In a conversation with a friend it was brought up when he first realized everyone did not live on a farm. He saw reports on antiwar protests and wanted to know why the people looked weird.
My earliest memory of anything relating to the world at large were news reports about the Hostages in Iran. I had never really paid attention before. After this I paid attention and started to learn a little about politics. About this time school changed from kickball into world events which somehow became relevant to every subject. Teachers always lecturing about how they saw things. It became a constant onslaught of Reagan, the Cold War We're gonna be nuked any day now. and it turns into a litany like that billy joel song.

So.
What is your earliest memory about World events and or politics

The earliest one that comes to mind is the death of John Lennon.
I think I was 8 or 9 years old. Coincidentally, my childhood friend's
mom died on the same day. For that reason, it always stayed in my
mind.

I think the Jimmy Carter years cause on TV they were always talking about him handing out peanuts to people.

According to my mum, the first time I sat up and paid attention to the news was in 1988, when reports of the Lockerbie bombing came in. At the time I would have been 4/5.

My actual earliest memory of wondering what the world was all about was the Gulf War. At the time I found it exciting, I had seen war of course in movies (even if I was too young to watch some of them), but this was live war...it was really happening. I was just a kid so I thought it was cool, it wan't the kind of thing I expected to ever happen to us. But it did open my eyes to things beyond the UK.

My earliest political memory and I mean truly and honestly political..was Jimmy Carter. I remember reading..well actually I don't think I read then.. so looking at my father's newspaper and there was a political cartoon showing Jimmy Carter dressed like a baby.

Missed this thread when I went into an remembering-things reverie in the Frist Book thread (also started by christopher - cheers!), so forgive any repetition.

I was born in 1967, and we moved out of my first family home around the time of my fourth birthday.

I remember watching some moon landings from a high chair. I can't be precise about it - it may have been one of the later batches, but I suspect it might have been the original Armstrong-Aldrin mission. I didn't really understand what was going on, of course, just that there were some men walking around on the big white circle in the sky that changes shape, and that it was somehow Important that they were doing so.

After that, my childhood continued untouched by the outside world until the early to mid 70s (unless you count remembering hearing hit records of the time on the radio - especially Dana's All Kinds of Everything in 70/71 while I was in hospital for my 4th birthday with scalds).

For this I have to thank the BBC's "Newsround" programme and the journalist John Craven who founded and anchored it. For those who don't know, it was a five-minute news bulletin aired during children's TV programming every weekday afternoon. They used the same journalists and foreign correspondents as the "grown-up" news programmes, but put together special reports aimed specifically at kids. From that, I particularly remember pictures of an Ethiopian famine (1973?) and the evacuation of the American embassy in Saigon in 1975, and the interminable bombing campaigns of the IRA throughout the 1970s.

After that, I'd say the first news issues I felt I really understood, to the extent of forming opinions about, were the Falklands War in 1981(?) and the British miner's strike of 1984. These sowed the seeds of my continuing distrust of the British Conservative party, and right-wing politics generally.

I can remember Desert Storm when I was 3. I called Saddam Hussien Saddam Goosien.

It seems like I have vague memories of the Kennedy inauguration, I am betting that is simply because it was shown after the assasination. I would say the Kennedy assasination was definitely the first event for myself and most of my fellow classmates that rudely introduced us to the outside world.

The Kennedy assassination was the first memory I have of a major world event as well. I recall being at my grandparents, with them and my parents watching the flag draped coffin travelling through the streets by horse-drawn carriage to Arlington.

And Julian, if as a one-year-old, you actually recall the Apollo 11 landing in 1968, you get my vote for best memory in human history!

When I was 4 years old I was sitting on the living room floor playing and Nixon was on the TV, my dad was trying to explain to me about his resignation, but I didn't really understand it.

Ooops! That dates me, doesn't it?

The first Persian gulf war. I am not very old by the way.

My first specific political memory is the Presidential campaign between Nixon and Kennedy back in 1960. I remember watching their debate on television and in those days the networks covered the conventions in prime time pretty much gavel to gavel. I was 7 at the time and my parents thought I was a little strange to watch a bunch of speeches, but I did. The process fascinated me.

Before that, I was aware of Eisenhower's "Project '66" policy which was a comprehensive program to build and re-build the nation's infrastructure with highway rest areas and the Interstate Highway system.

I remember my Dad calling me into the family room to watch Nixon resign. I didn't understand it's entire meaning, but I understood it was important.

I have vague memories of the moon landing. I was quite young, I don't remember much else about being three.

Earliest political memory I would say was the Carter v. Ford election. I rooted, and for no reason, for Ford. I remember after Carter was in office my friends and I would sing a remake of the Oscar Myer jingle:

My President has a first name its
J I M M Y
My President has a second name its
C A R T ER
Oh I hate to see him every day
Cause if you ask me while I'll say
Cause Jimmy Carter has a way with messing up the USA

Ok so do you think my Republican Father influenced me?

When I was in fourth grade I told my mother I wanted to be the first female President. Hmmm, I think I will change my view on that!

As far as recognizing that there was a world beyond my neighborhood, I would first say that I was extremely interested when learning about the American Indians in the 3rd grade. But I suppose the first international incident to catch my attention was the US hostages in Iran.

I remember lying on the living room floor looking at something or coloring....And I looked to my mom and asked her who the president was, she replied Nixon.

And now I feel old.

Hmm...Probably the earliest one that I actually had some understanding of was in 1989 when the Berlin wall came down. I was twelve.

I also *gulp* remember the Nixon-Kennedy debates, though I don't think they had that much impact - there was probably something else on that they were preempting. The first event which made a real political impact was probably the Kennedy assassination. The first event which really brought home the scope of the outside world, though, was seeing the Beatles in concert in 1964 (my entire family went). Coming from a very small town, I had never seen so many people in one place at one time - all of them screaming.


I was actually living about eight blocks from the Dakota the night John Lennon was shot. My partner, Sean, and I had met not too long before and we both walked down and joined the candlelight vigil on 72nd St.

I remember sitting on the stairs late at night (at least for me) in my nightie watching President Eisenhower's farewell speech. I didn't understand it but it seemed pretty sad. Dad, who was sitting on the couch below the stairs, didn't know I was up.

As kids in elementary school one fall, my friends and I used to shout at each other, Kennedy! Kennedy! and Nixon! Nixon! My dad said he was for Nixon, so I was, too.

My first profound political/world memory was in 1963 when I was 10 years old. I was walking across the playground going home when two kids told me that President Kennedy was shot. That same year I had lost my grandfather in June and my grandmother on November 17, just 5 days before Kennedy was assassinated. We watched Kennedy's funeral on television.

It was a sad, rotten year.

Politics: I used to sleep on the back porch during summer vacation. I had the radio turned on, and I listened to the reports of the Republican convention. Ike was the nominee, and come September, someone at our school organized us all into "Young Republicans." Everyone on the playground stood shoulder to shoulder during recess and we shouted "We like Ike" at every passerby. I must have been six at the time.

World Events: I have a memory of looking at a Life or Look magazine in the dentist's office. I was mostly looking at the photographs. Someone with a camera had taken photos to illustrate what the world looked like while high on LSD. There were also some photos taken by one of the 7 or 8 U.S. military "advisers" in South Vietnam.

The Military blockade of Cuba and the missile crisis stick in my mind, because I remember discussing with an older brother that, as I understood it from school, a military blockade was an act of war. He told me that we were already at war in Vietnam. That reality had not set in before that conversation.

My first political memory was the Nixon-Kennedy debates. I would have been five years old. I doubt I would have paid too much attention, but my parents seemed very interested and they asked me which one I liked. I said Nixon, which didn't seem to please them. Not sure why I picked Nixon, maybe to a five year old he looked more of a father image.

I remember getting the news of the Kennedy assassination. Didn't have TV, just radio, we were in a very rural part of Virginia, coal mining country. I didn't have much in the way of political thoughts about it, just a profound sense of sadness.

The first election I had any idea of the issues was 1964, Goldwater vs. Johnson. I liked Goldwater. I was only ten, but I 'd been reading since age four and perusing further and further into the adult sections of the library, including science-fiction. I'm sure I'd read several of the Heinlein juvies by then, and if I didn't have any particular poltics at that point, I did have an instinctive self-reliance and individualism, and I recognized Goldwater as one of my own kind.

hmmm... interesting question!

I remember the Lockerbie bombing, mostly because some friends and classmates died on the plane. But, I also did not realize at the time that the bombing had to do with politics because I was still unaware of what politics and terrorists were. Since my dad was stationed in Germany for much of the 80s, I remember the AFN commercials about terrorists and telling everyone to be aware of what people are doing and look for strange activities. But, its odd because I remember the commercials very clearly, but I didn't realize what they were really about until winter 1990 when my family arrived back in the US and we went with some German friends to visit the smithsonian in DC. There was a bomb threat and the visitors in the museum (I think it was the natural history museum) were escorted to the basement where we could wait to get our coats after the bomb squad removed the bomb from the coat room. It was very surreal, esp when I watched the heavily armed military personnel escort two men from the building. As we drove home from DC that day, we heard the announcement that we had gone to war in Iraq and then I didn't see my dad for several months. There was no news about the terrorist threat in DC that I heard, by my parents explained to me the men were terrorists trying to protest the war by bombing the building.

I also remember the fall of the Berlin Wall. The summer before the wall fell, we took a family trip to Austria and all along the road, there were little East German cars broken down on the side of the road heading into Germany - the cars were packed full of stuff, most of it abandoned. And when the cars broke down, the people - entire families with small children - just got out and walked as far as they could carrying whatever they could... My mother told me they were trying to find freedom. I felt something very deep then - the idea of wanting something so much that you could leave everything you owned and walk miles just to get it - and it wasn't anything tangible. It really amazed me that they were able to escape - I heard many stories of people getting shot who had tried to leave East Germany before. The months leading to the fall were very tense it seemed like - even to a 9 year old - until finally the wall officially came down and there were massive celebrations across the country. I think this event, more than anything triggered my first real interest in politics and history. Especially when I met a grand-uncle for the very first time - it just shocked me to think how the workings of two governments could prevent brothers from seeing each other.

JFK's assassination. I was only 4 at the time but I remember watching the news with my family and my Mom and my Sister weeping. My Sister was holding an autographed photo of him that she received in the mail the month before.

Still makes me sad, it was a moving experience.

I was about four or five years old visiting my granparent's and being shushed because my grandfather was watching the news as Nixon was resigning the Presidency. I had to sit quietly and watch it too.

I can remember when JFK was President, for an odd reason. Even back when I was, at most, seven years old, I was an avid fan of Mad magazine. I can recall some of the parodies they did of JFK. (Things like his young children running around the White House.) Of course, I remember the assassination, when everything else in the country seemed to come to a halt.

Other vivid memories from a few years later include the Moon landing, the Vietnam War, campus protests, and the hippie movement. (My family drove through the Haight-Ashbury area at the time, and even bought an underground newspaper.)

It's hard to say when I developed any serious political thoughts; a strong case could be made that I still have not done so. Perhaps it would be with the Watergate scandal.

I spent the first part of my life in California, and I can recall when it seemed like that state had the attention of the nation for a long time. Nixon, Reagan, Jerry Brown, and so on. Of course, there were state propositions that held the attention of the nation as well.

I saw the rise of feminism and the gay rights movement, as well as the rise of the religious right. What a long, strange trip it's been.

My parents made me stay up late in pajamas to watch the Moon Landing.

I wasnt allowed much tv in general so thats my first big memory and I was already 7-8y/o. I didnt realize at the time what the big deal was, it was fuzzy TV, slow, a flag, a small step for man and all that.
I do have memories of the civil rights movement though, Im not sure if its after the fact, but I had opinions early on because I remember telling my father that he shouldnt be racist and this must have been beforehand because they divorced when I was 10. I have no idea where I was getting my information from.
Next I suppose were the protests. The Vietnam War and Nixon era had the biggest influence on me politically. I was at the end of the boomers and we had progressive teachers and new everything. A lasting and seething contempt for lies about the reasons for going to war has followed me throughout my life.

Didn't the first lunar landing happen on 2 July 1969 - meaning I would have been 21 months old? That's still very young to remember more than a fleeting image, but it is not totally inconceivable.

Indeed, that is all I do remember - a small flickering monochrome screen. I fact, I remember the room better than the pictures (the positions of the furniture, etc.). I didn't usually watch TV with my dad - he was more likely to read with me - which might be what is making me think that the occasion was special. (After all, what does a toddler understand about moons and rockets?)

Although you are probably be right - it is more likely that what I'm remembering is actually one of the later missions - they were still going there until 1972 (I know that's not the one I remember, since it took place when I was living in a different house). It's a lot easier to believe that I can remember something that happened when I was three or four, n'est-ce pas?

But yes, I do have a very good memory, in terms of consciously remembering things from when I was very young at least. Maybe not the best in human history, but not bad.