The best and worst thing in the world

The image above is from the New York Times’s sports section (something that no longer exists), in the summer of 1974. Now in one sense the summer of 1974 was certainly a long time ago, and yet I would imagine that half or more of the regular readers of this blog have some memory of it. I myself was about to start high school, so I have a pretty vivid memory of that summer, in particular the hit songs on the rock & roll radio, including Midnight at the Oasis, Sundown, Band on the Run, Help Me . . . ah nostalgia.

Anyway, I try to imagine explaining a world to my current students in which it was impossible to even get the scores of the soccer games played in the World Cup Final until they were printed in the next day’s newspaper. This is one small thing, but it can stand for a lot of much bigger ones, aspects of a vanished world that was in some ways better and in others worse than the one in which we live now.

The best professor I had in law school was among other things a historian, and I remember him saying that the one question that drives every historian, whether they admit it or not, is: What would it have been like to live then? Specifically, was that time and place better or worse than this one now?