Customer Reviews

The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible!

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Otto Bettmann's "The Good Old Days - They Were Terrible!" is really kick to the head in terms of establishing reality with folks who think everything was so much better and more simple in the "good old days."

Filled with interesting graphics and drawings, this book covers all the bases from food safety to crime to public education. Barely a sacred cow is left untouched.

I've owned this book for more than ten years and it never fails to catch my interest when I pick it up again. I've also shown it to many of my friends and even given it as a gift.

As for this notion of "anti-US," this seems a bit simplistic. The author's intention seems pretty clear - to establish 19th century America as a pretty dangerous place to live. There are few, if any, comparisons to Europe. It's not intended to be a book about how "bad the US is compared to country X." No, this is about just telling it like it is (or rather, was). Being honest about our past does us no harm. Indeed, it allows us to be become even better in the future. It's called learning from your mistakes. And Bettman's book is an excellent place to start learning.

As a student many of my friends were required to read this book for History class, I myself enjoyed the book so much I bought a copy to keep even though I didn't take the class. Much of the book focuses on letting readers understand what society was like over a hundred years ago and how things we complain about today were just as much a problem in the past. The book features chapters on immigration, health, food, medical care and many other issues of the day.

Many of the chapters will make you cringe as you learn that horses created much more pollution then cars ever did or that meat packing companies often used diseased or sickly cows and pigs. The chapters on education bring light to modern viewers that delinquency and school violence were not unknown and in one instance a young teacher was killed by her on students.

The book features wonderfully drawn illustartions that bring life to the world of our grandparents and how we should be glad to have clean roads, safe food and laws to protect consumers from fraud and deceit. A great book that all students should read and enjoy

I am addicted to stories about time travel and I have a collection of them. This book is wonderful in that, instead of sentimental twaddle, conjecture, and picturesque rose-colored-glasses stories of the past, you really get to know what times were like in "The Good Old Days' - and - you'll thank your lucky stars that you are living now and not then. I was fascinated and horrified at the details of everyday life a century ago. I don't know how the people of that era survived and I now know why a lot of them didn't. A real eye-opener!!

What an incredible book! Interesting, informative, eye-opening, and unflinching. Tells the grim truth about life in nineteenth century industrial America, focusing on the cities (especially New York), but touching on the hardships and unpleasantness of rural life as well. The illustrations are as valuable as the text--and Bettman's list of sources is outstanding. Social history at its best!

"The Good Old Days-They Were Terrible!" is a sharp and unflinching overview of day-to-day living from the end of the American Civil War to the turn of the century, which employs contemporary sketches, cartoons and photos to make its point that these years were not the idyllic times we think them. Otto L. Bettmann uses his vast archive of illustrations to not just show us just how hard and fraught with danger this period of time really was, but also to give us a fascinating look into a vanished time. While his main purpose is to show us that these times weren't peaceful and carefree, Bettmann also illustrates the mundane aspects of any period of time, IE health, work, education, crime, housing, etc. All aspects of a routine day are covered here, which makes this social history at its best. We discover that the inhabitants of this period had the same concerns and problems that we do today. It's all here: garbage in the streets, dirty drinking water, prostitutes protected by cops, child-beating, etc. Definitely not a simple, beautiful time. It's life like any other period, and it's captured here. Bettmann's commentary is concise and mainly supports this book's real strength: it's expressive, contemporary illustrations. As journalism is the first draft of history, these illustrations serve the same purpose in telling us how things really were and how the inhabitants of these times saw their lives. Excellent social commentary.

I recommend this for people who romaticize the past, because we often forget how far we have come. Things back then were terrible, like crime, health, liberties, and so on. You always see the "Gay 90s" portrayed in Disney films as glorious and clean and everyone is civilized to have tea at 4, but in reality, most of us were living in tepid, diseased squalor with open corruption running rampant.

This book doesn't read heavily like a stern textbook, but is very informative without being preachy. This is a great "bathroom reader" type of book with small, heavily-illustrated chapters, consice writing, and easy-to-understand narrative. It will really make you appreciate how good we have it now, even if we still have a ways to go.

This is one of my favorite books of all time in my reference shelf.

This is the best reference that I have found for putting one's self into the true 19th century mindset. The illustrations are especially good (the author was the founder of the Bettmann Archive.)

Most people think that they know this period from romantisized Hollywood films, but they really don't. Imagine a 3 mile-per-hour world. Imagine a world where, except for a handful of streets with gas street lamps, the biggest cities went almost totally black after night fall. Imagine a world with no telephones, no data bases, no social security numbers, no fingerprint files- where if you move to a different neighborhood and assume a new identity it is very unlikely that you will ever be discovered. Imagine a world where there is little communication between police precincts in the same city, let alone between cities. And the police that do exist are of the most unprofessional and rudimentary sort- and primarily interested in collecting graft and protecting the rich. Now imagine workplaces where there are no health and safety laws, no minimum wage laws, and where people put in at least 12 hours a day at the most soul-killing menial labor. Imagine gangs of children roaming the streets out of control because their parents are in the mills 12 hours a day- or just abandoned them because they don't earn enough to feed them. Imagine the great cities surrounded not by suburbs, but by rings of smouldering garbage dumps and shanty towns. This isn't the Third World- this was America only a century ago.

Oh yes, and if you think that farm life was much better- think again....

No wonder all we have are romantisized stories of the "good old days." No wonder our great grandparents didn't talk much about those days....

People often like to think as our past being absouletly perfect. Good Old Days takes a look at American life in the late 1800s and early 1900s and examines what life was like for the common person. The book provides a documentation of the probelems of the era such as air pollution, bad traffic, poor housing and education. The book is extremely easy to read and provides a great deal of useful information.

This is a light read, with fun, quirky, inimitable bits and pieces of history laid out in an interesting and easy-to-read manner. As a previous reviewer said, it makes for a great gift (and a great bathroom book, too!) because you can flip it open at random and immediately be drawn into a fascinating story.

The author's stories and facts make a valid point, which is that life 100+ years ago has been romanticized by we, the baby boomers of the United States.

In 1913, "American Carpenter and Builder" (a building magazine of that era) stressed that a house with airtight walls and rain-proof roof was considered highly desirable. That was 1913. In other words, building standards were abysmal back in the day. If you look at how fast housing has evolved in these last 100 years, you can't help but feel grateful for our current standards of construction!

Author Otto Bettman brings the light of truth to some of the popular and commonly held misconceptions that life "back in the day" was cleaner, easier, simpler, better.

If you want to read a history book with a little more substance, I recommend, "Woman's Work Is Never Done" by Susan Strasser. After reading that book, all desire to live in an earlier time left me once and for all.

Rose Thornton
author, The Houses That Sears Built.

Dr. Otto Bettmann assorted this collection of anecdotes, statistics, graphics and illustrations to remind us of just how hard life was for the every day guy in 19th century. This is a much-needed reality check in these days when everyone has this misconception that our times are the most difficult ever. Remember, today will be the good old days in a not-too-distant future. While other history books have tried to make this very point, I think Dr. Bettmann's achievement, and what makes this book more effective in a way, is that he presents his thesis in a style that is enjoyable and humorous. It's a great little book for everyone's history shelves.

Note:
Dr. Bettmann wrote about America in American English for Americans: he knows which side his bread is buttered on. Would anyone buy a book about how terrible living conditions were in 19th Century Turkistan? Let's not take ourselves too seriously, people. This book is NOT America-bashing.