Yesterday

An elegant, original, enjoyable, and important investigation of the concept of nostalgia and its power. From Paul McCartney’s ‘Yesterday’ to Dua Lipa’s ‘Future Nostalgia,’ Becker shows that the ‘problem’ with nostalgia has never been the peculiar ways it engages with the past. Instead, it is the way nostalgia contests assumptions about progress. After Yesterday, nostalgia really isn’t what it used to be. -- Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University Western cultural critics have been lamenting our loss of optimism and our obsession with the past ever since the 1970s. Why? In his lucid history of arguments about nostalgia, Tobias Becker reveals their unacknowledged clinging to the idea of progress, an idea we seem unable to overcome. -- Philipp Felsch, author of <i>The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960–1990</i> Sha Na Na performed ‘At the Hop’ at Woodstock, six months to the day after the inauguration of the new law-and-order president, Richard Nixon. In his wide-ranging yet incisive book, Tobias Becker explains how two such disparate events could seem to belong to a single history of ‘nostalgia.’ -- Peter Fritzsche, University of Illinois