This is an excerpt from the Substack of journalist Sarah Kendzior. You can read the whole post here.
In Springfield, Illinois, there is a bookstore called Prairie Archives that I visit when I am driving from St. Louis to Chicago and need a break from the farms and factories and the fervent rhyming ode to guns planted in a series of signs stretching along a soybean field next to the highway.
Prairie Archives is down the street from the tomb of Abraham Lincoln, Springfield’s most famous resident. In 1838, a 28-year-old Lincoln stood in Springfield’s town square and proclaimed of the United States: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”
Lincoln was inspired to make the speech after a white mob in St. Louis set a Black man on fire and cheered as they watched him die. It is heady country between St. Louis and Springfield, weighted with the worst of history, and the drive makes me want to explore and to disappear.
I like Prairie Archives because I know I will find something weird. I don’t know what it will be, but I know it will be weird in a way that is different than what I find online: spontaneous, serendipitous. There is no algorithm to guide me, no data to mine. It is only me and aisle upon aisle of used books and magazines and maps.
I am of the last generation to have spent their youth in the analog age, and Prairie Archives reminds me of childhood memories when information was very hard to find. Now and then I try to explain this era to my children and they recoil with incomprehension. Not only did I lack instant gratification, I often had no gratification at all. I would wonder about things for years and never find the answers. I was a useless repository of botched song lyrics, dubious political trivia, history filled with holes. I hoped that someday I would stumble upon the information I sought, like people had done for centuries before me. I knew that if I did find what I was looking for, it would be through luck and not will. After all, it wasn’t like I could just google it.
Then, when I was 16, I got the internet, and the way my memory worked changed forever. I am of the last generation to remember the memory we lost.
In July of the year of our plague 2021, I bought a 1976 copy of the magazine UFO Report at Prairie Archives, because why not? The Pentagon had just announced that UFOs were real and that they had long had a secret division studying them, an insane development that got lost in the fires and floods and freezes and mass death that dominated the rest of that year.
I wanted to know what the type of people who read UFO Report during a bicentennial year were thinking about during those glory days of anomalous American accountability. The Pentagon Papers, the Watergate hearings, the Pike Committee, the Church Committee. Richard Nixon’s farewell helicopter fading into the sky. Those were boom times for patriotic paranoiacs, and I had been born too late. As a teenager, I fantasized about the mid-1970s like others my age did about Woodstock, before my generation got its own Woodstock in 1999 and burned it down with peace candles.
I sat on a bench down the street from Lincoln’s corpse and started reading UFO Report. On the first page, an advertisement screamed: “YOU ARE NOT BEING TOLD THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FUTURE!”