The 10-Year History Project

My husband and I have always had an interest in World War II, perhaps because our parents were of that generation and were involved in it, all in different ways.  My mother was Rosie the riveter in a shipyard. My father was a Merchant Mariner who made the North Atlantic run to keep Britain supplied and later to deliver tanks to Mermansk. (Merchant Mariners were unjustly denied any GI benefits after the war,  but that's another post.) Joe's father was in the Army stationed in Alaska and his mother was in the Canadian Air Force. 

We had read books about it but we came up with the idea in 1985 to go back 50 years each year and learn what was happening that year.  So 1985 became 1935 and so on  through 1995 which became 1945.  We listened to the music that was popular for each year and read at least one book that was a best seller that year.  But the most interesting thing we did was to go to the Houston Public Library downtown and make photocopies of magazine articles almost every month. This was before the Internet so we had to make photocopies. It still amazes me that those bound volumes were available to the public. The staff at the library came to know us and were always interested and helpful in what we were doing. I thought about making some dresses from patterns of the period but life got too busy and I never did.  We always got a chuckle out of the ads in the magazines. 

A couple of years ago I watched the PBS program 1940s House where a family lived a year as if they were in a house in London during the Blitz.  That was so interesting. I doubt that I would have made it through the food and fuel deprivations. 

It still surprises me that we kept it up through out.  There were a few breaks when life got in the way but for the most part we kept the time warp for the whole 10 years. It was interesting. 

Grand Expectations by James Patterson

Grand Expectations by James Patterson

I cannot overstate how much I enjoyed this history of the United States from the end of World War II to 1974.  I am a baby boomer and this book covers the period of my childhood and youth.  I read the book slowly because I remember so much of the period.  Civil rights, school desegregation,  the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Vietnam, feminism, Watrgate, and Nixon's resignation.  The Cold War and the nuclear arms race.  Wow, it was quite a ride!
Excellent book, well researched, written to be easily read and understood. I am planning to read other books in this Oxford History of the United States series. 

Liberty!

I have been watching the PBS series Liberty! about the American Revolution. What makes it so special is that it is taken from letters and documents of the time. The beauty of the language and writing is in such stark contrast to the vast verbal wastland of today. We certainly have the quantity of writing, texting, blogging today but are in sore lack of quality. I wonder if historians of the future will be so overwhelmed with the volume of communication today that they will just conclude that we really didn't have much of consequence to say at all.
Anyway, the series is great and I learned so much.