When I see that something happened in 1955 I automatically think "Oh, I was two years old then." For 1958 "Kindergarten with Miss Ashley" and even have some pictures in my head. For 1951 I think more vaguely "Was that the year my parents got married?" I am not in that picture. For any year before I was born I can build a picture from other things I know, but in none of them am I there, anywhere on the globe. Solely in the Mind of God, and He seems content to not give me any pre-AVI information I haven't earned. My parents were born in 1927 and 1930, and I sometimes piece together family history from them into my launching point. Childhood pictures of my grandparents are only hazily connected to the people I knew later.
Older people are aghast what young people don't know about recent history, but I recall my knowledge of the 1910s was nearly as good as my uncle's. Before that, he knew much less than I did, and he was an intelligent man. I suspect at least part of the "kids these days think that life in the 80s..." comes from this pinning ourselves on the bulletin board of eras we know but playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey before that until we learn hard information.
I don't think this is absolute. My granddaughter plays a mean game of Chronology because one of her anchors is Disney history. Steamboat Willie has a visual representation in her mind. Photos or buildings or various arts that we know send shafts of light back into an era. But even then, realities like poverty, lack of medical care, outhouses, poor roads, and repetitive food are not what was usually portrayed, so we miss the feel of eras before our own.
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I have a terrible time fixing historical dates unless I can tie them to a piece of memorable fiction.
Before they put it behind a paywall, I used to enjoy a NYT chronology quiz. You didn't have to get the absolute dates right, but you had to place 8-10 events in the proper order. Knowing the right date for one or more of them helped pin down the rest. Sometimes the time gaps were great and sometimes not. I could do the puzzle better if, for instance, it mentioned Eleanor of Aquitaine and I could recall Katherine Hepburn saying, "Of course he has a knife. We all have a knife. It's 1183 and we're all barbarians." That would place Henry II for me, and by extension Richard the Lion-Hearted or King John.
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