A Final Jeopardy question once asked “What 1980’s song do history teachers praise for its educational value?”

Only one contestant got it right. In 1989, singer Billy Joel wrote a song called “We Didn’t Start the Fire”.  Starting from his birth year in 1949 until 1989, he sang about important events that happened during those 40 years.

Here it is, set to pictures… . It’s a nice flashback through forty years of the past half century in less than 3 minutes. The flash file version was written by a guy named Ye Li who’s currently a doctoral scholar at Columbia University.  At the time he put the flash file together, he was a freshman at Caltech.

If you click here, you can watch Ye Li’s flash version. Top left gives you full screen….top right lets you pause.  Bottom left shows the year.  The  older you are, the more pictures you will recognize.  Anyone over age 65 should remember most of what they see but it’s neat at any age.

We Didn’t Start The Fire

If you’re reading this on an iPad or iPhone, you probably can’t see the Flash video.  If so, click on this link to see a copy somebody posted on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9zA7sCkUA8

I am vibrating with questions for Billy Joel:

1.  What happened in the 22 years since 1989?
2.  What happened between my birthday in 1931   and when the song begins in 1949?
3.  Who actually DID start the fire? I know it wasn’t me. I only specialize in kitchen fires.