To try to simulate how 1964 played out in real time, I didn’t rely on historians’ or public television’s subsequent interpretations but instead used as a baseline the Times, then as now the liberal newspaper of record. Among the digital gadgets with which the paper tries to retain subscribers in the post-print age is what it calls TimesMachine: full replicas of past editions (from 1851 to 1980) that you can leaf through in facsimile page by page online, much as one used to do with microfilm. Be warned: You can plug yourself into this machine and not pry yourself loose for hours. The acres of classified ads alone are New York City’s answer to the Dead Sea Scrolls. I was hooked from the moment I summoned up the paper of January 1, 1964.

As it happened, I did so in August, just as racial turmoil was riveting the nation on the heretofore obscure St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. I got all the way to page ten of this antique New Year’s Day edition before I was stopped short by a headline over a brief AP story: �St. Louis Holds 24 in Racial Protest.� Elsewhere in that same paper was an unintended paradigm of a culture war we’ve lived with ever since. A page-one story announced that the 55-year-old New York governor and presidential candidate Nelson Rockefeller was expecting a child by his 37-year-old second wife. The front-page play, combined with the detailed chronology of the expectant parents’ marital histories, amounted to an editorial message: The divorced Rockefeller was no shoo-in with a Leave It to Beaver electorate that couldn’t watch married couples share the same bed on network television. (This taboo would be killed off later that year by Bewitched.) As if to rub it in, the same Times contained the prominent an�nouncement of a June wedding for Arizona senator Barry Goldwater’s daughter. The juxtaposition of these two aspiring First Families, one epitomizing the old Eastern Establishment and the other a new conservative order rising across the Sun Belt, would climax in July with the raucous booing of Rockefeller by the victorious Goldwater forces at the Republican National Convention.

At the back of the January 1, 1964, paper was yet another cultural artifact that seems contemporary a half-century later: an ad for NBC’s coverage of the Tournament of Roses Parade, graced by a photo of a star attraction, Betty White. Who would have imagined that she would outlast half the Beatles? A dueling ad for CBS coverage of the same festivities in Pasadena featured Ronald Reagan, then a Hollywood has-been, sharing the bill with the former Miss America turned game-show panelist Bess Myerson. Reagan’s true star turn of autumn 1964 � the prime-time preelection speech that ignited his political career � would barely be noted by the Times.

Steeping myself in the remaining days of 1964, I was struck by recurring patterns. Almost every contemporaneous sighting of an imminent resolution of a domestic or international conflict was premature. Almost every political division and social injustice that continues to plague America today was visible then. Almost every lasting cultural innovation, from the experimental-film revolution in the East Village to Pop Art uptown, was ignored, ridiculed, condescended to, or dismissed by the Times and its Establishment peers. While there has been epic progress on some major fronts in the 50 years since � the Soviet Union and Jim Crow both collapsed, for starters � there has not been nearly as much forward movement as imagined by those who were there then.

It was 1964 when the tantalizing prospect of a woman president was raised by the first female presidential candidate entering a major party’s primary, the much-admired Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Republican of Maine. But neither that front-page development nor Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique, then reaching a wide audience in paperback, fast-tracked a dream that may finally be realized in our own time. (Even now, men hold some 71 percent of all political offices in America.) Action on the public-health menace of smoking was on another slow track. When a government committee’s finding of the link between cigarettes and cancer became a front-page story in January, the Times added a sidebar explaining that this discovery was already old news: The new report echoed previous studies dating back to 1859 in France and 1936 in America. Nonetheless, it would not be until 1971 that the first substantial government regulation, barring cigarette ads on television, would go into effect.

Some less culturally loaded, eminently fixable American maladies identified in 1964 have been left to fester ever since � as exemplified by a subheadline beneath the Times banner announcing the Warren Commission Report: �Security Steps Taken by Secret Service Held Inadequate.� A 1964 best seller, Vance Packard’s The Naked Society, sounded the alarm that �the surveillance of citizens� was growing as a result of the rise of �peering electronic eyes, undercover agents, lie detectors, hidden tape recorders, bureaucratic investigators, and outrageously intrusive questionnaires,� not to mention wholesale domestic spying by the departments of Defense and Justice. Packard even foresaw internet snooping in the prospect of �cabled TV� collecting its users’ personal information. But in contrast to muckrakers like Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell during the Progressive Era, Packard could not spark a scintilla, let alone an age, of reform. A half-century later, we’re more exposed than ever.