To Understand the Past, Pick Up an Old Magazine

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/magazine/old-magazines.html

by ingve • 3 years ago

76 80 3 years ago

ramraj07• 3 years ago

My PhD alma matter had a library until a year before I graduated and I found myself there once every few months just to browse and find a random Science or Nature issue from the 80s. It was a fascinating read for sure. Definitely much is lost even in science, people discovered a lot more with far fewer methods. I suppose the science was also easier and simpler.

dm_me_dogs• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/oVz97

ErikAugust• 3 years ago

https://trimread.org/articles/39034

rlawson• 3 years ago

One of my favorite hobbies is browsing 80/90's computer magazines

stevesimmons• 3 years ago

Byte magazine is the best.

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine

I only half jokingly say everything I know about computers I learned from reading Byte around 1985-1990.

defrost• 3 years ago

I have my stack of Byte magazines still, but I much prefer going back through the Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia (1977-) pile.

https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal

https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal_vol_01

GrumpyNl• 3 years ago

Is there a way to do a text search on those magazines?

doxeddaily• 3 years ago

Terrific Ohio Scientific!

I love the old ads lol. Except I also read these mags back in the 80s.

user_named• 3 years ago

You mean '90s.

rrreese• 3 years ago

Byte Magazine [1975 - 1998]

kps• 3 years ago

Byte was a shadow of its former self by 1990. Creative Computing was long gone. Dr Dobb's held out a bit better.

Ekaros• 3 years ago

I think things started to go downhill around mid-nineties... My collection of local computer magazines ends in 95...

PopAlongKid• 3 years ago

80/90's computer magazines

Comment was evidently trying to point out incorrect use of apostrophe.

kzrdude• 3 years ago

Scientific american has that nice section of "50, 100 and 150 years ago". They flex their history and also provide snapshots of the past. I haven't read in a long time, but I assume they still have it.

KineticLensman• 3 years ago

'Nature' does the same, for 50 and 100 years ago. A recent issue has the prediction from 1973 that beef wouldn't be eaten by the year 2000 because of the production inefficiencies, and a 1923 review of a book about cryptography. I've been reading Nature on and off for about 40 years. When I started, the '100 years' ago pieces were from the late 19th C, and often conjured up an image of amateur gentlemen scientists writing letters to learned societies in London, very different from today.

[Edit] 40 years rather than 35. Doesn't time fly!

mguerville• 3 years ago

I collect memorabilia of business scandals, crises, etc. and getting a newspaper or magazine from the early days of an event is often eye opening when contrasted to the final version that ends up in the history books

bluetomcat• 3 years ago

You also have to be careful not to interpret the past through the lens of the present gestalt. Perhaps what now could be deemed as "toxic masculinity", was considered "masculinity" back in the day.

atourgates• 3 years ago

I mean, interpreting the past through our present lens is a valuable exercise.

Just because past generations didn’t have a label for “toxic masculinity” doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, or that we can’t learn from its historical effects.

Same goes for plenty of modern social and relational concepts that were either ignored, or not-understood in the past.

motohagiography2• 3 years ago

On the contrary, our current lens is a narrow ideology that generates criticism and complaints that apply so indifferently to everything as to make it meaningless. It exists mainly to separate people from their histories, which politically neutralizes and subordinates them to a small cadre of activated ideologues. It has discovered nothing.

The value of books and magazines prior to about 1995, and art in general, is they are physical artifacts of peoples diverse lived experiences that provide waypoints, continuity, and a fabric for a society and civilization. They enable a stability and freedom from the power struggles of the present, and they are there for more than to be just gawked at and complained about, imo.

dsr_• 3 years ago

'past generations didn’t have a label for “toxic masculinity”'

But they did. The "macho" trait was considered a negative feature of Latino culture by mainstream Americans as early as the 1890s.

They didn't think the label applied to themselves, of course. Introspection is harder than labelling outsiders.

hackernoteng• 3 years ago

The old cigarette ads are the best

turnsout• 3 years ago

I don't think we've progressed that much. If you dig into what "masculinity" means today, it's still an extremely narrow lane. We accept a much wider range if you identify as queer, but if you identify as straight, "masculine" still basically means a silent Marlboro man.

pengaru• 3 years ago

It's not so nationally consistent as it seemed to be in the past.

But what you're describing does seem to still be true for at least a lot of the fly-over states.

That's kind of a large part of what all the drama has been in the last one-two decades. Part of the country has left that (and more) all largely behind, while the rest are clutching desperately to that past as if it's the very thing that "made america great".

earthboundkid• 3 years ago

What's the purpose of this comment? Do you think there are HN readers not aware of changing standards historically? Or are you just trolling to stir up a culture war debate?

marikio2• 3 years ago

The 1957 issue of Life that includes the first coverage of Psilocybin Mushrooms in the Western World also has an advert for a local KKK sponsored baseball team. Wild.

anon____2• 3 years ago

That's interesting, thanks!

"Seeking the Magic Mushroom" is a 1957 photo essay by amateur mycologist Robert Gordon Wasson describing his experience taking psilocybin mushrooms in 1955 during a Mazatec ritual in Oaxaca, Mexico.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeking_the_Magic_Mushroom

I found this issue of Life in the Internet Archive, here's the Magic Mushroom photo essay: https://archive.org/details/sim_life_1957-05-13_42_19/page/1....

The KKK baseball team story is a report, not an advertisement (although there's an insane amount of ads in that magazine): https://archive.org/details/sim_life_1957-05-13_42_19/page/4....

marikio2• 3 years ago

Thanks for the correction! Haven’t browsed it in about 5 years now, so memory is foggy :)

AlecSchueler• 3 years ago

And to understand how big of a pinch of salt you need to take in with you, compare your reality with a contemporary magazine.

guerrilla• 3 years ago

I don't think most people are very good at doing that, rather the media ends up shaping their reality itself both subjectively and eventually objectively.

hn_thrwn• 3 years ago

If you want to see just how much salt you need read a history book with the same delta t from now to then as from an event.

The amount of presentism in 2023 is ridiculous and completely uncritically accepted by most everyone.

drewcoo2• 3 years ago

And consider the relative cultural relevance of today's magazines and the historical ones you've chosen.

For all the moaning about how we've lost a monoculture because we don't all watch the same TV channels, I think those people are too young to remember things like LIFE magazine, the big, unavoidable, pictorial shared American experience, never really breaking news but always showing us the zeitgeist in broad strokes.

Today's magazines have niche or tabloid appeal at best.

anthk2• 3 years ago

My dad had a bunch of Reader Digest's magazines from the 70's and 80's, and I liked computers from that era.

trebligdivad• 3 years ago

A good birthday present for a youngster is one of your computer or electronics magazines from the month they were born.

JoelMcCracken• 3 years ago

I’ve been pondering the possibility of an app that could archive magazines over the eras, make them searchable, etc. something like this could be very neat to browse all magazines in public domain.

xnx2• 3 years ago

https://archive.org/details/magazine_rack

adhesive_wombat• 3 years ago

The internet Archive "Serials in Microfilm" collection is breathtaking in scale:

https://archive.org/details/sim_microfilm

Literally vaults and shipping containers of microfilm reels: https://archive.org/details/all-serials-in-microfilm-sim-mic...

cenazoic• 3 years ago

My favorite was browsing a 1902 Ladies’ Home Journal and finding a lament about how commercial Christmas had become, and essentially, how much better things were back in the good old days.

It’s amazing how evergreen that general sentiment seems to be.

raxxorraxor• 3 years ago

Likewise it is very true for almost everyone. Younger people and kids first don't experience anything like the usual shopping rush associated with Christmas so "back in the good old days" it was indeed less commercialized.

civilized• 3 years ago

The eternal dilemma: given a change in society or social perceptions over time, is it a time effect, an age effect, or a birth cohort effect?

JJMcJ• 3 years ago

It has been recorded from the earliest days of the Christian holiday. Maybe even before that with its predecessors.

floren• 3 years ago

Seneca in a letter to Lucilius, circa 62 AD:

It is the month of December, and yet the city is at this very moment in a sweat. Licence is given to the general merrymaking. Everything resounds with mighty preparations, – as if the Saturnalia differed at all from the usual business day! So true it is that the difference is nil, that I regard as correct the remark of the man who said: "Once December was a month; now it is a year."

(https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...)

namaria7• 3 years ago

People have been writing about "kids these days" ever since the alphabet got invented...

mjklin• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_tempora,_o_mores!

iamgoat• 3 years ago

https://archive.org/details/sim_ladies-home-journal_1902-12_...

The transition to longer daylight during winter solstice in the less-connected, less-commercialized times made for more grounded local, personal engagements. Writing that letter, making that treat, giving that gift, sharing that moment during the colder, darker times. Many of these individual productions are no longer created. Lost and replaced by layers of conveniences and alternative social interactions developed with each generation. Piled on through centuries of commerce. No wonder its evergreen.

For that time of year, as an aging introvert, the darkest days remind me to keep working on my one-on-one engagements.

drewcoo2• 3 years ago

Unlike the other replies claiming it's always been that way, I'll agree with the author of that article. The commercialization of Christmas as we know it really started in the mid-19th century.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/victorianchristmas/history.shtml

karaterobot• 3 years ago

To understand the past, read more primary historical sources, such as some magazines.

lastofthemojito• 3 years ago

I came across a copy of a 200-year-old newspaper for my town (not a big city) and the little thing that jumped out at me as I flipped through was that there were multiple advertisements for local shoemakers. Of course now there are no shoemakers around here, because who goes to a shoemaker right? You just buy the same Nikes or Dr Martens that are available everywhere. But before Zappos and before Payless and before the Sears Roebuck catalog, people still needed shoes, so we needed folks in each town to make them. It's one of those things that is completely obvious in retrospect but must have been a huge change to both shoemakers and shoe buyers as the transition happened.

SoftTalker• 3 years ago

As there are still high-end custom tailors, are there still high-end custom shoemakers?

diablerouge• 3 years ago

Definitely - searching for bespoke shoes yields quite a fair number. Before the reddit blackout, /r/goodyearwelt was the place to discuss fine men's footwear across the price spectrum.

They tend to be dress shoes or workboots nearly exclusively, and as styles have changed, there's little growth in the industry.

NoZebra120vClip• 3 years ago

Once in a great while, I find myself in the market for a cobbler, aka shoe repair shop. They do exist in my metro area, but they are indeed few and far between. The extant ones are very old businesses and they're usually run by some old codger who won't be selling or handing on the business to a successor.

The last shoe repair shop I used was very nice, had merchandise for me to purchase; I picked up a few aromatic cedar shoe trees, some polish and brushes, and had a couple pairs of shoes repaired very nicely. The owner was the only worker there and utterly overwhelmed; he gestured at his backlog which was immense. He cranked the 80s hair metal while he worked. There was supposed to be a shoe shine service, but no shoe shine boy to do it. He was kind to the homeless and passers-by, and people could sit and hang out in his store if they wanted.

He was murdered by a homeless fellow while trying to be kind to him. The homeless guy had gone to use the bathroom, and found the owner's gun lying on the counter, and for some reason used it against the owner himself. I will really miss that owner and his store.

Teever• 3 years ago

Oh yes, very much so.

Here is a video that I stumbled across recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEw4cSUalZY

beowulfey2• 3 years ago

I fully maintain that a lot of information known by the general population back in the day has been (or will be) lost to the sands of time. Sometimes it feels like information I find online for certain trades, like cooking or carpentry, is just a series of blogs all parroting each other. Old books contain an abundance of helpful tips, knowledge and ideas that I usually can't find as easily online, and I find them fascinating to read.

namaria7• 3 years ago

While there's insight in your observation, comparing old books to current blog posts is like comparing current books with old bar talk. There is plenty of high value sources in print.

beowulfey2• 3 years ago

That's true -- you mean comparing old books with new books? That's a good point!

BoxOfRain• 3 years ago

I've recently got into old-school valve (tube) based electronics and it makes me wonder how much practical knowledge has been lost over the decades in that field or worse obscured by grifters trying to sell snake oil to audiophile types.

eternityforest2• 3 years ago

The biggest reason is probably that nobody makes anything anymore....

Plus, about half those old books had information a modern person generally hopes to never use, even if they do still make things. Much as I love living history, I don't want to mill lumber by hand or do anything that involves the phrase "Measure out the white lead and mix it into the...".

There's lots of stuff that would be interesting and potentially useful, but information these days seems to spread based on immediate usefulness (Except math. Everyone just accepts people all should learn a pretty large amount even though only some of them will ever use it), and people don't really think about uncommon scenarios.

But now it seems like we're right on the edge where even modern practical things are being forgotten, and "I don't know how to cook" is starting to literally mean "I doordash every day and couldn't make a pot of spaghetti to save my life, and I think an impact driver must be a porn star name".

DropInIn2• 3 years ago

Most math we're taught is used constantly in life and is not comprehensible absent education....

Percents, fractions, what the word "average" means...

xnx2• 3 years ago

I've been meaning to create a single page website that shows the front page of the New York Times and/or Fox News from one day, one week, one year, and 10 years ago.

cuttysnark• 3 years ago

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/06/15/nytfrontpage/scan... [0]

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/06/15/nytfrontpage/scan... [1]

Should be helpful—the date syntax is straightforward.

NYT does this daily. The first one I can find is:

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2012/07/06/nytfrontpage/scan... [2]

[0] NYT front page scan from 15 June 2023

[1] from 15 June 2013

[2] from 06 July 2012, seemingly the first

tanseydavid• 3 years ago

One of my favorite quotes is: "if you want to learn something new, read an old book."

Can't remember who said it though.

namaria7• 3 years ago

I really like reading international economics and politics from the 60s and 70s. You realize that a lot of non fiction gets recycled often, and the no-nonsense analysis they did back then gets watered down a lot with the current touchiness of talking about different cultures. There was a lot of bias back then too, to be sure... But comparing different biases is the best way to filter some of them out.

WillAdams• 3 years ago

I've always regretted that I didn't keep one magazine from each month of my life --- unfortunately, most of the older ones got pitched a couple of moves ago. Articles which I'd like to revisit:

- Popular Mechanics and the first mention of a CNC which I read of --- the U.S. Navy putting one on an aircraft carrier at the cost of half-a-million dollars

- the computer magazine which had a review of the GRiD Compass (I later bought a GRiDCase III spending way more than I should have)

- the issue of Newsweek which had the 16 page insert ad for the original Apple Macintosh

- the issue of Time which had an article on gun control where the photo of weapons from a gun buyback prominently featured an inexpensive air pistol

- the news magazine which had a tiny sidebar article covering an international incident which I actually had direct knowledge of

AlbertCory• 3 years ago

I used newspapers.com heavily for research in my first book. "No hindsight" was my strict rule, so learning what people thought THEN was indispensable.

It has a monthly subscription, and searching is, well, tedious. Like, you want to go to the Business section, and binary search of the pages plus guessing is the only way.

subpixel• 3 years ago

In the early 20th century there were guides published for every business in the state - like a proto- yellow pages, but hard bound and carefully illustrated.

I found a listing an ancestor of mine had for his booming asbestos business in San Francisco.

You can learn a lot about the times through the businesses and products that were thriving (elevators!).

To Understand the Past, Pick Up an Old Magazine

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