The World is More Random Than You Think
The point here is that history doesn’t always perfectly line-up with what we read. And much of history is being re-written on a regular basis as stories, context, perspective and research methods change over time.
Capital Thinking · Issue #992 · View online
The 1960s was a tumultuous decade.
There was the Vietnam War, riots, anti-war demonstrations, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the civil rights movement, and much more.
Why History Gets Stuff Wrong All the Time
Ben Carlson | A Wealth of Common Sense:
The country finally put aside all of the political and racial tensions by the end of the decade once we beat the Russians and the astronauts from Apollo 11 landed on the moon in the July of 1969.
At least that’s what I’ve been told in much of what I’ve read or seen in pop culture over the years. Obviously, I wasn’t even around in the 1960s so I have no idea what impact the mission to the moon had on the mood of the country.
But maybe the moon landing wasn’t the unifying event we read about in all of the history books and Wikipedia entries. Maybe that’s just a wonderful narrative that stuck because it makes for such a great story. In his excellent book on the moon landing, One Giant Leap, Charles Fishman paints a different picture of the mood surrounding the space program in the 1960s.
In 1964, when a group of Americans was asked if we should, “go all out to beat the Russians in a manned flight to the moon,” only 26% said yes.
Even after the Apollo 8 mission in late-19681 meant U.S. astronauts were the first ever to circle the moon, Americans were still not on board with using so many resources to land on the moon.
Four weeks after millions of Americans watched a Christmas Eve message from those Apollo 8 astronauts in space, just 39% of people in a Harris Poll thought it was a good idea to land on the moon. And 55% of those surveyed said the $4 billion being spent annually by NASA wasn’t worth it.
Many questioned why the government would spend so much on space exploration when there were still so many unsolved problems on earth.To be fair, people lie on surveys. And the moon landing remains the most-watched television event in history, with almost 95% of households tuning in for that monumental event.
I’m sure there were some people who received a reprieve from the chaos of that decade by getting caught up in the space race but many others probably weren’t impacted because personal circumstances overwhelmed any shot in the arm from beating the Russians to the moon.
The point here is that history doesn’t always perfectly line-up with what we read. And much of history is being re-written on a regular basis as stories, context, perspective and research methods change over time.
Ben Carlson