Even as a mere lad I was something of a skeptic, and Bettmann wrote a fairly good, if somewhat anecdotal, revisionist look at American history between 1865 and 1910, the period often categorized in a nostalgic haze as "The Good Old Days". His title, "The Emergence of Professional Ethics in the German Book Trade of the Eighteenth Century" addressed the issue of copyright legislation. This book was quite useful for learning about the seedier past of the city, and the really shocking conditions for the poor and marginalized there, that we often don't discuss.

Adulteration of food was commonplace; loaves of bread frequently contained ash from the baker’s oven and grit from his machinery.

Of late, it has become peculiarly easy to divine an American's political persuasion based on whether they idolize the 1950s or 1960s.

Since the early 2000s, there has been a concerted attempt by supporters of deposed dictator Ferdinand Marcos to wipe the shit off his name and polish it to brand-new. Like modern Stalin apologists in Russia, many Ceaușescu supporters are right-wing Romanian nationalists who venerate the dictator for the fact that he heavily promoted Romanian nationalism and relatively independent policies from the Eastern Bloc, placing him alongside the likes of King Carol II and Conducator Ion Antonescu, two more of Romania's former authoritarian leaders with their own personality cults.No more dramatic courtroom scene has ever been enacted," reported the Syracuse Herald on May 22, 1915 as it covered "the greatest libel suit in history," a battle fought between former President Theodore Roosevelt and the leader of the Republican party. It wasn't until I was about twelve that I actually took the time to read more than the book's captions. It's just that change has also always been complex and uneven, and no period or people have ever had a monopoly on virtue. Otto Bettmann made a career out of collecting images, he was the curator and the founder of the Bettmann archives (which are now property of Corbis). And sometimes the individual episodes didn't go into enough detail, they seemed to be over before I'd found out all I wanted to know.

As is common, this belief thrives in ignorance: once words like "infant mortality", "citrus fruit", and "toilet paper" enter the conversation, attitudes swiftly change. This gruesomely sentimental and unmistakably authentic title introduces an equally disturbing collection of diaries, letters home, and confidential reports written by the executioners and sympathetic observers of the Holocaust, illustrated with numerous photographs they themselves took as "souvenirs" of their "achievements. Due partially to the manner in which the reunification of Germany was executed, which resulted in economic depression and large-scale unemployment in the former East Germany, adherents to Ostalgie remember the period of communism there fondly, thus demonstrating why it is necessary for the German government to maintain a Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives keeping the memory of the East German police state alive to counterbalance this. And they're rarely seen, I suppose, because most are rather gruesome, much like daily life for middle and lower class, urban and rural Americans during the latter half of the 19th century.The words Please and Thank you were in use, bank tillers could do maths without the need of a calculator.