American Man" (pater familias) are almost the same. The Catholic and Protestant backgrounds are more alike than they would acknowledge.
If you read Spanish magazines from the 20's and early 30's from Spain you would find a society pretty close to the American one, at least in urban places.
The English Gentleman term can be mapped to the "Caballero" term almost by a ratio 1:1, except that "Caballero" can also mean "Sir" as in "excuse me, sir".
The Anglosaxon society might have been more individualistic and the Hispanic one more group oriented, but once you chatted with individuals the traits faded out a lot.
Since the French burgueois revolution from 1789 and the Industrial Revolution, the Western society has been nearly uniformized at urban places from Andalusia to Sweden. OFC in rural places the gap was bigger, but Feudalism lost and from that the influence from both Churchs.
On the contrary, our current lens is a narrow ideology that generates criticism and complaints that apply so indifferently to everything as to make it meaningless. It exists mainly to separate people from their histories, which politically neutralizes and subordinates them to a small cadre of activated ideologues. It has discovered nothing.
The value of books and magazines prior to about 1995, and art in general, is they are physical artifacts of peoples diverse lived experiences that provide waypoints, continuity, and a fabric for a society and civilization. They enable a stability and freedom from the power struggles of the present, and they are there for more than to be just gawked at and complained about, imo.
We're not going to agree. Victimhood is not diverse, it's a single, homogenous, self-perpetualting ideological filter. I highly recommend Hannah Arendt's "Ideology and Terror" essay for a deeper treatment of why some people believe what they do, and how movements like this use media to consolidate their strategy.
... and much less accepting and empathetic to those who are excluded from the "diverse cultures" category.
Seriously. I understand that this is a politically charged issue in all kinds of ways, but as a white man who is the sole income earner of a traditional family, I expect to find all kinds of support for various identity groups pretty much everywhere I interact with others - but I've yet to find a single one that I identify with.
While I don't share that view, it's easy to see how people who are explicitly excluded in that way can come to feel that "diversity" initiatives are a thinly-veiled attack on everything they believe in.
Personally I see it as a correction of a long-term problem, and like most reactions, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. In a generation I think it will settle down into something much more reasonable and equitable.
What's the purpose of this comment? Do you think there are HN readers not aware of changing standards historically? Or are you just trolling to stir up a culture war debate?
I don't think we've progressed that much. If you dig into what "masculinity" means today, it's still an extremely narrow lane. We accept a much wider range if you identify as queer, but if you identify as straight, "masculine" still basically means a silent Marlboro man.
It's not so nationally consistent as it seemed to be in the past.
But what you're describing does seem to still be true for at least a lot of the fly-over states.
That's kind of a large part of what all the drama has been in the last one-two decades. Part of the country has left that (and more) all largely behind, while the rest are clutching desperately to that past as if it's the very thing that "made america great".
