\u201cOn the Writing of Contemporary History<\/a>\u201d by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.<\/p>\n Fifty years ago, as the 1960s began to wane, Schlesinger, a historian and former special assistant to John F. Kennedy, described the growing need for historians to document events not of a distant past but of their own times. In the preceding decades, he wrote, technology had intensified both the \u201cvolume of communication\u201d and the \u201curgency of events.\u201d And as a result, he asserted, \u201cIt is now a necessity\u2014a psychic necessity to counter the pressures of life in a high velocity age and a technical necessity to rescue and preserve evidence for future historians.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Flowering of the Hippies<\/a>\u201d by Mark Harris<\/p>\n During the summer of 1967, tens of thousands of hippies descended on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco to drop acid, clash with the police, and gather with like-minded people, as Harris described just weeks after the infamous summer came to a close. \u201cWhen hippies first came to San Francisco they were an isolated minority, mistrustful, turned inward by drugs, lacking acquaintance beyond themselves,\u201d Harris wrote. \u201cIn part a hoax of American journalism, known even to themselves only as they saw themselves in the media,\u201d he continued, \u201cthey began at last, and especially with the approach of the \u2018summer of love,\u2019 to assess their community, their quest, and themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDeath at an Early Age<\/a>\u201d by Jonathan Kozol<\/p>\n<\/section>\n Recalling his first year teaching in a public school in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Kozol described the deep-rooted segregation and inequality within the education system. \u201cConsider what it is like to go into a new classroom and to see before you suddenly, and in a way you cannot avoid recognizing, the dreadful consequences of a year\u2019s wastage of so many lives,\u201d he wrote, confronting \u201ccurious, cautious, and untrusting children\u201d who had become accustomed to chaos and failure. His efforts to offer the students \u201csomething new and lively\u201d were, he remembered, met with enthusiasm from the children and resistance from the other teachers. His \u201cmistake, in fact, is to have impinged upon the standardized condescension upon which the entire administration of the school is based,\u201d he said\u2014a condescension that held back the students and deprived them of the education they deserved.<\/p>\n 1917<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cA Prisoner in Wittenberg<\/a>\u201d by Private Hutchinson<\/p>\n Two months before the United States formally entered World War I, British Private Hutchinson detailed his capture and captivity under the Germans in the war\u2019s earlier years. While he was held as a prisoner of war, in a barracks where comfort was scarce and \u201cevery minute was like an hour and an hour like a day,\u201d a devastating wave of typhus broke out. \u201cI have stood against the wires and seen as many as 15 being carried to their last resting place, and the sentries laugh and jeer as the coffins went by,\u201d Hutchinson wrote. \u201cIt made me wonder if I should get it, for it is no joke standing there against the wires, with your eyes sunk right in your head and the skin of your stomach that loose that you could almost wipe your nose with it, from starvation, watching the sick going one way and the dead the other.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA Father to his Graduate Girl<\/a>\u201d by Edward S. Martin<\/p>\n<\/section>\n Martin\u2019s missive to his daughter, who recently secured a bachelor of arts degree, is by turns sweetly optimistic and revealing of an attitude toward women\u2019s education that persisted as the women\u2019s suffrage movement made waves, and gains, in the 1910s. \u201cI know that you have partaken faithfully of the repast that was set before you, and that, if there is anything good for girls in a college education, you must have got it,\u201d Martin tells his daughter. But, he adds, \u201cwomen are women, and will be to the end; and the work they do, in the long run and with due exceptions, will be women\u2019s work.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Threatened Eclipse of Free Speech<\/a>\u201d by James Harvey Robinson<\/p>\n As the United States began committing troops to World War I, Robinson expressed his apprehension about the potential consequences for the nation\u2019s citizens\u2014not on the European battlefield, but on the American home front. \u201cMany intelligent persons, as well as the great mass of the unthinking, would, now that war is on, have us surrender some of the normal constitutional safeguards of free speech,\u201d he wrote, because they felt that protests were \u201cessentially disloyal, if not downright treasonable\u201d and promoted \u201cdisunion at home.\u201d \u201cWhen we start out to kill enemies abroad on a gigantic scale,\u201d Robinson contended, \u201cwe are not likely to hesitate to gag those at home who seem directly or indirectly to sympathize with the foe.\u201d In this way, freedom could be lost at home even as soldiers fought to preserve it abroad.<\/p>\n 1867<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/section>\n \u201cOut on Picket<\/a>\u201d by Thomas Wentworth Higginson<\/p>\n During the Civil War, Higginson served as colonel of the first federally authorized black regiment\u2014an experience he revisited often in his writing for The Atlantic<\/em> in the 1860s. In one such article, he recalled the time he and his regiment spent in Port Royal, South Carolina, in 1863, positioned so that they could warn other Union forces of a Confederate approach. \u201cThe picket station was \u2026 always a coveted post among the regiments,\u201d he wrote, \u201ccombining some undeniable importance with a kind of relaxation.\u201d His description is rife with peaceful summer days and magical, \u201chaunted nights,\u201d always waiting for the enemy to appear.<\/p>\n \u201cAn Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage<\/a>\u201d by Frederick Douglass<\/p>\n In the early days of Reconstruction that followed the end of the war\u2014and, with it, slavery in the United States\u2014Douglass expressed his fear of the prejudice and oppression that still lay ahead for African Americans and called on the national legislature to grant them the equal rights of citizenship. \u201cWhat, then, is the work before Congress?\u201d he wrote. \u201cIn a word, it must enfranchise the negro \u2026 and in time bridge the chasm between North and South, so that our country may have a common liberty and a common civilization.\u201d The following year, Congress ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, granting full citizenship to people born or naturalized in the United States regardless of race.<\/p>\n Mr. Hardhack on the Derivation of Man from the Monkey<\/a>\u201d by E. P. Whipple<\/p>\n<\/section>\n A decade after Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species<\/em>, Whipple mocked the skeptics who argued against Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution by penning a satirical rant from the perspective of Mr. Solomon Hardhack, a reactionary who was offended by the notion that humans had descended from primates. \u201cMy proposition is, that nobody who reasons himself into a development from the monkey has the right to take mankind with him in his induction,\u201d he wrote. \u201cAs for the Hardhacks, they at least beg to be excused from joining him in that logical excursion, and insist on striking the monkey altogether out from their genealogical tree.\u201d<\/p>\n
When hippies, World War I, and the Civil War filled our pages:<\/p>\n
As much as 2017 has been a year of engrossing current events, it has also been a year for resurrecting history. In February, President Trump briefly brought Frederick Douglass<\/a> back to life at an event marking Black History Month. For some, his abrupt dismissal of FBI Director James Comey evoked memories ofWatergate<\/a> and the Saturday Night Massacre<\/a>. Nazi imagery and rhetoric resurged in the alt-right movement<\/a>. And over the course of the summer and fall, the Civil War was repeatedly relitigated<\/a>. So amid all the reflections on this unusual, eventful year and how it was covered by the press, it doesn\u2019t feel out of place to look back a little\u2014or even a lot\u2014farther than January 1.<\/p>\n Revisiting Atlantic<\/em> articles from 150, 100, or even 50 years ago provides glimpses into places and events that now feel remote: the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury, the German trenches of World War I, a Civil War outpost in South Carolina. But it also offers up discussions and ideas that wouldn\u2019t feel unfamiliar in 2017, from an examination of presidential impeachment to a criticism of city public schools.<\/p>\n 1967<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n