This year, a lot of Americans will be celebrating Independence Day in a minor key. I’m one of them. I’m spending our country’s anniversary in COVID isolation at Trinity College, Dublin, a set of circumstances not conducive to riotous celebration even at the best of times. I felt like I should mark the day somehow, though, so I’m sharing some magazine covers from July 1925 that show some of the many ways our country’s unquenchable spirit can be celebrated:
spending the day at Coney Island,
lighting a festive lantern,
breathing in the sea air,
ringing the bell of freedom,
and celebrating the diversity that always has been, and always will be, our country’s greatest strength.
Happy 4th, everyone!
My Life 100 Years Ago 
The Cooper Life cover made me nostalgic for the lively main streets of the small rural towns of my youth. Even in 1925 I suspect the artist wanted wanted to invoke a widespread warm home-town feeling for that feature.
Odd being so old that The 1920s are as close my young life as the GW Bush administration is now.
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Hi Frank, I was sorry to see that you were laid up with something that sounds way worse than my mild COVID. I hope that, like me, you’re completely recovered.
I had the same feeling of nostalgia about the Cooper cover. I lived in a very small town until I was eight, then in a bigger town, then in a suburb, but I think I’ll always be a small-town girl at heart.
Every time they have the 50th anniversary of something that I remember I think about how it’s as close to 100 years ago as it is to now. But the GW Bush administration! That was, like, two weeks ago!
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