It wasn’t that long ago...

Berlin and Vienna were the the height of modernity and all kinds of creative and intellectual revolutions, and then everyone went fascist, invaded Europe and slaughtered millions. Weimar seems closer to me than WWII and the Holocaust.

I distinctly remember realizing with some alarm, in junior high, that the civil rights movement occurred during my infancy. Even then, it seemed as if it was something that should have happened 100+ years before (at least).

I just can't get over that they made color movies during the Civil War, like Gone With the Wind.

Your grandmother look-a like man, OP!

People don't have the visceral response we had when we were young, OP. I am 60 years old. My grandfather was killed in World War 2 and it affected my mother (and us) for the rest of her life. We watched the 60s civil rights riots on television. I was glued to the TV when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon; my mom and aunt were sitting on the couch and crying. My parents had friends who had tattooed numbers on their arm; as a child I wondered why in the world they had that done.

Technology is a barrier to the real world and real life. We are insulated. We see only what we want to see. The younger generations are so self-absorbed they don't give themselves a chance to feel. It's unfortunate.

R5, I’m 60 also. You remind me, my grandpa had a second family, and he had another grandson, like me, right? But said grandson died in WWI! It amazes me to no end.

My Grandmother, pictured in the OP, lost her son, “Little Howard” (it reads on his gravestone.), and she was never the same again. It makes me sad to think of it.

My Mom had a friend in the Nazi camps. She hard a unique, and I know what that word means, it was unique, way of speaking. It was shrill, and rolling, like French Rs.

I wish I asked my oldsters more questions when they were still here! And hugged more people.

I was a kid in the 80s and things from the 60s seemed very old to me. Reruns of shows like Bewitched and I Dream Of Jeannie, and video of the Beatles and the Supremes on the Ed Sullivan show looked prehistoric to me, and at that time it was only 20 years in the past. Even in the 80s, the 60s seemed like ancient history.

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

I'm very sorry about the grammar and syntax errors. I'm just very tired.

[quote] Wikipedia: Chou En-lai was the first Premier of the People's Republic of China. Chou was China's head of government, serving from October 1949 until his death in January 1976. Zhou served under Chairman Mao Zedong.

I loved that he was asked for his opinion of the French Revolution. He reportedly replied “It’s too early to say.” Apparently he was misquoted, but I bet he would have said it, if he had only thought of it first.

R8/R9, you are forgiven! Thanks for that fascinating story about the harpoon!

The French have a kind of reverse mortgage, where a young person buys an oldER person’s home, to take ownership on the older person’s death. They sometimes look after the older person. I recall some old women who would ask her buyer, when they brought her food, if they were poisoning her.

I recall, there was one women who eventually became one of the oldest women in France. I think she lived to be older than 110. She outlived two of her buyers. She only just died in the last decade or so.

There were only about 25 years between the end of WWII and the moon landing. The technology evolution was huge. Where were you 25 years ago from today?

I was living in the place I’m still in. I had a boyfriend then. My sharpest memory starts to fade abruptly after 20 years before today, or so.

[quote] the end of WWI, 1919,

WWI ended in 1918.

^Thank you, Herr Bratwurst.

My nephew,who is 28,just cant grasp the concept that my maternal grandfather was born in 1901. 118 years ago. 36 years after the civil war ended. Considering my grandfather was born and raised in georgia ,he may very well have known civil war veterans as a child. None of my nieces or nephews have even the vaguest sense of history.

My teenaged niece and nephews cannot comprehend how the world worked before the internet and cell phones. It is unimaginable to them.

I’m really old. 66. I often think about the fact that I was born in 53, and the end of WW 2 was in 44!- events so close in time.

I saw all the old reels from the liberation of the concentration camps as a young kid. I remember when Dr. King was assasinated, my parents rascist friends were mad we missed school when it was declared a National Holiday.

I listen to Dr Kong’s speeches on YouTube when I walk. So hard not to cry.

And I remember that the Rethuglicans would not allow a congresswoman to read a letter from Coretta King. And so many young people don’t know who he is.

At my kids rascist elementary school, instead of being required to write a report on a “black hero” in honor of Black History Month, the tracher said it could be “any American hero.”

I once told an eleven year old that one day everything was black and white then suddenly I woke up one day and everything was in color. His mouth was wide open and said, "That's why TV shows went from black and white to color!"

My great-grandfather was a Civil War veteran. He was born in 1841. His daughter from his second marriage was born in1893. She gave birth to my dad in 1935 which was a year after her father died. I was born in 1979 and knew my grandmother who died in1986.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, there were a series of about 30 booklets about WWII which I loved. There were movies about the war. Everybody at the time was involved in it. Even my grandmother was an air warden and my mother worked in a defense plant. My Dad served in the navy. So, it was something we all were educated about, to an extent.