Making history cool again😎

Today’s newsletter is an interview with Manny Marotta, who is using social media to share his love of history with the world.

Manny is the creator of @100YearsAgoLive, @50YearsAgoLive, and @25YearsAgoLive, three history-focused Twitter accounts that show what life was like 100, 50, and 25 years ago. Here’s a great picture of Manny in historical costume:

Question #1: What inspired you to start these accounts?

Manny: Throughout middle and high school, my peers dreaded history class the most. For the most part, the teachers didn't seem to care about the subject, they read off names and dates, we had to regurgitate them on the test, and the majority of people forgot the information as soon as they learned it.

Then, I had a very inspiring AP US History teacher who made me realize that history could be fun to learn. Early in college, I started listening to historical podcasts in which the historians put real passion into the stories they told. I knew that if more people could hear this passion, in an accessible format, then there would be a wider appreciation of history.

At the time (2017), Twitter was very popular (as it remains today), and there was an account tweeting about the Russian Revolution in real-time. But there was no account posting about all of 1917, when there was a lot more going on.

So, I started @100YearsAgoLive as a means of giving people the ability to follow all of history in real-time, alongside their regular daily news.

Where does your love of history come from?

People in general love to read books and watch movies that invest them in fictional characters or stories, and I never understood this, because real-life, non-fiction history contains enough characters and stories to fill a million books and films - and those stories are often far more interesting than fiction.

My love of history comes from learning about these real stories of hardship, courage, sacrifice, desperation, loss, grief, triumph, and achievement, and knowing that these things actually happened, and knowing that these stories brought humanity to the place it inhabits today.

Today's society is a direct result of the stories we read about the past, and so it's immensely important and interesting to read about our collective past in this way. 

How can social media can be used as a tool for self-education?

Although most people recognize the need to learn about academic subjects such as history, few people actually donate that investment in time. And I understand that - it's difficult to tear oneself away just to learn.

It's much easier to incorporate learning into existing habits. People are already on social media, and for the most part social media is a destructive force that drives envy, vanity, and hatred.

So, by interrupting these feeds with a piece of our collective history, I hope to give people a breather from the usual chaos of the online world and weave historical education into regular social media usage.

Talk to us about your process for finding and sharing content on your social media live accounts. Are there particular places online where you look for historical documents or media?

In late summer or early autumn of each year, I begin gathering all the stories for the following year.

For about two hours each and every day during this period, I scour Wikipedia; Wikimedia Commons; Getty Images; and the Library of Congress newspaper archive to gather between five and nine stories for each of the 365 following days, x three accounts (@100YearsAgoLive, @50YearsAgoLive, and @25YearsAgoLive).

I then do my best to verify these stories through researching corroborating articles and papers, and I try to keep the language that is used to report these stories unbiased. In all, it takes around three months of daily research to put together all the stories for the following year.

I've been doing 2025's research since June 30, 2024, and I'm still not quite done. But on top of that, I do daily research, mostly to fill in gaps and gather photos for stories that I'll be posting the following day. In total, this daily research adds up to 10-12 hours per week. 

Do you think the historical profession is doing enough to promote a love of and interest in history on social media?

I don't think that the historical community at-large is doing enough to promote engagement with the general public. In many ways, historians are stuck in a cycle of publishing papers of one another’s' consumption, and keeping these papers away from the public.

There is also an alarming amount of historical misinformation and revisionist history going around, as well as AI-generated photographs and articles, and it is not being adequately addressed.

The very best defense that the field has against misinformation is to post the correct information, in a format that is just as accessible as the misinformation, but this isn't happening on a wide scale. This is part of the reason that I put so much effort into maintaining these accounts. Furthermore, the field of history is aging, with most historians now in their 50s or 60s.

I believe this is due to the boring way in which history is generally taught in schools. If we can engage more learners on social media, then more people may be enamored by the field. I hope that in the future, people continue to seek historical information from historians on social media, where they are accessible and accountable to the public.

ART OF THE DAY

Félix Vallotton, Coucher de soleil, 1913.