> First was on November 22, 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. This was when The Fifties actually ended and The Sixties began. (My great aunt Eva Quakenbush, née Searls or Searles—it was spelled both ways—told us what it was like when Lincoln was shot and she was 12 years old. “It changed everything,” she said. So did the JFK assassination.)

This always amazes me. Things you learn in history class seem like so long ago, yet here is a living person who spoke to someone with living memory of the civil war. Which also means that people living today had direct relatives who were slaves. The last American slave died in the 1970s, which means they have relatives alive today only a generation or two removed from that. I have people a generation or two younger than me right now! The past is not so far in the past.

I've realized I'm mostly likely going to be one of those living archives, and I have very weird feelings about it.

I'm 33 years old and I might be the youngest person/in the very last group of people who remember the early Web and the pre-Web Internet (via 2 geek parents). Was I doing anything super important or useful? Of course not, but I clearly remember things like Eternal September, the first banner ads and discussion of their implications regarding monetization on the web, the browser and search engine wars (and the search engines replacing directories and curation). I clearly remember how excited I was when ANYBODY could make suggestions about what tags were going to made, etc. In short, while I was probably the worst programmer there (I mean I was 4-5, it's a decent excuse), I'm a decent primary source.

I'm also female and have multiple ancestors who made it to being supercentenarians; it's not out of the question that I'll be the last one left. (e.g. being around in 2100 to answer questions about the early Web, which by then will be shrouded in mystery or overly-sanitized narratives [especially the parts pre most things (or anything) being archived; a lot of the 90s are just not recorded at all.]) I'm also a librarian/archivist, and I spend some amount of time wondering what I should say.

You may also be useful for "why didn't they fix climate change before it got so bad?" questions 50 years hence.

To add specifically to the Lincoln assassination: One of the eyewitnesses appeared on a gameshow as mystery guest in 1956 (shortly before passing away)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RPoymt3Jx4

One joke is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, and Brits think 100 miles is a long way.

Along those lines: John Tyler, 10th President of the USA... Alive when George Washington was president... Has a living grandson. Grandson! Until recently, he had two. This obituary for his second to last living grandson mentions the surviving brother.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/08/us/john-tyler-grandson-death-...

Harriet Tubman's life (1822-1913) overlapped with Thomas Jefferson's life (1743-1826) and Ronald Reagan's life (1911-2004).

my history teacher in school, said once - anything sooner than ~100y ago, is not yet history, but still politics..

agree or disagree with the list, is is very USA-centric. As a US citizen I can look to all the events he cites and agree at least to their impact, but aside from the internet and Ukraine, these are all things that happened to the US. I wonder how important the assasination of JFK, RFK, and MLK, or 9/11 were to non-US citizens? (I'm genuinely curious, I know that the reach on the US means that almost everyone is impacted becuase we strongly impact other countries with our actions, but are they seen as turning points outside of the US?)

As an anecdote, up in Canada most people my age (born in the 90s) would likely still consider 9/11 to be the most impactful individual event of our lifetimes. Time will tell if COVID-19 ends up overtaking it in retrospect, I feel like it likely will.

Of course, it’s not lost on me that we’re probably the country most culturally similar to the US, so I suppose this is unsurprising.

9/11 was big. Too young to have witnessed the rest and I would not be able to say what were the consequences of mlk or jfk assassinations.

9/11 initiated a transfer of $5 trillion from American taxpayers to an enormously smaller group of (mostly also) Americans, incidentally laying waste to two or more Asian countries, and American civil society.

Billionaires made through invasions based mainly on lies do not tend subsequently to favor sound government.

This is just a list of events. The first half of which didnt even have a systemic impact on history. "9/11 was a transition from Peacekeeper to Warmaker" is cute coming from an author who lived through Vietnam, Korea, Chile, Angola, Nicaragua, Colombia, Panama, and Grenada.

better permalink : http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2022/03/06/the-frog-of-war/

Thanks, changed from http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/ above.

"I’m an optimist by nature." Are you sure of that? Because what I just read seemed like the meandering thoughts of a cynical pessimist.

More surprising to me is that he still has conversations with Eric Raymond.

The author is an optimist in defiance of all that he observes should make him pessimistic.