It debunks the rosy false memories of "The good Old Days" that some of my family would reminisce about. 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. The comparisons between life in Victorian London (and a few other places which get a mention) and modern Britain are numerous and in parts, widely noted. That is to say a trip across a given city was the equivalent of a week's pay for the average person. Carefree days with a camera by the lineside or on station platforms without all the security and bother of today.

Nostalgia being a stubborn human sentiment, it's not surprising that once an era has passed beyond living memory, it acquires a rosy hue. For those interested in what became of the Bettmann Archive, it’s now part of Getty Images but you can browse at least part of it on the Internet Archives Wayback Machine.

A gem from the German biz sim wave of the early 90s which, above everything, impresses with its immensely varied (legal and illegal) possible activities. Of late, it has become peculiarly easy to divine an American's political persuasion based on whether they idolize the 1950s or 1960s.

Night/Shift is aimed at all those who don't feel comfortable around today's world, with surveillance tech everywhere. Where other Victorian retrospectives glaze over grime, disease, gang violence, fraud, unusual punishment, and an income/achievement gap in favor of fond memories of social advances and prosperity, O'Neill embraces all of these topics with gusto and an bubbly storytelling narrative style. I live in danger of being swept into the past by the romanticism of looking at life as memory; waxing about what it might be like, rather than attending to the miseries that accompany that life. Haskell repeatedly visits a dozen trees around the world, exploring the trees' connections with webs of fun. In 1921, he enrolled in the University of Leipzig and studied history, German literature, and philosophy.

She's remarkably effective in drawing parallels with the world of Victorian vice and modern society, and meticulous about providing examples to illustrate her points. He spent the next five decades adding to his collection of images and meeting some of the cultural icons of the times such as Alfred Kinsey, Peter Max, and Stanley Marcus, a diverse collection of people. Turns out (not that we should be surprised to learn it), the Good Old Days weren't that good after all. Now, Haskell brings his powers of observation to the biological networks that surround all species, including humans. Adulteration of food was commonplace; loaves of bread frequently contained ash from the baker’s oven and grit from his machinery.

Many former East Germans felt that after the reunification, the views of their West German compatriots dominate society at the expense of the East, which had their own distinct culture and outlook that they felt is being slowly erased. Rushdoony, Gary North, Larry Pratt, David Barton, and other Dominionists promote the New England Puritan theocracy of the 17 th and early-18 th centuries as one such period. And of course, no book on Victorian criminal history in London, especially with its heavy focus on the East End, would be complete without a chapter devoted to Jack the Ripper.

Now reading this, it makes me think that it's the blueprint for most of the most conservative thinking members of the GOP. The renaissance of Luton coincided with the acceleration of the football business away from matchday culture, just as England was becoming the key battleground in the Culture Wars. For a time, the succeeding century was also host to wistful yearning, despite its apt nickname, the " Gilded Age. But with expert photography and an inspired choice of varied locations, Ken has achieved exactly that with this excellent book. All the best parts of the good old days: early death, disease, pestilence, filth, rats, plague, starvation, freezing to death, prostitution, alcoholism, over crowding, incest, sexual abuse (at any and every age), not to mention open sewage.