Similarly, living history can sometimes reach closer to the modern day than one might appreciate. There were (probably—some of the stories lack documentation) a few people born into legal chattel slavery in the US still alive while Martin Luther King, Jr. was active. The "Old West" and settler/Western Expansion days were still very much in living memory when early western radio serials and films were made, so it's entirely possible (likely, even) that a couple honest-to-god gunslingers (rare though they may have been, and as unlike their film counterparts) or victims/perpetrators of settler/native violence sat down and watched romanticized Westerns on the big screen. Shane is set in 1889 and came out in 1953. Lots of people alive during the fictionalized events of the film were still alive then. At least a few people who fought in or witnessed actual fighting in the Civil War likely watched Keaton's The General in a movie theater, or (more ominously) Griffith's The Birth of a Nation.
Looking at that tag on kottke.org, the top few results are a Civil War widow dying in 2020, John Tyler (president in 1841) having a living grandson, and a 2020 interview with the son of a formerly enslaved person. Wild stuff.
She wasn't a "Civil War widow" per se. She was not widowed by the death of her husband in the Civil War. She was seventeen years old in 1936, and married a ninety-three year old Civil War veteran. She was the widow of a Civil War veteran.
This is one of my favourite things. It's an incredibly old, historically important text in a dead language and it's just a customer complaint.
>"You have put ingots which were not good before my messenger and said, 'If you want to take them, take them. If you do not want to take them, go away'.
3750 years ago some dude was still showing up and trying to rip people off and pull the "cash in hand" choosing beggar play.
It wasn't so much a scam, but a dispute over quality control of all things. Other tablets were found along with that one that included a customer complaining that he was tired of receiving low quality ingots. They knew enough about metallurgy six thousand years ago to have legal disputes over impurities!
What destroyed most of the empires was succession battles resulting in civil war, all through the late 1800s.
I've been watching the Fall of Civilizations Youtube channel, and the South Americans really messed up succession.
This is incredible. When you zoom out of your daily life, zoom out before smartphones, before electricity, before most modern countries exist... there were other civilizations, living daily lives, probably considering many of the same concerns we have today (family, health, work). Just wild.