Blog Post #1: TBT

Nostalgia is a sentimental yearning for how things used to be or how they were for a brief moment.

Do you ever feel nostalgic about your childhood or other times in your life?


In “Beware Social Nostalgia,” Stephanie Coontz warns readers:

In personal life, the warm glow of nostalgia amplifies good memories and minimizes bad ones about experiences and relationships, encouraging us to revisit and renew our ties with friends and family. It always involves a little harmless self-deception, like forgetting the pain of childbirth.

In society at large, however, nostalgia can distort our understanding of the world in dangerous ways, making us needlessly negative about our current situation.

… There’s nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to cross-examine them, recognizing and accepting the inconsistencies and gaps in those that make us proud and happy as well as those that cause us pain.

In my work as a historian and in my relationships as a friend, teacher, wife and mother, I have come to think that the most useful way to understand the past, and make it work for you, is to look at the trade-offs and contradictions that, however deeply buried, can be uncovered in every memory, good or bad.

On this Throwback Thursday, write a post answering the following:

• What do you feel nostalgia for?
• Do any of your fond memories overlook unpleasant details, such as a happy memory about a vacation that also had travel difficulties you have mostly forgotten?
• Do you ever feel less satisfied with the present due to memories of what once was? Why or why not?
• Do you agree with Ms. Coontz’s assertion that in society at large, nostalgia can be dangerous?