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Even finding stuff out on your own seems more difficult with more recent events.

I've noticed this too, and I reckon it's because news media tend to be run by people in their fifties or older, who were there and so don't feel the need to explain those events to people. In the UK there's a rule that, with certain national-security exceptions, all cabinet papers get released thirty years later. Every January 1st the newspapers are full of salacious and potentially fascinating stories about, say, the Suez crisis, with an utter lack of enough context to make them comprehensible to people of our age.

BBC TV once had a brilliant series called "The Rock 'N' Roll Years", which went through the Sixties and Seventies, a year in each half-hour programme, playing that year's hit singles over a mixture of concert footage and (silent) news footage from the year, with a news ticker along the bottom. The analysis was brief but insightful, and probably still makes up about 80% of what I know about Sixties and Seventies current affairs.

The BBC web site's On This Day is very good at contextualising.

Edit: and for the record, I've heard of HG Wells and the Gulf of Tonkin, but not the names My Lai or Chappaquiddick (though on looking them up, I'd heard of the Chappaquiddick incident but not registered the name). And any American who thinks that Europe has all the good place-names can clearly never have been to Chappaquiddick (or for that matter Passamaquoddy Bay).

Peter


Edited by peter (10/10/2004 16:46)