There's a thought-provoking article over at The Daily Beast about what may/may not be remembered in 100 years ...
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That last sentence makes causes me to grin and grimace, simultaneously ...Quote:
The 100-year test is much different than the half-century test. After 50 years, tens of millions of people are still alive. After 100 years, the living witnesses are gone.
So let's examine who and what from around 1918 is and isn't still widely remembered in 2018. Those findings can help us make informed guesses about who and what from 2018 might still be remembered in 2118.
In early 1918, World War I was still raging and writing at the time explicitly suggested that President Woodrow Wilson would join George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in the ranks of America's most legendary presidentsthe three leaders who had commanded during the nation's biggest military conflicts up to that point.
But a 2009 study asking respondents to name as many presidents as they could found that fewer than half of respondents could remember Wilson. Indeed, WWI probably ranks as only the third-most remembered American military conflict of the 20th century, behind WWII and Vietnam. Since last summer, younger Americans might primarily think of WWI as the war that Wonder Woman fought.
Honestly, I had no clue where that phrase came from ...Quote:
So, the $64,000 question is who and what from now will still be remembered in a century. The answer is probably much less than we think. That's thanks to a potent psychological bias known as the availability heuristic, in which people have a tendency to rely on examples that come quickly and easily to mind when evaluating a topic. To prove my point, the phrase "the $64,000 question" is a reference to the most viewed television show of 1956, which is largely forgotten today.
OK, that's pretty sobering ... my daughter, just now finishing her second year at The University, was barely 3 when 9/11 happened and really doesn't have much recollection about it ...Quote:
Let's go look at a few of the top contenders.
September 11 is the obvious top contender. But 2016 was the first election featuring voters with no memory of that daywhich will only be increasingly common in 2020 and beyond. As some commentators were already writing a few years ago, "the 9/11 era is over."
In no way do I mean to minimize the tragedy of September 11. The tragic 1915 sinking of the Lusitania by Germany caused 1,198 deaths and helped galvanize the American public into World War I, just as 9/11 led to our military interventions in Afghanistan and (much more controversially) Iraq. But the Lusitania is not widely remembered today by the general public. Perhaps it would have fared better if James Cameron had made a movie about star-crossed lovers on that ship instead.
The JFK assassination was the first big news event that I remember (I had just turned 5), and was obviously a huge deal in my universe ... but it's ancient history to my daughter ...Quote:
After a century, will September 11 or Kennedy's assassination be better remembered than those of Presidents James Garfield and William McKinley are today? Everyone alive in 1881 and 1901 remembered where they were when they heard the news, too.
