What if I actually was a nineties kid? And by myself, I of course mean everybody who says they are, but really are not. Sure, you follow @only90skids on Twitter AND Instagram, but you only saw those shows either because you had older siblings or you were sick on a school day and the only channel that was interesting was Nicktoons. Trust me. I get it. We all want to identify with a generation, but man! To be alive in the Golden Era known as the 1890’s.
Just think of all the fun tuberculosis patients I could meet, or Indians I could once again displace. To sit down and sign up for the Spanish-American war at a saloon where ten year olds are legally working and serving refreshing alcoholic beverages, would be, as they say in the 90s, “absolutely normal and expected”. I would love to have been able to vote for William McKinley in the well-known and heated election of 1896. I would then sit with my family of thirteen, as we listened to the metallic beeps of the telegraph machine, letting us know if the Panic of 1893 had really ended and if we truly were in a “gilded age”, which, as history proves, we were, if we were in fact in the newly formed upper-middle class and not a populist farming family. THIS is every nineties kid’s dream come true.
Now, I can hear the naysayers in the back of the class now, uttering exclamatorys like “You’re wrong!”, “The 80s were better!”, and “The election of 1896 wasn’t that heated, according to most historians!”. Now, like Samuel Gompers once said about anti-Union laws in rad year of 1896, “Haters are going to hate, and skaters are going to ice skate because skateboarding has not been invented yet.” (Trust me, TOTATLY a real quote.) But, like all nostalgia blinded young adults, I can be wrong. There is actually a better era than the 1890s. Shocking, I know, it seems like nothing could top the “gay 90s” (This title is actually true, just look at the Wikipedia page.) I, of course, am talking about the truly great 90s, the 1790s.
The seventeen nineties, otherwise known as the best time to be alive. This, of course, provided you are a patriotically aligned white male with land ownership and NO syphilis. The fun that could be had, provided again that you fall into the previous category, because if you’re not in that category, you won’t have a tonne of fun, as long as fun is defined by voting, which American Idol has proven time and time again to be true, then at minimum you will have to wait 70 years to have a blast. Speaking of fun, how could we not mention the XYZ affair! It’s all the fun of a quasi-war with the spelling of a spilled bag of scrabble pieces. And fun fact! Eli Whitney invented to cotton gin during this time, allowing slavery to REALLY flourish in the south, causing a human trafficking based economy to start, which, through multiple reasons, started what is known by many to be the darkest time in American history. Awesome!
In conclusion, while the 1790s are scientifically proven to be the best 90s (Again, you’ve gotta trust me on this one), we can all agree that the 1890s are the era with the most rampant nostalgia hording. So, next time you see some try hard in a Cat-Dog T-shirt, just remind them that the original Cat-Dog was made by crazy circus owner and known swindler P.T Barnum, and was actually the front half of both a stray cat and dog sewn together, seen for just a nickel, along with the bearded lady at the 1890 World’s Fair.
-James Wagner, Contributor