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player ready...If journalism is the “first rough draft of history,” as we in the news business like to say, then it’s no surprise that we love to dive into the old clips, to see what we got right and wrong. Or just to see what our predecessors were writing about way back when.
The weekly Chicago Flashback feature you’re reading is the latest iteration of a newspaper tradition of including a bit of history with the news report. When we dig through the clips now, we find simple lists of noteworthy events that happened on a given day, and longer features that sought to find out “Whatever happened to so-and-so?”
For much of the 1940s, the Tribune published a daily column called “This Day in History” — in a format different from the Tribune’s current daily almanac — that focused each missive on a specific news event.
On Nov. 6, 1945, the column looked back to the same day in 1860, the day Abraham Lincoln was elected president. The Tribune mentioned that the question of slavery was “agitating the country.” After describing how quickly after Lincoln’s election South Carolina seceded, the Tribune reminded readers that the pro-Union candidates had together polled a majority of the Southern vote and noted: “As the nation thus drifted toward the fearful tragedy of civil war, one ironic and pathetic fact stood out. The plain people of the south were not implacably hostile to the union.”
With every retelling, another draft of history is written.
In recent decades, the Tribune has digitized much of its extensive photo archive, making it far easier to revisit history through pictures. For years, an editor on the Sunday Magazine would select one stand-out photo each week from the Tribune’s archives and weave delightful strings of related trivia into an expanded caption.
In 2011, then-Editor Gerould Kern conceived of the current-era Chicago Flashback page. The first one, published on June 19, 2011, as readers were engrossed with the trial of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, took a look back at Illinois’ “ ‘Worst governor’ ever.”
Subsequent Flashbacks have featured nearly every aspect of Chicago life, along the way revealing how society, and the Tribune, talked about the issues of the day — from race relations and women’s rights to politics and arts.
With suggestions from readers and by mixing archival photos, images of Tribune pages and new stories told through the old Tribune clips, history comes alive anew – just the latest draft.
Forgot to save your favorite Flashbacks? We’ve compiled more than 100 of our favorite Chicago Flashback features into a single coffee-table volume. Find it at store.chicagotribune.com.