What Am I Missing?

 John Jay Chapman's preface to the second edition of his William Lloyd Garrison begins

I once knew a man who wrote a brilliant biography of Abraham Lincoln. He himself belonged to the Civil War epoch, and while writing the book in about the year 1895, he became so absorbed and excited by that war as he studied it, and lived it over again, that he could not sleep at night. He paced the room, lost in thought, awed by his subject. It was a contemporary of this biographer who told me that, while the Civil War was in progress, the enthusiastic historian had taken no interest in it; it didn't seem to attract his attention.

I find this odd, yet I have no doubt that there are matters I ignored between say 1975 and 1985 that will interest the future much, and would interest me also--if not to the point of insomnia--were they brought to my attention.