I love history. It was my favorite subject in school. It’s my favorite category on Jeopardy. I usually do pretty well when anything history-related is a Trivial Pursuit question.

I also love journalism. It was my major in college, and if it weren’t for the soul-crushing pace of a reporter’s life, I think I would have excelled in the profession. Even though I didn’t make journalism my career, does not mean I wasted my time in college. I learned how to ask questions, think critically, and never bury the lead. I believe good skills to have in general, really.

The beautiful nexus of where history and journalism converge is that reporting (when at its best and most objective) becomes a record of history. There is a quote I love by the late Philip Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post, who said, “Journalism is the first rough draft of history.”

Jody at the Newseum — Me outside the Newseum in Washington, D.C

Then, it makes sense that when Andrew and I visited Washington D.C. in 2013, one of the museums I was most excited to go to was the Newseum. Yep, that’s right. The seven-level, 250,000-square-foot museum was located on the iconic Pennsylvania Avenue and featured fifteen theaters and fifteen galleries. The Berlin Wall Gallery included the largest display of wall sections outside Germany. Other galleries presented topics including the First Amendment, world press freedom, news history, the September 11 attacks, and the history of the Internet, TV, and radio. The Today’s Front Pages Gallery presented daily front pages from more than 80 international newspapers. I was in heaven.

Jody Outside of the Newseum — Me outside the Newseum in Washington, D.C

So this year, for my birthday week post, I thought it would be fun to look up and see what were the major headlines of the day I was born: February 17, 1976. Unfortunately, this was a little harder than I anticipated it would be. While I could have gone into my local library, I wanted to find some archives from the comfort and convenience of my own home via the internet.

The best source I could find was a site called Newspaper Archive, and I liked it because it provides broadsheet PDF or JPEG images for thousands of newspapers spanning over a century. Sadly for me, not every newspaper had every year— or my year, to be specific.

For larger circulation metropolitan newspapers, the Oakland Tribune had my birthday. I’ve included all the pages I saved at the bottom of this post. In addition to the Oakland Tribune, I saved some pages from the local newspaper where I was born in Colorado. As you can tell, my town being more of a military town, the articles are more geared toward topics that related to military life. Headlines included “Military Spending Cuts Predicted in Colorado,” “Civil Service Hiring Abuses Probed,” and “Ford to Unveil Streamlining of Intelligence Work.” In Oakland, local news was addressing issues of recycling, California’s drought, and cancer treatments. Both papers, however, had stories covering the Patty Hearst trial, which at the time was definitely headline news.

If you have the time, scroll down and look at some of the international briefs. There are a few stories about issues involving Russia. The Oakland Tribute had a story about Multilingual Voting Protests. I also included some advertising pages to see what prices were like in 1976. And if you look hard enough you can read some blurbs about the campaign predictions of the then little-known politician named Jimmy Carter.

News clipping from 1976 — I had to include this because it was just too timely. It seems talk of epidemics used to be much less controversial.

One of the things that I love about looking back through old newspapers is that you get a context for time and how we have (or haven’t) evolved as a society. I swear, if you didn’t know the datelines of some of these pages, some stories read as if they could be in today’s newspaper. While on hand that might seem kind of depressing, I see it as sort of reassuring. What I come away thinking is that we as a people have come through hard times and done hard things. And as time marches on and more headlines get written, we will keep facing and coming through more hard things for years to come.