How Long is 49 Years?

[Ed note: The first draft of this didn’t know how it wanted to end. Then I had some thinking time. Yeah, in the shower.]

It’s never been something I’ve had time to think about before, but I do wonder if every culture has their own weirdly universally accepted units of measurement that make no sense to outsiders. I’m not talking about our stupid imperial system (though I’m not not going to bring it up), more like the way people I know from Oklahoma and Texas would measure something in football fields without thinking about it. I remember driving cross country before my sophomore year of college to see my older brother get married at Excalibur in Las Vegas, and my dad and I stopped at the giant meteor crater in Arizona. They told us you could fit a bunch of football fields in the floor, and even the American Museum of Natural History uses football fields as an estimate on their website, as they use the meteor crater to show the scale of Saturn’s moon Janus. It’s like scale-ception.

Because I grew up around football my whole life, I natural think of things in terms of first downs - ten yards is just somehow really visually ingrained in my brain. That’s also approximately the measurement for a side in volleyball, which I used to step off regularly in the summers when me and my friends would play in the sand at Regional Park in Midwest City. I also know that my standing reach is 7’8” tall, which is halfway between a regulation women’s net (7’4”) and a regulation men’s net (7’11”ish, basically 8’). It’s moderately useful?

In history, then, we tend to use decades and centuries as a unit of measure, but after turning 49 yesterday, I wondered about chronological scales and units and how my own life compared, because I’m a nerd and, yeah, was kind of looking for an excuse for a birthday post. I know I should do this next year when I turn 50, but I really don’t want to think about that, so here we are, with the ever-annoying odd number. I was born in the bi-centennial year of 1976, meaning that yes, I can sort of track independence day anniversaries with my birthday. I also get to have election day on my birthday every couple of decades, first on a presidential election (1988 and 2016), then on a mid-term election (1994 and 2022). It’s… less fun than you think.

So without further ado, here are some examples of events in US history separated by 49 years. No idea if they will mean anything to anyone, but a couple of them are kind of fun.

In 1754, George Washington popped across the Appalachian Mountains to help start the French and Indian War. This war led to the shift in British colonial policy that got us to the American Revolution, mostly because Britain decided it didn’t need any more wars at that specific moment, so the King and Parliament banned colonists from settling west of the Appalachians. Forty-nine years later, in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson authorized the purchase of Louisiana from France, doubling the size of the United States and opening up land even further west than the region that was shut down to Americans in 1763. Oh, and it left the door open for the OG I’m-VP-I-can-shoot-people, Aaron Burr, to scheme and plot to break Louisiana away from the United States before being tried for treason in 1807. Fun times.

Another founding 49 was the gap between the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the inauguration of John Quincy Adams in 1825. Probably don’t need to rehash the Declaration, but JQA is fun because not only was he our first nepo-baby president, but he was the first non-Revolutionary era guy. Of course, he only won because the Electoral College was split and the House of Representatives “preferred” him to popular vote “winner” Andrew Jackson for some reason, an election forever known for the “Corrupt Bargain” that saw Speaker of the House Henry Clay become Secretary of State under JQA. The election of 1824 was also a big deal because it was the gateway to an era of dramatic increase in male suffrage - JQA got almost five times as many votes in 1828 as he did in 1824 and still got his ass kicked by Jackson.

Sticking with some wars and stuff you’ve heard of, the War of 1812 happened in, well, 1812, and 49 years later, the Civil War broke out in 1861. On the one hand, you had a group of folks starting a war against a much more developed opponent who were clearly going to kick the shit out of those folks in the long term, and on the other you have the War of 1812, where a young United States without anything remotely resembling a navy declared war on Great Britain. One conflict was fought early enough in the Industrial Revolution that artillery was able to dominate (when present) while the other was a slaughterhouse of mass produced weaponry. And before we pick nits, anyone who thinks the South thought they’d just walk away without war is the type of person who shoves their nose in someone’s face and is appalled when they get shoved away.

So stepping away from wars but sticking around the same time period, in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. That novel shocked people in the US who somehow thought that slavery wasn’t horrific and evil, helping turn the tide of popular sentiment away from simple “free soil” politics (ie - let’s not end slavery because I don’t give a shit about that but I don’t want rich planters taking slaves to western lands that white people deserved to have) towards abolition and the eventual end of slavery. Meanwhile, when William McKinley was shot in 1901, the office passed on to the third straight Republican VP who wasn’t supposed to ever come near the presidency (after Andrew Johnson ugggggh and Chester Arthur — surprisingly decent!), one Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt helped usher in a period of progressive reforms, sure enough, but he really did not intend for any of those benefits to be for African Americans - I mean, sure, not having arsenic milk was great for everyone but for Roosevelt… It was just an accidental benefit for African Americans.

And then my last coincidentally interesting 49 year gap was from 1865 to 1914. The Civil War ended in 1865, and World War 1 in Europe began in 1914. Two horrific wars - the first fought defend the evils of slavery, the second fought because of the evils of dick measuring. The Civil War should have been all the proof any European leaders needed that war should be avoided at all costs, but those “civilized” leaders had been so busy carrying their White Man’s Burden at the end of a machine gun across the globe that they failed to develop any sense that fighting each other would have been monumentally destructive. But sometimes you’ve just gotta compare yourself to the dude in the next stall, even if it means tearing down the entire movie theater around you.

Whew, this thing took a turn!

I think this is where our “major date” history model gets us. Not every date was a war, but most of the stuff that pops into my mind is, at least for the US. Let’s try some random dates?

If I back up from my birth year of 1976, I get 1927. That was year of the Great Mississippi Flood, where an asshole conservative president told the people affected by the flood that it wasn’t government’s job to rebuild or take care of them, tough shit. It was also the year that America’s first America First dickface Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic. Then accepted a medal from the Nazis before deciding oh hey maybe we shouldn’t move to Germany before coming home to scream about the US spending money to fight fascism.

That didn’t work.

In my particular 49 years, we’ve had computers, the internet, and all kinds of crazy tech. We’ve also gone from a peanut farmer divesting himself from a farm to a dude who whined about whether a pharmaceutical company would give 10% of itself to the government right before floating the idea that an NFL team should have its own football field named for himself. A dude who was out building houses for charity in his old age, to one who demolished the part of the White House dedicated to public service and the people during a government shutdown. We may have gone from stagflation in 1976 to… uh, stagflation in 2025? It hasn’t happened yet, right?

[Insert revisions here lol]

The first time around on this post, I tried to redeem this thing somehow, but turns out that wasn’t needed. This is what happens when you focus on big dates and major events and personalities — it’s rarely ever great. These things are so big that they blot out the vast majority of people, the folks like you and me. Yes, Teddy did not have the greatest motivations ever, but there were men and women from all classes and groups fighting like hell to get someone, anyone, to step up and protect folks. Harriet Beecher Stowe didn’t have to wake up everyone. PLENTY of people knew how bad war is, and did everything they could to minimize damage, heal the damages. That’s us. That’s the thing I’m going to think about next year as I head toward 50, and hopefully for as many of another 49 as I can get. So I’ll leave the cornball crap below for, uh, a reminder to maybe think things through before publishing.

[the old crappy ending, though still not a total waste of space]

And look, I feel great, personally, at 49. I’m really looking forward to this year, personally, to spending time with my family and friends and continuing to teach US history. There’s a whole year for history to go from a kind of negative 49-year gap to a more hopeful 50-year one? If I were cleverer, I would have done all this 49-year gaps and ticked it forward one more year to something better - I mean, in 1804 Aaron Burr shot Hamilton BUT we actually amended the Electoral College? 1862 gave us the Homestead Act and the IRS guys! 1915.. hrm, no, not going to talk about that one, this needs a hopeful ending.

So 2026 is a chance to write a better story.

Election Day is just five days before my birthday, after all! It can’t be nearly as bad as 2016, riiiiiight??? Right? (Padme and Anakin meme activate?)