It's 1925... People Long for 1895.
Before the 2010s, before the 2000s, there were... the 90s.
The other 90s.
The 1890s.
In a way... the first decade to matter. But why? 🤔
In this Vintage Deep Dive, I'm tracing the full story of how the 1890s became the first decade to be mythologized in real time: the Gilded Age inequality hiding beneath the gas lamps and corsets, the illustrator R.V. Coulter who turned his privileged childhood memories into a wildly popular comic series, and the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis that sold wartime America a fantasy of a past that never quite existed. But running through all of it is a bigger question: why do we need the past to have been innocent? And what are we hiding when we decide it was?
