A brief history of the past

100 years

as told through the New York Times archives

Brought to you by

By Ilia Blinderman & Jan Diehm , illustration by Max-o-matic

For years, we’ve tried to stay abreast of it all — the school shootings, the shifts in foreign policy, the playoff results, the firings, the appointments, and the rest of the news that streamed across our various screens.

Not this year. We’re in our early 30s, and 2018 marks the first time in our adult lives that we’ve taken a step back from the news cycle. It seems like there are countless fires burning, and each day brings more somber tidings. The flood of updates seems no longer manageable, in large part because the barrage of bad news seems to affect all levels of the international order. The stability of the recent half century has given way to a deep sense of uncertainty and confusion regarding the future.

For months, we’ve wanted some note-waving historian to emerge from the archives, and reassure us that, in fact, there’s no need to worry — we’re living through the same sense of unease that previous generations did during the Nixon administration, the Vietnam War, and the Iranian hostage crisis. But that’s yet, if at all likely, to happen. To gain a more balanced perspective, we decided to do some digging ourselves: below, you can take a tour through the past 100 years as reflected in the pages of one of America’s most-respected newspapers, The New York Times and compare the events of the past year to the tumult of the long 20th century.

For every decade, we’ve summarized the words that most frequently appear in NYT headlines, sizing each word relative to its disproportionate popularity. Selecting each one of these will allow you to see its popularity throughout the past century; you’ll also be able to explore the articles that the NYT published on each of these topics over the years by hovering over each decade in the chart.

Want to focus solely on the countries that dominate headlines? Check out our companion piece The World through the Eyes of the U.S.

1900s

1910s

1920s

1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

1900s

Domestically, the turn of the century saw the unexpected ascension of Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency, following the death of President William McKinley. Roosevelt dominated press coverage in 1902, partly due to it being his first year in office, but also in part due to his party’s win in congress (also, bear hunting). Local politics were also prominent: the New York state governorship race between Republicans Benjamin Odell and Thomas Platt (who was, in large part, responsible for the consolidation of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island into a single city so as to dilute the influence of Manhattan’s immigrant voters) received much attention, with Odell defeating Platt, a major political boss. Internationally, the Second Boer War saw three years of violent fighting in Africa, with the British empire eventually winning out over the South African Republic and the Orange Free State.

1910s

World War I, while less of a historical signpost in America than in Europe, nevertheless dominated coverage in the 1910s. In addition to trench warfare, many headlines referred to the naval blockades that the United Kingdom and the German Empire imposed on each other. Although President Woodrow Wilson was initially disinclined to bring America into the war, the German (then also referred to as Teutonic) U-boat attack on an ocean liner which led to the deaths of nearly 1,200 civilians (over 100 of whom were Americans) inevitably drew the U.S. into the conflict. Russia, meanwhile, was experiencing what may be its most seminal historical event: Nicholas II’s abdication of the throne after 300 years of his family’s grip on the Russian empire, and the Bolsheviks’ taking control of the the Winter Palace — akin to revolutionaries storming the White House — during the October revolution.

1920s

As Germany paid reparations for its aggression during WWI, America’s attention began to swing back to domestic affairs, and in particular, to the presidency of Warren G. Harding. Although Harding had a notable foreign policy success in hosting what would become the world’s first arms control conference , limiting the power of the world’s naval superpowers, he died early, and his legacy became marred by corruption and adultery scandals. His vice president, Calvin Coolidge, took over and restored faith in the presidency, assisted by Andrew Mellon, the famed financial tycoon, who fought to reduce the national debt. In New York City, the expansion of the subway by Mayor John F. Hylan took up much of people’s attention.

1930s

The 1930s began with the Great Depression, where more than 1 in 5 Americans were unemployed at its peak. In New York, Samuel Seabury presided over a vast investigation of police and judicial workings — as if today, more than a thousand witnesses had testified that the NYPD had framed countless innocent people and had given them a choice between parting with their life savings, or facing prison. The consequences were seismic: the mayor, a flashy political operative named Jimmy Walker, was forced to resign, and Fiorello LaGuardia (he of airport fame) was elected in his stead with a promise to clean up the city. And, while the National Recovery Administration sought to stimulate economic growth at home, Spain’s civil war occupied attention abroad.

1940s

The Second World War’s impacts dominated the headlines of the New York Times during the 1940s. Abroad, it was the Soviet Union’s Red Army grinding war with the Axis powers, which long preceded American involvement in the conflict. At home, the Office of Price Administration (OPA) set limits on raising the prices of products during wartime, and rationed scarce foods, like meat. Once the war had ended, labor disputes resumed, with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a federation of industrial unions, taking central stage.

1950s

While war broke out between North and South Korea in 1950, the conflict formed part of the larger struggle between communist states (The Soviet Union, China) and democratic states (the United States). At home, anti-communist sentiment was at an all-time high, spurred by Senator Joseph McCarthy until he was accused of misconduct by the U.S. Army, and lost popularity. In the Middle East, meanwhile, Israel, the United Kingdom, and France invaded Egypt in what’s known as the Suez Canal crisis, a move which President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles fiercely opposed.

1960s

The 1960s were a decade of upheaval, both on the home front and on the world stage. Perhaps no year embodies the momentous domestic shifts better than 1963: The Summer of ‘63 was a defining stretch in the civil rights movement that culminated with Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington in August. Three months later in November, President John F. Kennedy was shot dead while riding in a motorcade in Dallas. Abroad, the United States was in the middle of the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War and faced deepening Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union over the influx of newly independent, non-aligned nations from the decolonization of Sub-Saharan Africa, most notably in The Congo and Katanga province.

1970s

Headlines from the current decade might feel eerily familiar to headlines from the 1970s, where another president (Richard Nixon) was embattled in another political scandal (Watergate). In 1972, several burglars were caught at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC. Nixon furiously attempted to distance himself from the break-in and cover up the crime, but he was eventually forced to resign in 1974. Henry Kissinger, another larger-than-life figure and Nixon’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, also took his fair share of the decade’s headlines. Kissinger helped negotiate the end to both the Vietnam War and the Yom Kippur War, but he also was complicit in the secretive carpet bombing of Cambodia, which killed tens of thousands of civilians.

1980s

President Ronald Reagan was in office for eight of the 10 years in the 1980s, and the decade’s most frequent terms reflect everything that defined his administration (with particular focus on Iran-related issues). The headlines cover the successes, like the Iranian hostage crisis: hours after Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981, more than 60 hostages were released from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The crisis began two years earlier under President Jimmy Carter to protest American interference in Iranian affairs, including allowing a deposed Shah to seek cancer treatment in the U.S. They also cover scandals: during the Iran-Contra affair, senior Reagan administration officials bypassed an arms embargo, secretly selling weapons to Iran. They hoped to use the proceeds from the arms sale to fund the Contras, who were fighting against Nicaragua’s socialist government. Reagan’s presidency withstood the scandal, but his reputation took a lasting hit.

1990s

The headlines of the 1990s have a strong domestic focus: welfare, police, and hospitals. In 1992, President Bill Clinton campaigned on the promise to “end welfare as we have come to know it,” and in 1996 he signed the The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which passed control of welfare programs from federal to state governments. In addition to Clinton, several other politicians appear frequently: Bob Dole, Clinton’s 1996 GOP presidential challenger; Rudy Giuliani, elected as mayor of New York City in 1993, and the first Republican to hold that office since the 1960s; and Christine Todd Whitman, New Jersey’s first female governor. The 1990s also gave rise to some other familiar characters, this time in the tech world, as more and more American households owned computers. Both Microsoft Office’s endearing paperclip assistant, Clippy, and America Online’s (AOL) running stick man were introduced in 1997.

2000s

On September 11, 2001 the way in which Americans saw the world instantly changed when al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, killing nearly 3,000 people. The decade’s most frequent words — Sept 11, President Bush, terrorist — paint a picture of a country as it tries to grapple with terrorism on a global stage. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded Afghanistan, and two years later in 2003, Bush initiated the war in Iraq. The American armed forces helped to take down the country’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, but found no weapons of mass destruction, one of the justifications for the war. Businessman Michael Bloomberg was also elected as New York City mayor soon after 9/11, serving a resilient and defiant city for three terms until 2014.

2010s

If you think politics has dominated the last few years, you’re right. Presidents Barack Obama (the first black president) and Donald Trump (the first reality TV show president), as well as 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, garnered a lot of headlines. Noticeably absent from the mix? The first major-party female presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton (But her emails!). Big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple also appear frequently, overlapping with politics. The United States intelligence community determined that Russia, under direction from President Vladimir Putin, wielded an influence campaign through social media to undermine the 2016 presidential election.

These are, of course, far from the sole important events in American history. We’ve failed to include mention of innumerable coups, militaristic bungles, moral and legal battles, and much of what has made up the past century. Nevertheless, we hope that our turn to data in highlighting a number of the most iconic events has helped paint some historical context to the end of this turbulent year. In light of recent social and geopolitical unrest, perhaps it’ll serve as some comfort: our decade’s news may be alarming, but in the long arc of history, far from unique.

Method

In order to derive the terms that were disproportionately emblematic of a particular decade, we compared each decade (e.g., 1960s) to the frequency of terms to a corpus consisting of three decades: the decade at hand, as well as the preceding and following decades (in this case, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s). For the first and last decades, we compared the data to a corpus consisting of their sole neighboring decade and the decade at hand (e.g., we compared the 1900s to a corpus comprising the 1900s and 1910s). Since some words occurring in a particular decade may be incredibly rare in any other decade, we only included words that manifested at least once in every 10,000 words for a specific decade. We also note that 1964 did not have any articles labelled as appearing on page 1, and thus, its events were, unfortunately, minimally covered by our analyses.

A note on language: We included the word “negro” in our analyses because it provides an important historical lens through which to view events like the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. We recognize and respect that the term is offensive without just context.

Finally, an acknowledgement: The staff of the New York Times (many of whom are friends and former colleagues) have done, and continue to perform, tremendously important work. They have long been an inspiration to us (we share their work weekly), and would like to thank them for both their openness (their headlines API archive was instrumental to this project), and their contribution to documenting so much of American history.