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Welcome to Our Generation USA!
This Web Page covers
Generations of Mankind
as a complex society that is characterized by urban development, social stratification, a form of government, and symbolic systems of communication (such as writing).
See also related web pages:
Being Human
American Lifestyles
Medical Breakthroughs
Human Sexuality
Worst of Humanity
The Generations of Mankind The following photograph depicts four generations of one family: a male infant, his mother, his maternal grandmother, and one of his maternal great-grandmothers.
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Generation is defined as the act of producing offspring. In kinship terminology, it is a structural term designating the parent-child relationship. It is also known as biogenesis, reproduction, or procreation in the biological sciences.
The term is also often used synonymously with cohort in social science; under this formulation the term means "people within a delineated population who experience the same significant events within a given period of time".
Generation in this sense of birth cohort, also known as a "social generation", is widely used in popular culture, and has been the basis for societal analysis. Serious analysis of generations began in the nineteenth century, emerging from an increasing awareness of the possibility of permanent social change and the idea of youthful rebellion against the established social order. Some analysts believe that a generation is one of the fundamental social categories in a society, while others view its importance as being overshadowed by other factors such as class, gender, race, education, and so on.
The Following are a List of Generations by the time as noted:
The term Generation Alpha has been suggested as name for both this cohort and for the subsequent one.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Generations of Mankind:
The term is also often used synonymously with cohort in social science; under this formulation the term means "people within a delineated population who experience the same significant events within a given period of time".
Generation in this sense of birth cohort, also known as a "social generation", is widely used in popular culture, and has been the basis for societal analysis. Serious analysis of generations began in the nineteenth century, emerging from an increasing awareness of the possibility of permanent social change and the idea of youthful rebellion against the established social order. Some analysts believe that a generation is one of the fundamental social categories in a society, while others view its importance as being overshadowed by other factors such as class, gender, race, education, and so on.
The Following are a List of Generations by the time as noted:
- The Lost Generation, also known as the Generation of 1914 in Europe, is a term originating with Gertrude Stein to describe those who fought in World War I. The members of the lost generation were typically born between 1883 and 1900.
- The Greatest Generation, also known as the G.I. Generation, is the generation that includes the veterans who fought in World War II. They were born from around 1900 through 1924, coming of age during the Great Depression. Journalist Tom Brokaw dubbed this the Greatest Generation in a book of the same name.
- The Silent Generation, also known as the Lucky Few, were born from approximately 1925 until 1942. It includes some who fought in World War II, most of those who fought the Korean War and many during the Vietnam War.
- The Baby Boomers are the generation that was born following World War II, generally from 1946 up to 1964, a time that was marked by an increase in birth rates. The term "baby boomer" is sometimes used in a cultural context. Therefore, it is impossible to achieve broad consensus on a defined start and end date. The baby boom has been described variously as a "shockwave" and as "the pig in the python". In general, baby boomers are associated with a rejection or redefinition of traditional values; however, many commentators have disputed the extent of that rejection, noting the widespread continuity of values with older and younger generations. In Europe and North America boomers are widely associated with privilege, as many grew up in a time of affluence. One of the features of Boomers was that they tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before them. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the change they were bringing about. This generation is also referred to as the Me Generation.
- Generation X, commonly abbreviated to Gen X, is the generation born after the Western Post–World War II baby boom. Demographers, historians and commentators use birth dates ranging from the early 1960s to the early 1980s. The term has also been used in different times and places for a number of different subcultures or countercultures since the 1950s.
- Millennials, also known as the Millennial Generation, or Generation Y, is the demographic cohort following Generation X. Commentators use birth dates ranging from the early 1980s to around 2000.
- The cohort of people born after the Millennials have no agreed-upon name or range of birth dates. A common name is Generation Z. Some sources start this generation at the mid or late 1990s with various ending dates and others start it in the early 2000s with birth dates ending around 2025.
The term Generation Alpha has been suggested as name for both this cohort and for the subsequent one.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Generations of Mankind:
- Familial generation
- Social generation
- Generational theory
- Generational tension
- List of generations
- Other terminology
- See also:
Ancient Civilizations including How the Egyptian Pyramids were built.
YouTube Video: Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, which tells a day life in Ancient Greece
Pictured: LEFT: Ancient Egypt is a canonical example of an early culture considered a civilization; RIGHT: The Aztec Pyramid at St. Cecilia Acatitlan, State of Mexico
A civilization is any complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification, symbolic communication forms (typically, writing systems), and a perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment by a cultural elite.
Civilizations are intimately associated with and often further defined by other socio-politico-economic characteristics, including centralization, the domestication of both humans and other organisms, labor specialization, culturally ingrained ideologies of progress and supremacism, monumental architecture, taxation, societal dependence upon farming as an agricultural practice, and growth.
Historically, a civilization was a so-called "advanced" culture in contrast to more supposedly primitive cultures. In this broad sense, a civilization contrasts with non-centralized tribal societies, including the cultures of nomadic pastoralists, egalitarian horticultural subsistence neolithic societies or hunter-gatherers.
Civilizations are organized in densely populated settlements divided into hierarchical social classes with a ruling elite and subordinate urban and rural populations, which engage in intensive agriculture, mining, small-scale manufacture and trade. Civilization concentrates power, extending human control over the rest of nature, including over other human beings.
The earliest emergence of civilizations is generally associated with the final stages of the Neolithic Revolution, culminating in the relatively rapid process of urban revolution and formation of state, a political development associated with the appearance of a governing elite.
The earlier neolithic technology and lifestyle was established first in the Middle East (for example at Göbekli Tepe, from about 9,130 BCE), and later in the Yangtze and Yellow River basins in China (for example the Pengtoushan culture from 7,500 BCE), and later spread. Similar pre-civilized "neolithic revolutions" also began independently from 7,000 BCE in such places as northwestern South America (the Norte Chico civilization) and Mesoamerica.
These were among the six civilizations worldwide that arose independently. Mesopotamia is the site of the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BCE, with civilizations developing from 6,500 years ago. This area has been identified as having inspired some of the most important developments in human history including the invention of the wheel, the development of cursive script, mathematics, astronomy and agriculture.
The civilized urban revolution in turn was dependent upon the development of sedentarism, the domestication of grains and animals and development of lifestyles that facilitated economies of scale and accumulation of surplus production by certain social sectors.
The transition from complex cultures to civilizations, while still disputed, seems to be associated with the development of state structures, in which power was further monopolized by an elite ruling class who practiced human sacrifice.
Towards the end of the Neolithic period, various elitist Chalcolithic civilizations began to rise in various "cradles" from around 3300 BCE. Chalcolithic civilizations, as defined above, also developed in Pre-Columbian Americas and, despite an early start in Egypt, Axum and Kush, much later in Iron Age sub-Saharan Africa.
The Bronze Age collapse was followed by the Iron Age around 1200 BCE, during which a number of new civilizations emerged, culminating in a period from the 8th to the 3rd century BCE which German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers termed the Axial Age, and which he claimed was a critical transitional phase leading to Classical civilization.
A major technological and cultural transition to modernity began approximately 1500 CE in Western Europe, and from this beginning new approaches to science and law spread rapidly around the world, incorporating earlier cultures into the industrial and technological civilization of the present.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Ancient Civilizations:
How the Egyptian Pyramids Were Built.
There have been many hypotheses about the Egyptian pyramid construction techniques. These techniques seem to have developed over time; later pyramids were not built the same way as earlier ones. Most of the construction hypotheses are based on the idea that huge stones were carved with copper chisels from stone quarries, and these blocks were then dragged and lifted into position. Disagreements chiefly concern the methods used to move and place the stones.
In addition to the many unresolved arguments about the construction techniques, there have been disagreements as to the kind of workforce used. The Greeks, many years after the event, believed that the pyramids must have been built by slave labor.
Archaeologists now believe that the Great Pyramid of Giza (at least) was built by tens of thousands of skilled workers who camped near the pyramids and worked for a salary or as a form of tax payment (levy) until the construction was completed, pointing to workers' cemeteries discovered in 1990 by archaeologists Zahi Hawass and Mark Lehner. For the Middle Kingdom Pyramid of Amenemhat II, there is evidence from the annal stone of the king that foreigners from Palestine were used.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about how the Egyptian Great Pyramids were built:
Civilizations are intimately associated with and often further defined by other socio-politico-economic characteristics, including centralization, the domestication of both humans and other organisms, labor specialization, culturally ingrained ideologies of progress and supremacism, monumental architecture, taxation, societal dependence upon farming as an agricultural practice, and growth.
Historically, a civilization was a so-called "advanced" culture in contrast to more supposedly primitive cultures. In this broad sense, a civilization contrasts with non-centralized tribal societies, including the cultures of nomadic pastoralists, egalitarian horticultural subsistence neolithic societies or hunter-gatherers.
Civilizations are organized in densely populated settlements divided into hierarchical social classes with a ruling elite and subordinate urban and rural populations, which engage in intensive agriculture, mining, small-scale manufacture and trade. Civilization concentrates power, extending human control over the rest of nature, including over other human beings.
The earliest emergence of civilizations is generally associated with the final stages of the Neolithic Revolution, culminating in the relatively rapid process of urban revolution and formation of state, a political development associated with the appearance of a governing elite.
The earlier neolithic technology and lifestyle was established first in the Middle East (for example at Göbekli Tepe, from about 9,130 BCE), and later in the Yangtze and Yellow River basins in China (for example the Pengtoushan culture from 7,500 BCE), and later spread. Similar pre-civilized "neolithic revolutions" also began independently from 7,000 BCE in such places as northwestern South America (the Norte Chico civilization) and Mesoamerica.
These were among the six civilizations worldwide that arose independently. Mesopotamia is the site of the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BCE, with civilizations developing from 6,500 years ago. This area has been identified as having inspired some of the most important developments in human history including the invention of the wheel, the development of cursive script, mathematics, astronomy and agriculture.
The civilized urban revolution in turn was dependent upon the development of sedentarism, the domestication of grains and animals and development of lifestyles that facilitated economies of scale and accumulation of surplus production by certain social sectors.
The transition from complex cultures to civilizations, while still disputed, seems to be associated with the development of state structures, in which power was further monopolized by an elite ruling class who practiced human sacrifice.
Towards the end of the Neolithic period, various elitist Chalcolithic civilizations began to rise in various "cradles" from around 3300 BCE. Chalcolithic civilizations, as defined above, also developed in Pre-Columbian Americas and, despite an early start in Egypt, Axum and Kush, much later in Iron Age sub-Saharan Africa.
The Bronze Age collapse was followed by the Iron Age around 1200 BCE, during which a number of new civilizations emerged, culminating in a period from the 8th to the 3rd century BCE which German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers termed the Axial Age, and which he claimed was a critical transitional phase leading to Classical civilization.
A major technological and cultural transition to modernity began approximately 1500 CE in Western Europe, and from this beginning new approaches to science and law spread rapidly around the world, incorporating earlier cultures into the industrial and technological civilization of the present.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Ancient Civilizations:
- History of the concept
- Characteristics
- Cultural identity
- Complex systems
- History
- Fall of civilizations
- Future
- See also:
- Anarcho-primitivism
- Barbarian
- Civilized core
- Cradle of civilization
- Culture
- Outline of culture
- Historical powers
- History of the world
- Human population
- Intermediate Region
- Kardashev scale
- Law of Life
- Mission civilisatrice
- Muslim world
- New Tribalism
- Proto-civilization
- Sedentism
- Western civilization
- Christendom
- Role of the Christian Church in civilization
- Future Shock
- The dictionary definition of civilization at Wiktionary
- Quotations related to Civilization at Wikiquote
- BBC on civilization
- Top 10 oldest civilizations
How the Egyptian Pyramids Were Built.
There have been many hypotheses about the Egyptian pyramid construction techniques. These techniques seem to have developed over time; later pyramids were not built the same way as earlier ones. Most of the construction hypotheses are based on the idea that huge stones were carved with copper chisels from stone quarries, and these blocks were then dragged and lifted into position. Disagreements chiefly concern the methods used to move and place the stones.
In addition to the many unresolved arguments about the construction techniques, there have been disagreements as to the kind of workforce used. The Greeks, many years after the event, believed that the pyramids must have been built by slave labor.
Archaeologists now believe that the Great Pyramid of Giza (at least) was built by tens of thousands of skilled workers who camped near the pyramids and worked for a salary or as a form of tax payment (levy) until the construction was completed, pointing to workers' cemeteries discovered in 1990 by archaeologists Zahi Hawass and Mark Lehner. For the Middle Kingdom Pyramid of Amenemhat II, there is evidence from the annal stone of the king that foreigners from Palestine were used.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about how the Egyptian Great Pyramids were built:
- Historical hypotheses
- Third through Fifth Dynasties
Middle Kingdom and onward
- Third through Fifth Dynasties
- Great Pyramid
- See also:
- List of megalithic sites
- Theories about Stonehenge
- Seven wonders of the world
- The Herodotus Machine
- How to Build a Pyramid, Archaeology Magazine, May/June 2007
- Engineering the Pyramids - Materials Science and Engineering @ Drexel University
- Rope pull hypothesis - alternative hypothesis by Heribert Illig and Franz Löhner
- Did the Great Pyramid Have an Elevator? The Structural Engineer, April 2009
- The main problems / drawbacks of all ramp systems
- 3D Unveils Great Pyramid's Mystery - illustrates hypothesis of Houdin and Brier.
Human Migration
YouTube Video Animated map shows how humans migrated across the globe
PICTURED BELOW:
TOP: Net migration rates for 2016: positive (blue), negative (orange), stable (green), and no data (gray) (Courtesy of Kamalthebest - Own work, derived from File:BlankMap-World-Microstates.svg, using this CIA Factbook source, CC BY-SA 4.0
BOTTOM: Net migration by Nation (2008 -2012)
Worldwide Human migration is the movement by people from one place to another with the intentions of settling, permanently in the new location. The movement is often over long distances and from one country to another, but internal migration is also possible; indeed, this is the dominant form globally. Migration may be individuals, family units or in large groups.
Nomadic movements are normally not regarded as migrations as there is no intention to settle in the new place and because the movement is generally seasonal. Only a few nomadic people have retained this form of lifestyle in modern times. Also, the temporary movement of people for the purpose of travel, tourism, pilgrimages, or the commute is not regarded as migration, in the absence of an intention to live and settle in the visited places.
Many estimates of statistics in worldwide migration patterns exist.
The World Bank has published its Migration and Remittances Factbook annually since 2008. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has published a yearly World Migration Report since 1999. The United Nations Statistics Division also keeps a database on worldwide migration.
Recent advances in research on migration via the Internet promise better understanding of migration patterns and migration motives.
Substantial internal migration can also take place within a country, either seasonal human migration (mainly related to agriculture and to tourism to urban places), or shifts of population into cities (urbanisation) or out of cities (suburbanisation). Studies of worldwide migration patterns, however, tend to limit their scope to international migration.
The World Bank's Migration and Remittances Factbook of 2011 lists the following estimates for the year 2010: total number of immigrants: 215.8 million or 3.2% of world population. In 2013, the percentage of international migrants worldwide increased by 33% with 59% of migrants targeting developed regions.
Almost half of these migrants are women, which is one of the most significant migrant-pattern changes in the last half century. Women migrate alone or with their family members and community. Even though female migration is largely viewed as associations rather than independent migration, emerging studies argue complex and manifold reasons for this.
A distinction can be made between voluntary and involuntary migration, or between refugees fleeing political conflict or natural disaster vs. economic or labor migration, but these distinctions are difficult to make and partially subjective, as the motivators for migration are often correlated.
The World Bank's report estimates that, as of 2010, 16.3 million or 7.6% of migrants qualified as refugees. At the end of 2012, approximately 15.4 million people were refugees and persons in refugee-like situations - 87% of them found asylum in developing countries.
Structurally, there is substantial South-South and North-North migration, i.e., most emigrants from high-income O.E.C.D. countries migrate to other high-income countries, and a substantial part (estimated at 43%) of emigrants from developing countries migrate to other developing countries.
The United Nations Population Fund says that "[while the North has experienced a higher absolute increase in the migrant stock since 2000 (32 million) compared to the South (25 million), the South recorded a higher growth rate. Between 2000 and 2013 the average annual rate of change of the migrant population in the developing regions (2.3%) slightly exceeded that of the developed regions (2.1%).
The top ten immigration countries are:
The top ten countries of origin are:
The top ten migration corridors worldwide are:
1. Libya–European Union
2. Mexico–United States;
3. Russia–Ukraine;
4. Ukraine–Russia;
5. Bangladesh–India;
6. Turkey–Germany;
7. Kazakhstan–Russia;
8. Russia–Kazakhstan;
9. China mainland–Hong Kong;
10. China–United States.
Remittances, i.e., funds transferred by migrant workers to their home country, form a substantial part of the economy of some countries. The top ten remittance recipients in 2010 were (estimates in billion US dollar):
The Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM), launched in 2003, published a report in 2005. International migration challenges at the global level are addressed through the Global Forum on Migration and Development and the Global Migration Group, both established in 2006.
The United Nations reported that 2014 had the highest level of forced migration on record: 59.5 million individuals, caused by "persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or human rights violations", as compared with 51.2 million in 2013 (an increase of 8.3 million) and with 37.5 million a decade prior.
As of 2015 one of every 122 humans is a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. National Geographic has published 5 maps showing human migrations in progress in 2015 based on the UN report.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Worldwide Human Migration:
Nomadic movements are normally not regarded as migrations as there is no intention to settle in the new place and because the movement is generally seasonal. Only a few nomadic people have retained this form of lifestyle in modern times. Also, the temporary movement of people for the purpose of travel, tourism, pilgrimages, or the commute is not regarded as migration, in the absence of an intention to live and settle in the visited places.
Many estimates of statistics in worldwide migration patterns exist.
The World Bank has published its Migration and Remittances Factbook annually since 2008. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has published a yearly World Migration Report since 1999. The United Nations Statistics Division also keeps a database on worldwide migration.
Recent advances in research on migration via the Internet promise better understanding of migration patterns and migration motives.
Substantial internal migration can also take place within a country, either seasonal human migration (mainly related to agriculture and to tourism to urban places), or shifts of population into cities (urbanisation) or out of cities (suburbanisation). Studies of worldwide migration patterns, however, tend to limit their scope to international migration.
The World Bank's Migration and Remittances Factbook of 2011 lists the following estimates for the year 2010: total number of immigrants: 215.8 million or 3.2% of world population. In 2013, the percentage of international migrants worldwide increased by 33% with 59% of migrants targeting developed regions.
Almost half of these migrants are women, which is one of the most significant migrant-pattern changes in the last half century. Women migrate alone or with their family members and community. Even though female migration is largely viewed as associations rather than independent migration, emerging studies argue complex and manifold reasons for this.
A distinction can be made between voluntary and involuntary migration, or between refugees fleeing political conflict or natural disaster vs. economic or labor migration, but these distinctions are difficult to make and partially subjective, as the motivators for migration are often correlated.
The World Bank's report estimates that, as of 2010, 16.3 million or 7.6% of migrants qualified as refugees. At the end of 2012, approximately 15.4 million people were refugees and persons in refugee-like situations - 87% of them found asylum in developing countries.
Structurally, there is substantial South-South and North-North migration, i.e., most emigrants from high-income O.E.C.D. countries migrate to other high-income countries, and a substantial part (estimated at 43%) of emigrants from developing countries migrate to other developing countries.
The United Nations Population Fund says that "[while the North has experienced a higher absolute increase in the migrant stock since 2000 (32 million) compared to the South (25 million), the South recorded a higher growth rate. Between 2000 and 2013 the average annual rate of change of the migrant population in the developing regions (2.3%) slightly exceeded that of the developed regions (2.1%).
The top ten immigration countries are:
- the United States
- the Russian Federation
- Germany
- Saudi Arabia
- Canada
- the UK
- France
- Australia
- India
The top ten countries of origin are:
- Mexico
- Spain
- the Russian Federation
- China
- Ukraine
- Bangladesh
- Pakistan
- the UK
- the Philippines
- Turkey
The top ten migration corridors worldwide are:
1. Libya–European Union
2. Mexico–United States;
3. Russia–Ukraine;
4. Ukraine–Russia;
5. Bangladesh–India;
6. Turkey–Germany;
7. Kazakhstan–Russia;
8. Russia–Kazakhstan;
9. China mainland–Hong Kong;
10. China–United States.
Remittances, i.e., funds transferred by migrant workers to their home country, form a substantial part of the economy of some countries. The top ten remittance recipients in 2010 were (estimates in billion US dollar):
- India (55; 2.7% of GDP),
- China (51; 0.5% of GNP),
- Mexico (22.6; 1.8% of GDP),
- Philippines (21.3; 7.8% of GDP),
- France (15.9; 0.5% of GDP),
- Germany (11.6; 0.2% of GDP),
- Bangladesh (11.1; 7.2% of GDP),
- Belgium (10.4; 1.9% of GDP),
- Spain (10.2; 0.7% of GDP),
- Nigeria (10.0; 1.9% of GDP).
The Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM), launched in 2003, published a report in 2005. International migration challenges at the global level are addressed through the Global Forum on Migration and Development and the Global Migration Group, both established in 2006.
The United Nations reported that 2014 had the highest level of forced migration on record: 59.5 million individuals, caused by "persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or human rights violations", as compared with 51.2 million in 2013 (an increase of 8.3 million) and with 37.5 million a decade prior.
As of 2015 one of every 122 humans is a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. National Geographic has published 5 maps showing human migrations in progress in 2015 based on the UN report.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Worldwide Human Migration:
- Theories for migration for work in the 21st century
- Historical theories
- See also
- Colonization
- Diaspora
- Early human migrations
- Environmental migrant
- Existential migration
- Feminization of migration
- Globalisation
- Humanitarian crisis
- Illegal immigration
- Religion and human migration
- Job migration
- Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time
- List of diasporas
- Expatriate
- Migrant literature
- Immigration to Europe
- Migration in the People's Republic of China
- Most recent common ancestor
- People flow
- Political demography
- iom.int, The International Organisation for Migration
- CIA World Factbook gives up-to-date statistics on net immigration by country.
- Western Sahara and Migration
- Stalker's Guide to International Migration Comprehensive interactive guide to modern migration issues, with maps and statistics
- Mass migration as a travel business
- Migration, refugees and displacement (UNDP) provides background and statistics on human migration.
Nomads including a List of Nomadic People
YouTube Video: Who Are The Bedouin Nomads Of The Middle East?
Pictured: (L) Europe: Hungarian gypsy nomads; (R) Nomads and Gypsies of India
Click here for a List of Nomadic People by Country.
A nomad is a member of a community of people who live in different locations, moving from one place to another. Among the various ways nomads relate to their environment, one can distinguish the hunter-gatherer, the pastoral nomad owning livestock, or the "modern" peripatetic nomad. As of 1995, there were an estimated 30–40 million nomads in the world.
Nomadic hunting and gathering, following seasonally available wild plants and game, is by far the oldest human subsistence method. Pastoralists raise herds, driving them, or moving with them, in patterns that normally avoid depleting pastures beyond their ability to recover.
Nomadism is also a lifestyle adapted to infertile regions such as steppe, tundra, or ice and sand, where mobility is the most efficient strategy for exploiting scarce resources. For example, many groups in the tundra are reindeer herders and are semi-nomadic, following forage for their animals.
These nomads sometimes adapt the use of high technology such as solar photovoltaics to reduce their dependence on diesel fuel.
Sometimes also described as "nomadic" are the various itinerant populations who move about in densely populated areas living not on natural resources, but by offering services (craft or trade) to the resident population. These groups are known as "peripatetic nomads".
Common Characteristics:
A nomad is a person with no settled home, moving from place to place as a way of obtaining food, finding pasture for livestock, or otherwise making a living. The word Nomad comes from a Greek word that means one who wanders for pasture. Most nomadic groups follow a fixed annual or seasonal pattern of movements and settlements. Nomadic peoples traditionally travel by animal or canoe or on foot. Today, some nomads travel by motor vehicle. Most nomads live in tents or other portable shelters.
Nomads keep moving for different reasons. Nomadic foragers move in search of game, edible plants, and water. The Australian Aborigines, Negritos of Southeast Asia, and San of Africa, for example, traditionally move from camp to camp to hunt and to gather wild plants.
Some tribes of the Americas followed this way of life. Pastoral nomads make their living raising livestock, such as camels, cattle, goats, horses, sheep, or yaks. Gaddi tribe of Himachal Pradesh India is one such tribe. These nomads travel to find more camels, goats, and sheep through the deserts of Arabia and northern Africa.
The Fulani and their cattle travel through the grasslands of Niger in western Africa. Some nomadic peoples, especially herders, may also move to raid settled communities or avoid enemies. Nomadic craftworkers and merchants travel to find and serve customers. They include the Lohar blacksmiths of India, the Romani traders, and the Irish Travellers.
Most nomads travel in groups of families called bands or tribes. These groups are based on kinship and marriage ties or on formal agreements of cooperation. A council of adult males makes most of the decisions, though some tribes have chiefs.
In the case of Mongolian nomads, a family moves twice a year. These two movements would generally occur during the summer and winter. The winter location is usually located near mountains in a valley and most families already have their fixed winter locations. The winter locations have shelter for the animals and are not used by other families while they are out. In the summer they move to a more open area that the animals can graze.
Most nomads usually move in the same region and don't travel very far to a totally different region. Because they usually circle around a large area, a community gets formed and the other families generally know where the other ones are. Most often, a family would not have the resources to move from one province to another unless they are moving out of the area permanently.
A family can move on its own or with others and if it moves alone, they are usually no more than a couple of kilometers from each other. In the modern day there are no tribes and the people make decisions among their family members, although they consult with the elders on usual matters.
The geographical closeness of families are usually for mutual support. Pastoral nomad societies usually do not have large population. One such society, the Mongols, gave rise to the largest land empire in history. The Mongols originally consisted of loosely organized nomadic tribes in Mongolia, Manchuria, and Siberia. In the late 12th century, Genghis Khan united them and other nomadic tribes to found the Mongol Empire, which eventually stretched the length of Asia.
The nomadic way of life has become increasingly rare. Many governments dislike nomads because it is difficult to control their movement and to obtain taxes from them. Many countries have converted pastures into cropland and forced nomadic peoples into permanent settlements.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Nomadic lifestyle:
A nomad is a member of a community of people who live in different locations, moving from one place to another. Among the various ways nomads relate to their environment, one can distinguish the hunter-gatherer, the pastoral nomad owning livestock, or the "modern" peripatetic nomad. As of 1995, there were an estimated 30–40 million nomads in the world.
Nomadic hunting and gathering, following seasonally available wild plants and game, is by far the oldest human subsistence method. Pastoralists raise herds, driving them, or moving with them, in patterns that normally avoid depleting pastures beyond their ability to recover.
Nomadism is also a lifestyle adapted to infertile regions such as steppe, tundra, or ice and sand, where mobility is the most efficient strategy for exploiting scarce resources. For example, many groups in the tundra are reindeer herders and are semi-nomadic, following forage for their animals.
These nomads sometimes adapt the use of high technology such as solar photovoltaics to reduce their dependence on diesel fuel.
Sometimes also described as "nomadic" are the various itinerant populations who move about in densely populated areas living not on natural resources, but by offering services (craft or trade) to the resident population. These groups are known as "peripatetic nomads".
Common Characteristics:
A nomad is a person with no settled home, moving from place to place as a way of obtaining food, finding pasture for livestock, or otherwise making a living. The word Nomad comes from a Greek word that means one who wanders for pasture. Most nomadic groups follow a fixed annual or seasonal pattern of movements and settlements. Nomadic peoples traditionally travel by animal or canoe or on foot. Today, some nomads travel by motor vehicle. Most nomads live in tents or other portable shelters.
Nomads keep moving for different reasons. Nomadic foragers move in search of game, edible plants, and water. The Australian Aborigines, Negritos of Southeast Asia, and San of Africa, for example, traditionally move from camp to camp to hunt and to gather wild plants.
Some tribes of the Americas followed this way of life. Pastoral nomads make their living raising livestock, such as camels, cattle, goats, horses, sheep, or yaks. Gaddi tribe of Himachal Pradesh India is one such tribe. These nomads travel to find more camels, goats, and sheep through the deserts of Arabia and northern Africa.
The Fulani and their cattle travel through the grasslands of Niger in western Africa. Some nomadic peoples, especially herders, may also move to raid settled communities or avoid enemies. Nomadic craftworkers and merchants travel to find and serve customers. They include the Lohar blacksmiths of India, the Romani traders, and the Irish Travellers.
Most nomads travel in groups of families called bands or tribes. These groups are based on kinship and marriage ties or on formal agreements of cooperation. A council of adult males makes most of the decisions, though some tribes have chiefs.
In the case of Mongolian nomads, a family moves twice a year. These two movements would generally occur during the summer and winter. The winter location is usually located near mountains in a valley and most families already have their fixed winter locations. The winter locations have shelter for the animals and are not used by other families while they are out. In the summer they move to a more open area that the animals can graze.
Most nomads usually move in the same region and don't travel very far to a totally different region. Because they usually circle around a large area, a community gets formed and the other families generally know where the other ones are. Most often, a family would not have the resources to move from one province to another unless they are moving out of the area permanently.
A family can move on its own or with others and if it moves alone, they are usually no more than a couple of kilometers from each other. In the modern day there are no tribes and the people make decisions among their family members, although they consult with the elders on usual matters.
The geographical closeness of families are usually for mutual support. Pastoral nomad societies usually do not have large population. One such society, the Mongols, gave rise to the largest land empire in history. The Mongols originally consisted of loosely organized nomadic tribes in Mongolia, Manchuria, and Siberia. In the late 12th century, Genghis Khan united them and other nomadic tribes to found the Mongol Empire, which eventually stretched the length of Asia.
The nomadic way of life has become increasingly rare. Many governments dislike nomads because it is difficult to control their movement and to obtain taxes from them. Many countries have converted pastures into cropland and forced nomadic peoples into permanent settlements.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Nomadic lifestyle:
- Hunter-gatherers
- Pastoralism
- Origin
- Increase in post-Soviet Central Asia
Sedentarization
- Contemporary peripatetic minorities in Europe and Asia
- Romani people
Dom people
Yörüks
- Romani people
- Image gallery
- See also:
Economic Ranking of Countries by: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) vs. by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)
YouTube Video: Top 10 Richest Countries by GDP (PPP) per capita
Pictured: Economic Ranking of Countries (L) by GDP and (R) by PPP
Click here for a List of Countries by Gross Domestic Product (GDP):
Gross domestic product (GDP) is the market value of all final goods and services from a nation in a given year. Countries are sorted by nominal GDP estimates from financial and statistical institutions, which are calculated at market or government official exchange rates.
Nominal GDP does not take into account differences in the cost of living in different countries, and the results can vary greatly from one year to another based on fluctuations in the exchange rates of the country's currency. Such fluctuations may change a country's ranking from one year to the next, even though they often make little or no difference in the standard of living of its population.
Comparisons of national wealth are also frequently made on the basis of purchasing power parity (PPP), to adjust for differences in the cost of living in different countries. PPP largely removes the exchange rate problem, but has its own drawbacks; it does not reflect the value of economic output in international trade, and it also requires more estimation than nominal GDP. On the whole, PPP per capita figures are less spread than nominal GDP per capita figures.
The United States is the world's largest economy with a GDP of approximately $18.56 trillion, notably due to high average incomes, a large population, capital investment, moderate unemployment, high consumer spending, a relatively young population, and technological innovation.
Tuvalu is the world's smallest national economy with a GDP of about $32 million because of its very small population, a lack of natural resources, reliance on foreign aid, negligible capital investment, demographic problems, and low average incomes.
Although the rankings of national economies have changed considerably over time, the United States has maintained its top position since the Gilded Age, a time period in which its economy saw rapid expansion, surpassing the British Empire and Qing dynasty in aggregate output.
Since China's transition to a market-based economy through privatization and deregulation, the country has seen its ranking increase from ninth in 1978 to second to only the United States in 2016 as economic growth accelerated and its share of global nominal GDP surged from 2% in 1980 to 15% in 2016.
India has also experienced a similar economic boom since the implementation of neoliberal reforms in the early 1990s.
When supranational entities are included, the European Union is the second largest economy in the world. It was the largest from 2004, when ten countries joined the union, to 2014, after which it was surpassed by the United States.
The first list largely includes data compiled by the International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook for 2016, the second list shows the World Bank's 2016 estimates, and the third list includes data compiled by the United Nations Statistics Division for 2015.
Several economies which are not considered to be countries (the world, the European Union, and some dependent territories) are included in the lists because they appear in the sources as distinct economies. These economies are italicized and not ranked in the charts, but are listed where applicable.
___________________________________________________________________________
Click here for a List of Countries by their estimated forecast of gross domestic product based on purchasing power parity, abbreviated GDP (PPP):
Countries are sorted by GDP PPP forecast estimates from financial and statistical institutions in the limited period January-April 2017, which are calculated at market or government official exchange rates. The data given on this page are based on the international dollar, a standardized unit used by economists.
GDP comparisons using PPP are arguably more useful than those using nominal GDP when assessing a nation's domestic market because PPP takes into account the relative cost of local goods, services and inflation rates of the country, rather than using international market exchange rates which may distort the real differences in per capita income.
It is however limited when measuring financial flows between countries. PPP is often used to gauge global poverty thresholds and is used by the United Nations in constructing the human development index. These surveys such as the International Comparison Program include both tradable and non-tradable goods in an attempt to estimate a representative basket of all goods.
The first table includes estimates for the year 2017 for all current 191 International Monetary Fund (IMF) members as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan (the official list says "Taiwan, Province of China").
Data are in millions of international dollars; they were calculated by the IMF. Figures were published in April 2017.
The second table includes data, mostly for the year 2015, for 180 of the 193 current United Nations member states as well as Hong Kong and Macau (the two Chinese Special Administrative Regions). Data are in billions of international dollars; they were compiled by the World Bank.
The third table is a tabulation of the CIA World Factbook Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (Purchasing Power Parity) data update of 2016. The data for GDP at purchasing power parity have also been rebased using the new International Comparison Program price surveys and extrapolated to 2007.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about The List of Countries by GDP/PPP:
Gross domestic product (GDP) is the market value of all final goods and services from a nation in a given year. Countries are sorted by nominal GDP estimates from financial and statistical institutions, which are calculated at market or government official exchange rates.
Nominal GDP does not take into account differences in the cost of living in different countries, and the results can vary greatly from one year to another based on fluctuations in the exchange rates of the country's currency. Such fluctuations may change a country's ranking from one year to the next, even though they often make little or no difference in the standard of living of its population.
Comparisons of national wealth are also frequently made on the basis of purchasing power parity (PPP), to adjust for differences in the cost of living in different countries. PPP largely removes the exchange rate problem, but has its own drawbacks; it does not reflect the value of economic output in international trade, and it also requires more estimation than nominal GDP. On the whole, PPP per capita figures are less spread than nominal GDP per capita figures.
The United States is the world's largest economy with a GDP of approximately $18.56 trillion, notably due to high average incomes, a large population, capital investment, moderate unemployment, high consumer spending, a relatively young population, and technological innovation.
Tuvalu is the world's smallest national economy with a GDP of about $32 million because of its very small population, a lack of natural resources, reliance on foreign aid, negligible capital investment, demographic problems, and low average incomes.
Although the rankings of national economies have changed considerably over time, the United States has maintained its top position since the Gilded Age, a time period in which its economy saw rapid expansion, surpassing the British Empire and Qing dynasty in aggregate output.
Since China's transition to a market-based economy through privatization and deregulation, the country has seen its ranking increase from ninth in 1978 to second to only the United States in 2016 as economic growth accelerated and its share of global nominal GDP surged from 2% in 1980 to 15% in 2016.
India has also experienced a similar economic boom since the implementation of neoliberal reforms in the early 1990s.
When supranational entities are included, the European Union is the second largest economy in the world. It was the largest from 2004, when ten countries joined the union, to 2014, after which it was surpassed by the United States.
The first list largely includes data compiled by the International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook for 2016, the second list shows the World Bank's 2016 estimates, and the third list includes data compiled by the United Nations Statistics Division for 2015.
Several economies which are not considered to be countries (the world, the European Union, and some dependent territories) are included in the lists because they appear in the sources as distinct economies. These economies are italicized and not ranked in the charts, but are listed where applicable.
___________________________________________________________________________
Click here for a List of Countries by their estimated forecast of gross domestic product based on purchasing power parity, abbreviated GDP (PPP):
Countries are sorted by GDP PPP forecast estimates from financial and statistical institutions in the limited period January-April 2017, which are calculated at market or government official exchange rates. The data given on this page are based on the international dollar, a standardized unit used by economists.
GDP comparisons using PPP are arguably more useful than those using nominal GDP when assessing a nation's domestic market because PPP takes into account the relative cost of local goods, services and inflation rates of the country, rather than using international market exchange rates which may distort the real differences in per capita income.
It is however limited when measuring financial flows between countries. PPP is often used to gauge global poverty thresholds and is used by the United Nations in constructing the human development index. These surveys such as the International Comparison Program include both tradable and non-tradable goods in an attempt to estimate a representative basket of all goods.
The first table includes estimates for the year 2017 for all current 191 International Monetary Fund (IMF) members as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan (the official list says "Taiwan, Province of China").
Data are in millions of international dollars; they were calculated by the IMF. Figures were published in April 2017.
The second table includes data, mostly for the year 2015, for 180 of the 193 current United Nations member states as well as Hong Kong and Macau (the two Chinese Special Administrative Regions). Data are in billions of international dollars; they were compiled by the World Bank.
The third table is a tabulation of the CIA World Factbook Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (Purchasing Power Parity) data update of 2016. The data for GDP at purchasing power parity have also been rebased using the new International Comparison Program price surveys and extrapolated to 2007.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about The List of Countries by GDP/PPP:
- List of countries by GDP (nominal) per capita
- List of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita
- List of IMF ranked countries by GDP, IMF ranked GDP (nominal), GDP (nominal) per capita, GDP (PPP), GDP (PPP) per capita, Population, and PPP
- List of IMF ranked countries by past and projected GDP (PPP)
- List of countries by real GDP growth rate
- List of countries by Human Development Index
- List of countries by income equality
- List of countries by distribution of wealth
- Lists of countries by GDP
- National wealth
Countries including a List of Countries and any of their Territories
YouTube Video: Countries of the World/Countries of the World Song
Pictured: Map showing the countries of the world.
Click here for a List of Countries and any Territories.
A country is a region that is identified as a distinct national entity in political geography. A country may be an independent sovereign state or one that is occupied by another state, as a non-sovereign or formerly sovereign political division, or a geographic region associated with sets of previously independent or differently associated people with distinct political characteristics.
Regardless of the physical geography, in the modern internationally accepted legal definition as defined by the League of Nations in 1937 and reaffirmed by the United Nations in 1945, a resident of a country is subject to the independent exercise of legal jurisdiction.
Sometimes countries refers both to sovereign states and to other political entities, while other times it refers only to states. For example, the CIA World Factbook uses the word in its "Country name" field to refer to "a wide variety of dependencies, areas of special sovereignty, uninhabited islands, and other entities in addition to the traditional countries or independent states".
In English the word "Country" has increasingly become associated with political divisions, so that one sense, associated with the indefinite article – "a country" – through misuse and subsequent conflation is now a synonym for state, or a former sovereign state, in the sense of sovereign territory or "district, native land". Areas much smaller than a political state may be called by names such as the West Country in England, the Black Country (a heavily industrialized part of England), "Constable Country" (a part of East Anglia painted by John Constable), the "big country" (used in various contexts of the American West), "coal country" (used of parts of the US and elsewhere) and many other terms.
The equivalent terms in French and other Romance languages (pays and variants) have not carried the process of being identified with political sovereign states as far as the English "country", instead derived from, pagus, which designated the territory controlled by a medieval count, a title originally granted by the Roman Church.
In many European countries the words are used for sub-divisions of the national territory, as in the German Bundesländer, as well as a less formal term for a sovereign state. France has very many "pays" that are officially recognized at some level, and are either natural regions, like the Pays de Bray, or reflect old political or economic entities, like the Pays de la Loire.
A version of "country" can be found in the modern French language as contrée, based on the word cuntrée in Old French, that is used similarly to the word "pays" to define non-state regions, but can also be used to describe a political state in some particular cases. The modern Italian contrada is a word with its meaning varying locally, but usually meaning a ward or similar small division of a town, or a village or hamlet in the countryside.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Countries:
A country is a region that is identified as a distinct national entity in political geography. A country may be an independent sovereign state or one that is occupied by another state, as a non-sovereign or formerly sovereign political division, or a geographic region associated with sets of previously independent or differently associated people with distinct political characteristics.
Regardless of the physical geography, in the modern internationally accepted legal definition as defined by the League of Nations in 1937 and reaffirmed by the United Nations in 1945, a resident of a country is subject to the independent exercise of legal jurisdiction.
Sometimes countries refers both to sovereign states and to other political entities, while other times it refers only to states. For example, the CIA World Factbook uses the word in its "Country name" field to refer to "a wide variety of dependencies, areas of special sovereignty, uninhabited islands, and other entities in addition to the traditional countries or independent states".
In English the word "Country" has increasingly become associated with political divisions, so that one sense, associated with the indefinite article – "a country" – through misuse and subsequent conflation is now a synonym for state, or a former sovereign state, in the sense of sovereign territory or "district, native land". Areas much smaller than a political state may be called by names such as the West Country in England, the Black Country (a heavily industrialized part of England), "Constable Country" (a part of East Anglia painted by John Constable), the "big country" (used in various contexts of the American West), "coal country" (used of parts of the US and elsewhere) and many other terms.
The equivalent terms in French and other Romance languages (pays and variants) have not carried the process of being identified with political sovereign states as far as the English "country", instead derived from, pagus, which designated the territory controlled by a medieval count, a title originally granted by the Roman Church.
In many European countries the words are used for sub-divisions of the national territory, as in the German Bundesländer, as well as a less formal term for a sovereign state. France has very many "pays" that are officially recognized at some level, and are either natural regions, like the Pays de Bray, or reflect old political or economic entities, like the Pays de la Loire.
A version of "country" can be found in the modern French language as contrée, based on the word cuntrée in Old French, that is used similarly to the word "pays" to define non-state regions, but can also be used to describe a political state in some particular cases. The modern Italian contrada is a word with its meaning varying locally, but usually meaning a ward or similar small division of a town, or a village or hamlet in the countryside.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Countries:
- Sovereignty status
- See also:
Military Alliances around the Globe, including a List
YouTube Video about the Cold War: Berlin
Pictured: a Map of the Two military alliances (NATO and Warsaw Pact) in Europe during the Cold War (Courtesy of SA 3.0)
Click here for a List of Military Alliances Since Biblical Times
A military alliance is an international agreement concerning national security, when the contracting parties promise to support each other in case of a crisis that has not been identified in advance.
Military alliances differ from coalitions, as coalitions are formed for a crisis that are already known.
Military alliances can be classified as defense pacts, non-aggression pacts and ententes.
Characteristics:
Military alliances are related to collective security systems but can differ in nature. An early 1950s memorandum from the United States Department of State explained the difference by saying, that historically alliances "were designed to advance the respective nationalistic interests of the parties, and provided for joint military action if one of the parties in pursuit of such objectives became involved in war".
While a collective security arrangement "is directed against no one; it is directed solely against aggression. It seeks not to influence any shifting 'balance of power' but to strengthen the 'balance of principle'".
The obvious motivation in states engaging in military alliances is to protect themselves against threats from other countries.
However states have also entered into alliances to improves ties with a particular nation or to manage conflict with a particular nation.
The nature of alliances, including their formation and cohesiveness (or lack thereof), is a subject of much academic study past and present, with the leading scholars generally considered to be Glenn H. Snyder and Stephen Walt.
Click here for European historiography
A military alliance is an international agreement concerning national security, when the contracting parties promise to support each other in case of a crisis that has not been identified in advance.
Military alliances differ from coalitions, as coalitions are formed for a crisis that are already known.
Military alliances can be classified as defense pacts, non-aggression pacts and ententes.
Characteristics:
Military alliances are related to collective security systems but can differ in nature. An early 1950s memorandum from the United States Department of State explained the difference by saying, that historically alliances "were designed to advance the respective nationalistic interests of the parties, and provided for joint military action if one of the parties in pursuit of such objectives became involved in war".
While a collective security arrangement "is directed against no one; it is directed solely against aggression. It seeks not to influence any shifting 'balance of power' but to strengthen the 'balance of principle'".
The obvious motivation in states engaging in military alliances is to protect themselves against threats from other countries.
However states have also entered into alliances to improves ties with a particular nation or to manage conflict with a particular nation.
The nature of alliances, including their formation and cohesiveness (or lack thereof), is a subject of much academic study past and present, with the leading scholars generally considered to be Glenn H. Snyder and Stephen Walt.
Click here for European historiography
History of Human Habitats and Population
YouTube Video: Early human habitat, recreated for first time, shows life was no picnic
Pictured: (L) Early Humans making fire inside their cave; (R) 1800'S Victorian House
Habitat and Population:
Further information: Human migration, Demography, and World population
Early human settlements were dependent on proximity to water and, depending on the lifestyle, other natural resources used for subsistence, such as populations of animal prey for hunting and arable land for growing crops and grazing livestock.
But humans have a great capacity for altering their habitats by means of technology, through the following means:
But human settlements continue to be vulnerable to natural disasters, especially those placed in hazardous locations and characterized by lack of quality of construction.
Deliberate habitat alteration is often done with the goals of increasing material wealth, increasing thermal comfort, improving the amount of food available, improving aesthetics, or improving ease of access to resources or other human settlements.
With the advent of large-scale trade and transport infrastructure, proximity to these resources has become unnecessary, and in many places, these factors are no longer a driving force behind the growth and decline of a population.
Nonetheless, the manner in which a habitat is altered is often a major determinant in population change. Technology has allowed humans to colonize six of the Earth's seven continents and adapt to virtually all climates. However the human population is not uniformly distributed on the Earth's surface, because the population density varies from one region to another and there are large areas almost completely uninhabited, like Antarctica.
Within the last century, humans have explored Antarctica, underwater environment, and outer space, although large-scale colonization of these environments is not yet feasible.
With a population of over seven billion, humans are among the most numerous of the large mammals. Most humans (61%) live in Asia. The remainder live in the Americas (14%), Africa (14%), Europe (11%), and Oceania (0.5%).
Human habitation within closed ecological systems in hostile environments, such as Antarctica and outer space, is expensive, typically limited in duration, and restricted to scientific, military, or industrial expeditions.
Life in space has been very sporadic, with no more than thirteen humans in space at any given time. Between 1969 and 1972, two humans at a time spent brief intervals on the Moon. As of September 2017, no other celestial body has been visited by humans, although there has been a continuous human presence in space since the launch of the initial crew to inhabit the International Space Station on October 31, 2000. However, other celestial bodies have been visited by human-made objects.
Since 1800, the human population has increased from one billion to over seven billion, In 2004, some 2.5 billion out of 6.3 billion people (39.7%) lived in urban areas. In February 2008, the U.N. estimated that half the world's population would live in urban areas by the end of the year. Problems for humans living in cities include various forms of pollution and crime, especially in inner city and suburban slums. Both overall population numbers and the proportion residing in cities are expected to increase significantly in the coming decades.
Humans have had a dramatic effect on the environment. Humans are apex predators, being rarely preyed upon by other species. Currently, through land development, combustion of fossil fuels, and pollution, humans are thought to be the main contributor to global climate change. If this continues at its current rate it is predicted that climate change will wipe out half of all plant and animal species over the next century.
See Also:
Further information: Human migration, Demography, and World population
Early human settlements were dependent on proximity to water and, depending on the lifestyle, other natural resources used for subsistence, such as populations of animal prey for hunting and arable land for growing crops and grazing livestock.
But humans have a great capacity for altering their habitats by means of technology, through the following means:
- irrigation,
- urban planning,
- construction,
- transport,
- manufacturing goods,
- deforestation,
- and desertification.
But human settlements continue to be vulnerable to natural disasters, especially those placed in hazardous locations and characterized by lack of quality of construction.
Deliberate habitat alteration is often done with the goals of increasing material wealth, increasing thermal comfort, improving the amount of food available, improving aesthetics, or improving ease of access to resources or other human settlements.
With the advent of large-scale trade and transport infrastructure, proximity to these resources has become unnecessary, and in many places, these factors are no longer a driving force behind the growth and decline of a population.
Nonetheless, the manner in which a habitat is altered is often a major determinant in population change. Technology has allowed humans to colonize six of the Earth's seven continents and adapt to virtually all climates. However the human population is not uniformly distributed on the Earth's surface, because the population density varies from one region to another and there are large areas almost completely uninhabited, like Antarctica.
Within the last century, humans have explored Antarctica, underwater environment, and outer space, although large-scale colonization of these environments is not yet feasible.
With a population of over seven billion, humans are among the most numerous of the large mammals. Most humans (61%) live in Asia. The remainder live in the Americas (14%), Africa (14%), Europe (11%), and Oceania (0.5%).
Human habitation within closed ecological systems in hostile environments, such as Antarctica and outer space, is expensive, typically limited in duration, and restricted to scientific, military, or industrial expeditions.
Life in space has been very sporadic, with no more than thirteen humans in space at any given time. Between 1969 and 1972, two humans at a time spent brief intervals on the Moon. As of September 2017, no other celestial body has been visited by humans, although there has been a continuous human presence in space since the launch of the initial crew to inhabit the International Space Station on October 31, 2000. However, other celestial bodies have been visited by human-made objects.
Since 1800, the human population has increased from one billion to over seven billion, In 2004, some 2.5 billion out of 6.3 billion people (39.7%) lived in urban areas. In February 2008, the U.N. estimated that half the world's population would live in urban areas by the end of the year. Problems for humans living in cities include various forms of pollution and crime, especially in inner city and suburban slums. Both overall population numbers and the proportion residing in cities are expected to increase significantly in the coming decades.
Humans have had a dramatic effect on the environment. Humans are apex predators, being rarely preyed upon by other species. Currently, through land development, combustion of fossil fuels, and pollution, humans are thought to be the main contributor to global climate change. If this continues at its current rate it is predicted that climate change will wipe out half of all plant and animal species over the next century.
See Also:
- City,
- Town,
- Nomad,
- Camping,
- Farm,
- House,
- Watercraft,
- Infrastructure,
- Architecture,
- Building,
- and Engineering
History of Mankind
YouTube Video: Mankind: the Story of All of Us
YouTube Video: Mankind: The Story of All of Us -- Birth of Farming | History
Pictured Below Inspiring Quotes by (Clockwise from Upper Left) John F. Kennedy, Helen Keller, Nelson Mandela, and Mark Twain
The history of the world is the history of humanity (or human history), as determined from archaeology, anthropology, genetics, linguistics, and other disciplines; and, for periods since the invention of writing, from recorded history and from secondary sources and studies.
Humanity's written history was preceded by its prehistory, beginning with the Palaeolithic Era ("Early Stone Age"), followed by the Neolithic Era ("New Stone Age"). The Neolithic saw the Agricultural Revolution begin, between 8000 and 5000 BCE, in the Near East's Fertile Crescent.
The Agricultural Revolution marked a fundamental change in history, with humans beginning the systematic husbandry of plants and animals. As agriculture advanced, most humans transitioned from a nomadic to a settled lifestyle as farmers in permanent settlements. The relative security and increased productivity provided by farming allowed communities to expand into increasingly larger units, fostered by advances in transportation.
Whether in prehistoric or historic times, people always had to be near reliable sources of potable water. Cities developed on river banks as early as 3000 BCE, when some of the first well-developed settlements arose in Mesopotamia, on the banks of Egypt's Nile River, in the Indus River valley, and along China's rivers.
As farming developed, grain agriculture became more sophisticated and prompted a division of labor to store food between growing seasons. Labor divisions led to the rise of a leisured upper class and the development of cities, which provided the foundation for civilization. The growing complexity of human societies necessitated systems of accounting and writing.
With civilizations flourishing, ancient history ("Antiquity," including the Classical Age, up to about 500 CE) saw the rise and fall of empires.
Post-classical history (the "Middle Ages," c. 500–1500 CE ) witnessed the rise of Christianity, the Islamic Golden Age (c. 750 CE – c. 1258 CE), and the early Italian Renaissance (from around 1300 CE).
The Early Modern Period, sometimes referred to as the "European Age", from about 1500 to 1800, included the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Discovery. The mid-15th-century invention of modern printing, employing movable type, revolutionized communication and facilitated ever wider dissemination of information, helping end the Middle Ages and ushering in the Scientific Revolution.
By the 18th century, the accumulation of knowledge and technology had reached a critical mass that brought about the Industrial Revolution and began the Late Modern Period, which starts around 1800 and includes the current day.
This scheme of historical periodization (dividing history into Antiquity, Post-Classical, Early Modern, and Late Modern periods) was developed for, and applies best to, the history of the Old World, particularly Europe and the Mediterranean.
Outside this region, including ancient China and ancient India, historical timelines unfolded differently. However, by the 18th century, due to extensive world trade and colonization, the histories of most civilizations had become substantially intertwined.
In the last quarter-millennium, the rates of growth of population, knowledge, technology, communications, commerce, weapons destructiveness, and environmental degradation have greatly accelerated, creating opportunities and perils that now confront the planet's human communities.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about History of Mankind:
Humanity's written history was preceded by its prehistory, beginning with the Palaeolithic Era ("Early Stone Age"), followed by the Neolithic Era ("New Stone Age"). The Neolithic saw the Agricultural Revolution begin, between 8000 and 5000 BCE, in the Near East's Fertile Crescent.
The Agricultural Revolution marked a fundamental change in history, with humans beginning the systematic husbandry of plants and animals. As agriculture advanced, most humans transitioned from a nomadic to a settled lifestyle as farmers in permanent settlements. The relative security and increased productivity provided by farming allowed communities to expand into increasingly larger units, fostered by advances in transportation.
Whether in prehistoric or historic times, people always had to be near reliable sources of potable water. Cities developed on river banks as early as 3000 BCE, when some of the first well-developed settlements arose in Mesopotamia, on the banks of Egypt's Nile River, in the Indus River valley, and along China's rivers.
As farming developed, grain agriculture became more sophisticated and prompted a division of labor to store food between growing seasons. Labor divisions led to the rise of a leisured upper class and the development of cities, which provided the foundation for civilization. The growing complexity of human societies necessitated systems of accounting and writing.
With civilizations flourishing, ancient history ("Antiquity," including the Classical Age, up to about 500 CE) saw the rise and fall of empires.
Post-classical history (the "Middle Ages," c. 500–1500 CE ) witnessed the rise of Christianity, the Islamic Golden Age (c. 750 CE – c. 1258 CE), and the early Italian Renaissance (from around 1300 CE).
The Early Modern Period, sometimes referred to as the "European Age", from about 1500 to 1800, included the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Discovery. The mid-15th-century invention of modern printing, employing movable type, revolutionized communication and facilitated ever wider dissemination of information, helping end the Middle Ages and ushering in the Scientific Revolution.
By the 18th century, the accumulation of knowledge and technology had reached a critical mass that brought about the Industrial Revolution and began the Late Modern Period, which starts around 1800 and includes the current day.
This scheme of historical periodization (dividing history into Antiquity, Post-Classical, Early Modern, and Late Modern periods) was developed for, and applies best to, the history of the Old World, particularly Europe and the Mediterranean.
Outside this region, including ancient China and ancient India, historical timelines unfolded differently. However, by the 18th century, due to extensive world trade and colonization, the histories of most civilizations had become substantially intertwined.
In the last quarter-millennium, the rates of growth of population, knowledge, technology, communications, commerce, weapons destructiveness, and environmental degradation have greatly accelerated, creating opportunities and perils that now confront the planet's human communities.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about History of Mankind:
- Prehistory
- Early humans
- Rise of civilization
- Ancient history
- Cradles of civilization
- Axial Age
- Regional empires
- Declines, falls and resurgence
- Post-classical history
- Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa
- Europe
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- South Asia
- East Asia
- Southeast Asia
- Oceania
- The Americas
- Modern history
- See also:
- Economic history of the world
- Historic recurrence
- Historiography
- List of archaeological periods
- List of millennia
- List of time periods
- Crash Course World History
- British Museum – A History of the World (archived).
- Pella, John & Erik Ringmar, History of International Relations Open Textbook Project, Cambridge: Open Book. (archived).
History of Clothing and Textiles over Time
YouTube Video: 100 Years of Clothing Fashion
YouTube Video: Cotton from Field to Fabric
Pictured: Different Clothing Styles from the Past to the Present
The history of clothing and textiles covers the availability and use of textiles and other materials and the development of technology for the making of clothing over human history.
The wearing of clothing is exclusively a human characteristic and is a feature of most human societies. It is not known when humans began wearing clothes but anthropologists believe that animal skins and vegetation were adapted into coverings as protection from cold, heat and rain, especially as humans migrated to new climates.
Clothing and textiles have been important in human history and reflect the materials available to a civilization as well as the technologies that had been mastered. The social significance of the finished product reflects their culture.
Textiles can be felt or spun fibers made into yarn and subsequently netted, looped, knit or woven to make fabrics, which appeared in the Middle East during the late stone age.
From the ancient times to the present day, methods of textile production have continually evolved, and the choices of textiles available have influenced how people carried their possessions, clothed themselves, and decorated their surroundings.
Sources available for the study of clothing and textiles include material remains discovered via archaeology; representation of textiles and their manufacture in art; and documents concerning the manufacture, acquisition, use, and trade of fabrics, tools, and finished garments. Scholarship of textile history, especially its earlier stages, is part of material culture studies.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the History of Clothing and Textiles:
The wearing of clothing is exclusively a human characteristic and is a feature of most human societies. It is not known when humans began wearing clothes but anthropologists believe that animal skins and vegetation were adapted into coverings as protection from cold, heat and rain, especially as humans migrated to new climates.
Clothing and textiles have been important in human history and reflect the materials available to a civilization as well as the technologies that had been mastered. The social significance of the finished product reflects their culture.
Textiles can be felt or spun fibers made into yarn and subsequently netted, looped, knit or woven to make fabrics, which appeared in the Middle East during the late stone age.
From the ancient times to the present day, methods of textile production have continually evolved, and the choices of textiles available have influenced how people carried their possessions, clothed themselves, and decorated their surroundings.
Sources available for the study of clothing and textiles include material remains discovered via archaeology; representation of textiles and their manufacture in art; and documents concerning the manufacture, acquisition, use, and trade of fabrics, tools, and finished garments. Scholarship of textile history, especially its earlier stages, is part of material culture studies.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the History of Clothing and Textiles:
- Prehistoric development
- Early adoption of apparel
- Ancient textiles and clothing
- Medieval clothing and textiles
- Renaissance and early modern period
- Mughal India
- Enlightenment and the Colonial period
- Industrial revolution
- Contemporary technology
- 21st century
- See also:
- History of fashion design
- History of hide materials
- History of silk
- History of Western fashion
- Otzi's clothing and shoes
- Timeline of clothing and textiles technology
- Spindle, Loom, and Needle – History of the Textile Industry
- Australian Museum of Clothing And Textiles Inc. at the Wayback Machine (archived 27 October 2009) – Why have a Museum of Clothing and Textiles?
- The drafting history of the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing
- American Women's History: A Research Guide Clothing and Fashion
- Historical Clothing/Fabric
- All Sewn Up: Millinery, Dressmaking, Clothing and Costume
- Gallery of English Medieval Clothing from 1906 by Dion Clayton Calthrop
Comparison of American vs. British EnglishPictured below: Examples of British vs. American English Usage for Transportation
The English language was first introduced to the Americas by British colonization, beginning in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The language also spread to numerous other parts of the world as a result of British trade and colonization and the spread of the former British Empire, which, by 1921, included about 470–570 million people, about a quarter of the world's population.
Written forms of British and American English as found in newspapers and textbooks vary little in their essential features, with only occasional noticeable differences.
Over the past 400 years, the forms of the language used in the Americas—especially in the United States—and that used in the United Kingdom have diverged in a few minor ways, leading to the versions now often referred to as American English and British English.
Differences between the two include pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary (lexis), spelling, punctuation, idioms, and formatting of dates and numbers. However, the differences in written and most spoken grammar structure tend to be much less than in other aspects of the language in terms of mutual intelligibility.
A few words have completely different meanings in the two versions or are even unknown or not used in one of the versions. One particular contribution towards formalizing these differences came from Noah Webster, who wrote the first American dictionary (published 1828) with the intention of showing that people in the United States spoke a different dialect from those spoken in the UK, much like a regional accent.
This divergence between American English and British English has provided opportunities for humorous comment: e.g. in fiction George Bernard Shaw says that the United States and United Kingdom are "two countries divided by a common language"; and Oscar Wilde says that "We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, the language" (The Canterville Ghost, 1888).
Henry Sweet incorrectly predicted in 1877 that within a century American English, Australian English and British English would be mutually unintelligible (A Handbook of Phonetics).
Perhaps increased worldwide communication through radio, television, the Internet and globalization has tended to reduce regional variation. This can lead to some variations becoming extinct (for instance the wireless being progressively superseded by the radio) or the acceptance of wide variations as "perfectly good English" everywhere.
Although spoken American and British English are generally mutually intelligible, there are occasional differences which might cause embarrassment—for example, in American English a rubber is usually interpreted as a condom rather than an eraser; and a British fanny refers to the female pubic area, while the American fanny refers to an ass (US) or an arse (UK).
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about American vs. British English:
Written forms of British and American English as found in newspapers and textbooks vary little in their essential features, with only occasional noticeable differences.
Over the past 400 years, the forms of the language used in the Americas—especially in the United States—and that used in the United Kingdom have diverged in a few minor ways, leading to the versions now often referred to as American English and British English.
Differences between the two include pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary (lexis), spelling, punctuation, idioms, and formatting of dates and numbers. However, the differences in written and most spoken grammar structure tend to be much less than in other aspects of the language in terms of mutual intelligibility.
A few words have completely different meanings in the two versions or are even unknown or not used in one of the versions. One particular contribution towards formalizing these differences came from Noah Webster, who wrote the first American dictionary (published 1828) with the intention of showing that people in the United States spoke a different dialect from those spoken in the UK, much like a regional accent.
This divergence between American English and British English has provided opportunities for humorous comment: e.g. in fiction George Bernard Shaw says that the United States and United Kingdom are "two countries divided by a common language"; and Oscar Wilde says that "We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, the language" (The Canterville Ghost, 1888).
Henry Sweet incorrectly predicted in 1877 that within a century American English, Australian English and British English would be mutually unintelligible (A Handbook of Phonetics).
Perhaps increased worldwide communication through radio, television, the Internet and globalization has tended to reduce regional variation. This can lead to some variations becoming extinct (for instance the wireless being progressively superseded by the radio) or the acceptance of wide variations as "perfectly good English" everywhere.
Although spoken American and British English are generally mutually intelligible, there are occasional differences which might cause embarrassment—for example, in American English a rubber is usually interpreted as a condom rather than an eraser; and a British fanny refers to the female pubic area, while the American fanny refers to an ass (US) or an arse (UK).
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about American vs. British English:
- Word derivation and compounds
- Vocabulary
- Style
- Writing
- Numerical expressions
- Demographics
- See also:
- Lists of words having different meanings in American and British English
- American and British English pronunciation differences
- American and British English spelling differences
- American and British English grammatical differences
- British and American keyboards
- List of dialects of the English language
- Word substitution list, by the Ubuntu English (United Kingdom) Translators team
- Map of US English dialects
- The Septic's Companion: A British Slang Dictionary
- Selected Vocabulary Differences Between British and American English at the Wayback Machine (archived 1 July 2016)
- British English vs. American English Slang Compared
Developed Countries
- YouTube Video: What is a Developed Economy?
- YouTube Video: Comparing Developing and Developed countries
- YouTube of the 10 Most Developed Countries (2010)
A developed country, industrialized country, more developed country, or more economically developed country (MEDC), is a sovereign state that has a developed economy and advanced technological infrastructure relative to other less industrialized nations.
Most commonly, the criteria for evaluating the degree of economic development are gross domestic product (GDP), gross national product (GNP), the per capita income, level of industrialization, amount of widespread infrastructure and general standard of living. Which criteria are to be used and which countries can be classified as being developed are subjects of debate.
Developed countries have generally more advanced post-industrial economies, meaning the service sector provides more wealth than the industrial sector. They are contrasted with developing countries, which are in the process of industrialisation or are pre-industrial and almost entirely agrarian, some of which might fall into the category of Least Developed Countries (Next).
As of 2015, advanced economies comprise 60.8% of global GDP based on nominal values and 42.9% of global GDP based on purchasing-power parity (PPP) according to the International Monetary Fund.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Developed Nations:
Most commonly, the criteria for evaluating the degree of economic development are gross domestic product (GDP), gross national product (GNP), the per capita income, level of industrialization, amount of widespread infrastructure and general standard of living. Which criteria are to be used and which countries can be classified as being developed are subjects of debate.
Developed countries have generally more advanced post-industrial economies, meaning the service sector provides more wealth than the industrial sector. They are contrasted with developing countries, which are in the process of industrialisation or are pre-industrial and almost entirely agrarian, some of which might fall into the category of Least Developed Countries (Next).
As of 2015, advanced economies comprise 60.8% of global GDP based on nominal values and 42.9% of global GDP based on purchasing-power parity (PPP) according to the International Monetary Fund.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Developed Nations:
- Similar terms
- Definition and criteria
- Human Development Index (HDI)
- High-income economies
- Development Assistance Committee members
- IMF advanced economies
- Paris Club members
- Comparative table (2020)
- See also:
- Digital divide
- First World privilege
- First World problem
- Fourth World
- Globalization
- Group of Seven
- Group of Eight
- Multinational corporation
- Second World
- Third World
- List of countries by wealth per adult
- Western Bloc
- IMF (advanced economies)
- The Economist (quality of life survey)
- The World Factbook (developed countries)
- United Nations Statistics Division (definition)
- List of countries, United Nations Statistics Division (developed regions)
- World Bank (high-income economies)
Developing Countries
- YouTube Video: Where Are The World’s Worst Slums?
- YouTube Video: The most toxic place on earth - Agbogbloshie
- YouTube Video: Third World vs First World Countries - What's The Difference?
A developing country (or a low and middle income country (LMIC), less developed country, less economically developed country (LEDC), or underdeveloped country) is a country with a less developed industrial base and a low Human Development Index (HDI) relative to other countries.
However, this definition is not universally agreed upon. There is also no clear agreement on which countries fit this category. A nation's GDP per capita compared with other nations can also be a reference point. In general, the United Nations accepts any country's claim of itself being "developing".
There are controversies over the use of this term which some feel it is perpetuating an outdated concept of "us" and "them". In 2015, the World Bank declared that the "developing / developed world categorization" is becoming less relevant and that they will phase out the use of that descriptor. Instead, their reports with present data aggregations for regions, and for income groups.
The term "developing" describes a currently observed situation and not a changing dynamic or expected direction of progress. Since the late 1990s, developing countries tended to demonstrate higher growth rates than developed countries. Developing countries include, in decreasing order of economic growth or size of the capital market:
Therefore, the least developed countries are the poorest of the developing countries.
Developing countries tend to have some characteristics in common. For example, with regards to health risks, they commonly have low levels of:
Often, there is also widespread poverty, low education levels, inadequate access to family planning services, corruption at all government levels and a lack of so-called good governance. Effects of global warming (climate change) are expected to impact developing countries more than wealthier countries, as most of them have a high "climate vulnerability".
The Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations were set up to help overcome many of these problems. Development aid or development cooperation is financial aid given by governments and other agencies to support the economic, environmental, social and political development of developing countries.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Developing Countries:
However, this definition is not universally agreed upon. There is also no clear agreement on which countries fit this category. A nation's GDP per capita compared with other nations can also be a reference point. In general, the United Nations accepts any country's claim of itself being "developing".
There are controversies over the use of this term which some feel it is perpetuating an outdated concept of "us" and "them". In 2015, the World Bank declared that the "developing / developed world categorization" is becoming less relevant and that they will phase out the use of that descriptor. Instead, their reports with present data aggregations for regions, and for income groups.
The term "developing" describes a currently observed situation and not a changing dynamic or expected direction of progress. Since the late 1990s, developing countries tended to demonstrate higher growth rates than developed countries. Developing countries include, in decreasing order of economic growth or size of the capital market:
Therefore, the least developed countries are the poorest of the developing countries.
Developing countries tend to have some characteristics in common. For example, with regards to health risks, they commonly have low levels of:
- access to safe drinking water,
- sanitation and hygiene;
- energy poverty;
- high levels of pollution (e.g.
- high proportion of people with tropical and infectious diseases (neglected tropical diseases);
- high number of road traffic accidents;
- and generally poor infrastructure.
Often, there is also widespread poverty, low education levels, inadequate access to family planning services, corruption at all government levels and a lack of so-called good governance. Effects of global warming (climate change) are expected to impact developing countries more than wealthier countries, as most of them have a high "climate vulnerability".
The Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations were set up to help overcome many of these problems. Development aid or development cooperation is financial aid given by governments and other agencies to support the economic, environmental, social and political development of developing countries.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Developing Countries:
Cradle of Civilization
- YouTube Video about The Cradle(s) of Civilization
- YouTube Video: 1177 B.C.: When Civilization Collapsed | Eric Cline
- YouTube Video: Cradles of Civilization - The First Cities l Lessons of Dr. David Neiman
The cradle of civilization is any location where civilization is understood to have independently emerged.
According to current thinking, there was no single "cradle" of civilization; instead, several cradles of civilization developed independently: the following are believed to be the oldest in the Old World:
The extent to which there was significant influence between the early civilizations of the Near East and the Indus Valley with the Chinese civilization of East Asia (Far East) is disputed.
Scholars accept that the Olmec civilization of Mesoamerica, which existed in modern-day Mexico, and the civilization in Caral-Supe, a region in modern-day Peru, rival in age the civilizations of the Old World and emerged independently of the Old World and of each other.
Scholars have defined civilization by using various criteria such as the use of writing, cities, a class-based society, agriculture, animal husbandry, public buildings, metallurgy, and monumental architecture.
The term cradle of civilization has frequently been applied to a variety of regions and cultures, in particular to the Ancient Near East during the Chalcolithic (see Ubaid period), which contained the Fertile Crescent, and to Ancient India, and Ancient China. The term has also been applied to ancient Anatolia, the Levant, and the Iranian plateau, and is used to refer to cultural predecessors such as Ancient Greece, which is widely considered the predecessor to Western civilization.
History of the idea:
The concept "cradle of civilization" is the subject of much debate. The figurative use of cradle to mean "the place or region in which anything is nurtured or sheltered in its earlier stage" is traced by the Oxford English Dictionary to Spenser (1590).
Charles Rollin's Ancient History (1734) has "Egypt that served at first as the cradle of the holy nation".
The phrase "cradle of civilization" plays a certain role in national mysticism. It has been used in Eastern as well as Western cultures, for instance, in Indian nationalism (In Search of the Cradle of Civilization 1995) and Taiwanese nationalism (Taiwan;— The Cradle of Civilization 2002).
The terms also appear in esoteric pseudohistory, such as the Urantia Book, claiming the title for "the second Eden", or the pseudoarchaeology related to Megalithic Britain (Civilization One 2004, Ancient Britain: The Cradle of Civilization 1921).
Rise of civilization:
Further information: Neolithic Revolution, Urban revolution, and Chalcolithic
The earliest signs of a process leading to sedentary culture can be seen in the Levant to as early as 12,000 BC, when the Natufian culture became sedentary; it evolved into an agricultural society by 10,000 BC.
The importance of water to safeguard an abundant and stable food supply, due to favourable conditions for hunting, fishing and gathering resources including cereals, provided an initial wide spectrum economy that triggered the creation of permanent villages.
The earliest proto-urban settlements with several thousand inhabitants emerged in the Neolithic. The first cities to house several tens of thousands were Memphis and Uruk, by the 31st century BC (see Historical urban community sizes).
Historic times are marked apart from prehistoric times when "records of the past begin to be kept for the benefit of future generations"—in written or oral form.
If the rise of civilization is taken to coincide with the development of writing out of proto-writing, the Near Eastern Chalcolithic, the transitional period between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age during the 4th millennium BC, and the development of proto-writing in Harappa in the Indus Valley of South Asia around 3300 BC are the earliest incidences, followed by Chinese proto-writing evolving into the oracle bone script, and again by the emergence of Mesoamerican writing systems from about 900 BC.
In the absence of written documents, most aspects of the rise of early civilizations are contained in archaeological assessments that document the development of formal institutions and the material culture. A "civilized" way of life is ultimately linked to conditions coming almost exclusively from intensive agriculture.
Gordon Childe defined the development of civilization as the result of two successive revolutions: the Neolithic Revolution, triggering the development of settled communities, and the Urban Revolution, which enhanced tendencies towards dense settlements, specialized occupational groups, social classes, exploitation of surpluses, monumental public buildings and writing.
Few of those conditions, however, are unchallenged by the records: dense cities were not attested in Egypt's Old Kingdom and cities had a dispersed population in the Maya area; the Incas lacked writing although they could keep records with Quipus which might also have had literary uses; and often monumental architecture preceded any indication of village settlement.
For instance, in present-day Louisiana, researchers have determined that cultures that were primarily nomadic organized over generations to build earthwork mounds at seasonal settlements as early as 3400 BC. Rather than a succession of events and preconditions, the rise of civilization could equally be hypothesized as an accelerated process that started with incipient agriculture and culminated in the Oriental Bronze Age.
Single or multiple cradles:
A traditional theory of the spread of civilization is that it began in the Fertile Crescent and spread out from there by influence. Scholars more generally now believe that civilizations arose independently at several locations in both hemispheres. They have observed that sociocultural developments occurred along different timeframes. "Sedentary" and "nomadic" communities continued to interact considerably; they were not strictly divided among widely different cultural groups.
The concept of a cradle of civilization has a focus where the inhabitants came to build cities, to create writing systems, to experiment in techniques for making pottery and using metals, to domesticate animals, and to develop complex social structures involving class systems.
Current scholarship generally identifies six sites where civilization emerged independently:
A question that intrigues scholars is why pristine civilizations rose when and where they did. The economies of all of the pristine civilizations depended upon agriculture, with the possible exception of the Andean coast civilization which may have initially relied as much or more on marine resources.
Jared Diamond postulates that the reason the Fertile Crescent was the earliest civilization was that large-seeded, easily-domesticable plants (wheat and barley, among others) and large domesticable animals (cattle, pigs, sheep, horses) were native to the region.
By contrast, it took thousands of years of selective breeding in Mesoamerica for maize to become productive enough to be a staple crop. Mesoamerica also lacked large domesticable animals. Llamas were the only large, domesticable animal in the Andes of South America. Llamas are large enough to be pack animals but not large enough to be ridden or as draft animals.
Australia lacked both easily domesticable plants and large animals.
Cradles of civilization:
Fertile Crescent:
Mesopotamia:
Main articles: History of Mesopotamia, History of Sumer, and Sumer
Around 10,200 BC the first fully developed Neolithic cultures belonging to the phases Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) and Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (7600 to 6000 BC) appeared in the Fertile Crescent and from there spread eastward and westward.
One of the most notable PPNA settlements is Jericho in the Levant region, thought to be the world's first town (settled around 9600 BC and fortified around 6800 BC).
In Mesopotamia, the convergence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers produced rich fertile soil and a supply of water for irrigation. The civilizations that emerged around these rivers are among the earliest known non-nomadic agrarian societies. It is because of this that the Fertile Crescent region, and Mesopotamia in particular, are often referred to as the cradle of civilization.
The period known as the Ubaid period (c. 6500 to 3800 BC) is the earliest known period on the alluvial plain, although it is likely earlier periods exist obscured under the alluvium. It was during the Ubaid period that the movement toward urbanization began.
Agriculture and animal husbandry were widely practiced in sedentary communities, particularly in Northern Mesopotamia, and intensive irrigated hydraulic agriculture began to be practiced in the south.
Around 6000 BC, Neolithic settlements appear all over Egypt. Studies based on morphological, genetic, and archaeological data have attributed these settlements to migrants from the Fertile Crescent in the Near East returning during the Egyptian and North African Neolithic Revolution and bringing agriculture to the region.
Tell el-'Oueili is the oldest Sumerian site settled during this period, around 5300 BC, and the city of Ur also first dates to the end of this period. In the south, the Ubaid period took place from around 6500 to 3800 BC, when it was replaced by the Uruk period.
Sumerian civilization coalesced in the subsequent Uruk period (4000 to 3100 BC). Named after the Sumerian city of Uruk, this period saw the emergence of urban life in Mesopotamia and, during its later phase, the gradual emergence of the cuneiform script.
Proto-writing in the region dates to around 3500 BC, with the earliest texts dating to 3300 BC; early cuneiform writing emerged in 3000 BC. It was also during this period that pottery painting declined as copper started to become popular, along with cylinder seals.
Sumerian cities during the Uruk period were probably theocratic and were most likely headed by a priest-king (ensi), assisted by a council of elders, including both men and women. It is quite possible that the later Sumerian pantheon was modeled upon this political structure.
Uruk trade networks started to expand to other parts of Mesopotamia and as far as North Caucasus, and strong signs of governmental organization and social stratification began to emerge leading to the Early Dynastic Period (c. 2900 BC).
The Jemdet Nasr period, which is generally dated from 3100 to 2900 BC and succeeds the Uruk period, is known as one of the formative stages in the development of the cuneiform script. The oldest clay tablets come from Uruk and date to the late fourth millennium BC, slightly earlier than the Jemdet Nasr Period.
By the time of the Jemdet Nasr Period, the script had already undergone a number of significant changes. It originally consisted of pictographs, but by the time of the Jemdet Nasr Period it was already adopting simpler and more abstract designs. It is also during this period that the script acquired its iconic wedge-shaped appearance.
After the Early Dynastic period begins, there was a shift in control of the city-states from the temple establishment headed by council of elders led by a priestly "En" (a male figure when it was a temple for a goddess, or a female figure when headed by a male god) towards a more secular Lugal (Lu = man, Gal = great) and includes such legendary patriarchal figures as Enmerkar, Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh—who are supposed to have reigned shortly before the historic record opens c. 2700 BC, when the now deciphered syllabic writing started to develop from the early pictograms.
The center of Sumerian culture remained in southern Mesopotamia, even though rulers soon began expanding into neighboring areas, and neighboring Semitic groups adopted much of Sumerian culture for their own. The earliest ziggurats began near the end of the Early Dynastic Period, although architectural precursors in the form of raised platforms date back to the Ubaid period.
The well-known Sumerian King List dates to the early second millennium BC. It consists of a succession of royal dynasties from different Sumerian cities, ranging back into the Early Dynastic Period. Each dynasty rises to prominence and dominates the region, only to be replaced by the next. The document was used by later Mesopotamian kings to legitimize their rule. While some of the information in the list can be checked against other texts such as economic documents, much of it is probably purely fictional, and its use as a historical document is limited.
Eannatum, the Sumerian king of Lagash, established one of the first verifiable empires in history in 2500 BC. The neighboring Elam, in modern Iran, was also part of the early urbanization during the Chalcolithic period. Elamite states were among the leading political forces of the Ancient Near East.
The emergence of Elamite written records from around 3000 BC also parallels Sumerian history, where slightly earlier records have been found. During the 3rd millennium BC, there developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and the Akkadians.
Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language somewhere between the 3rd and the 2nd millennia BC. The Semitic-speaking Akkadian empire emerged around 2350 BC under Sargon the Great. The Akkadian Empire reached its political peak between the 24th and 22nd centuries BC.
Under Sargon and his successors, the Akkadian language was briefly imposed on neighboring conquered states such as Elam and Gutium. After the fall of the Akkadian Empire and the overthrow of the Gutians, there was a brief reassertion of Sumerian dominance in Mesopotamia under the Third Dynasty of Ur.
After the final collapse of Sumerian hegemony in Mesopotamia around 2004 BC, the Semitic Akkadian people of Mesopotamia eventually coalesced into two major Akkadian-speaking nations: Assyria in the north, and, a few centuries later, Babylonia in the south.
Ancient Egypt:
Main articles: History of ancient Egypt and Ancient Egypt
The developed Neolithic cultures belonging to the phases Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (10,200 BC) and Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (7600 to 6000 BC) appeared in the fertile crescent and from there spread eastwards and westwards. Contemporaneously, a grain-grinding culture using the earliest type of sickle blades had replaced the culture of hunters, fishers, and gathering people using stone tools along the Nile.
Geological evidence and computer climate modeling studies also suggest that natural climate changes around 8000 BC began to desiccate the extensive pastoral lands of northern Africa, eventually forming the Sahara. Continued desiccation forced the early ancestors of the Egyptians to settle around the Nile more permanently and to adopt a more sedentary lifestyle. The oldest fully developed neolithic culture in Egypt is Fayum A culture that began around 5500 B.C.
By about 5500 BC, small tribes living in the Nile valley had developed into a series of inter-related cultures as far south as Sudan, demonstrating firm control of agriculture and animal husbandry, and identifiable by their pottery and personal items, such as combs, bracelets, and beads.
The largest of these early cultures in upper Southern Egypt was the Badari, which probably originated in the Western Desert; it was known for its high quality ceramics, stone tools, and use of copper. The oldest known domesticated bovine in Africa are from Fayum dating to around 4400 BC.
The Badari cultures was followed by the Naqada culture, which brought a number of technological improvements. As early as the first Naqada Period, Amratia, Egyptians imported obsidian from Ethiopia, used to shape blades and other objects from flakes. By 3300 BC, just before the first Egyptian dynasty, Egypt was divided into two kingdoms, known as Upper Egypt to the south, and Lower Egypt to the north.
Egyptian civilization begins during the second phase of the Naqda culture, known as the Gerzeh period, around 3500 BC and coalesces with the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt around 3150 BC. Farming produced the vast majority of food; with increased food supplies, the populace adopted a much more sedentary lifestyle, and the larger settlements grew to cities of about 5,000 residents.
It was in this time that the city dwellers started using mud brick to build their cities, and the use of the arch and recessed walls for decorative effect became popular. Copper instead of stone was increasingly used to make tools and weaponry. Symbols on Gerzean pottery also resemble nascent Egyptian hieroglyphs. Early evidence also exists of contact with the Near East, particularly Canaan and the Byblos coast, during this time.
Concurrent with these cultural advances, a process of unification of the societies and towns of the upper Nile River, or Upper Egypt, occurred. At the same time the societies of the Nile Delta, or Lower Egypt, also underwent a unification process. During his reign in Upper Egypt, King Narmer defeated his enemies on the Delta and merged both the Kingdom of Upper and Lower Egypt under his single rule.
The Early Dynastic Period of Egypt immediately followed the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt. It is generally taken to include the First and Second Dynasties, lasting from the Naqada III archaeological period until about the beginning of the Old Kingdom, c. 2686 BC. With the First Dynasty, the capital moved from Thinis to Memphis with a unified Egypt ruled by a god-king.
The hallmarks of ancient Egyptian civilization, such as art, architecture and many aspects of religion, took shape during the Early Dynastic period. The strong institution of kingship developed by the pharaohs served to legitimize state control over the land, labour, and resources that were essential to the survival and growth of ancient Egyptian civilization.
Major advances in architecture, art, and technology were made during the subsequent Old Kingdom, fueled by the increased agricultural productivity and resulting population, made possible by a well-developed central administration. Some of ancient Egypt's crowning achievements, the Giza pyramids and Great Sphinx, were constructed during the Old Kingdom.
Under the direction of the vizier, state officials collected taxes, coordinated irrigation projects to improve crop yield, drafted peasants to work on construction projects, and established a justice system to maintain peace and order. Along with the rising importance of a central administration there arose a new class of educated scribes and officials who were granted estates by the pharaoh in payment for their services.
Pharaohs also made land grants to their mortuary cults and local temples, to ensure that these institutions had the resources to worship the pharaoh after his death. Scholars believe that five centuries of these practices slowly eroded the economic power of the pharaoh, and that the economy could no longer afford to support a large centralized administration.
As the power of the pharaoh diminished, regional governors called nomarchs began to challenge the supremacy of the pharaoh. This, coupled with severe droughts between 2200 and 2150 BC, is assumed to have caused the country to enter the 140-year period of famine and strife known as the First Intermediate Period.
Ancient India:
Main articles:
One of the earliest Neolithic sites in the Indian subcontinent is Bhirrana along the ancient Ghaggar-Hakra riverine system in the present day state of Haryana in India, dating to around 7600 BC. Other early sites include Lahuradewa in the Middle Ganges region and Jhusi near the confluence of Ganges and Yamuna rivers, both dating to around 7000 BC.
The aceramic Neolithic at Mehrgarh in present day Pakistan lasts from 7000 to 5500 BC, with the ceramic Neolithic at Mehrgarh lasting up to 3300 BC; blending into the Early Bronze Age. Mehrgarh is one of the earliest sites with evidence of farming and herding in the Indian subcontinent.
It is likely that the culture centered around Mehrgarh migrated into the Indus Valley in present day Pakistan and became the Indus Valley Civilisation. The earliest fortified town in the region is found at Rehman Dheri, dated 4000 BC in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa close to River Zhob Valley in present day Pakistan .
Other fortified towns found to date are at Amri (3600–3300 BC), Kot Diji in Sindh, and at Kalibangan (3000 BC) at the Hakra River.
The Indus Valley Civilisation starts around 3300 BC with what is referred to as the Early Harappan Phase (3300 to 2600 BC). The earliest examples of the Indus script date to this period, as well as the emergence of citadels representing centralised authority and an increasingly urban quality of life.
Trade networks linked this culture with related regional cultures and distant sources of raw materials, including lapis lazuli and other materials for bead-making. By this time, villagers had domesticated numerous crops, including peas, sesame seeds, dates, and cotton, as well as animals, including the water buffalo.
2600 BC marks the Mature Harappan Phase during which Early Harappan communities turned into large urban centres including Harappa, Dholavira, Mohenjo-Daro, Lothal, Rupar, and Rakhigarhi, and more than 1,000 towns and villages, often of relatively small size.
Mature Harappans evolved new techniques in metallurgy and produced copper, bronze, lead, and tin and displayed advanced levels of engineering. As seen in Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and the recently partially excavated Rakhigarhi, this urban plan included the world's first known urban sanitation systems: see hydraulic engineering of the Indus Valley Civilisation.
Within the city, individual homes or groups of homes obtained water from wells. From a room that appears to have been set aside for bathing, waste water was directed to covered drains, which lined the major streets. Houses opened only to inner courtyards and smaller lanes. The house-building in some villages in the region still resembles in some respects the house-building of the Harappans.
The advanced architecture of the Harappans is shown by their impressive dockyards, granaries, warehouses, brick platforms, and protective walls. The massive walls of Indus cities most likely protected the Harappans from floods and may have dissuaded military conflicts.
The people of the Indus Civilisation achieved great accuracy in measuring length, mass, and time. They were among the first to develop a system of uniform weights and measures. A comparison of available objects indicates large scale variation across the Indus territories.
Their smallest division, which is marked on an ivory scale found in Lothal in Gujarat, was approximately 1.704 mm, the smallest division ever recorded on a scale of the Bronze Age. Harappan engineers followed the decimal division of measurement for all practical purposes, including the measurement of mass as revealed by their hexahedron weights.
These chert weights were in a ratio of 5:2:1 with weights of 0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, and 500 units, with each unit weighing approximately 28 grams, similar to the English Imperial ounce or Greek uncia, and smaller objects were weighed in similar ratios with the units of 0.871. However, as in other cultures, actual weights were not uniform throughout the area. The weights and measures later used in Kautilya's Arthashastra (4th century BC) are the same as those used in Lothal.
Around 1800 BC, signs of a gradual decline began to emerge, and by around 1700 BC most of the cities had been abandoned. Suggested contributory causes for the localisation of the IVC include changes in the course of the river, and climate change that is also signalled for the neighbouring areas of the Middle East.
As of 2016 many scholars believe that drought led to a decline in trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia contributing to the collapse of the Indus Civilisation. The Ghaggar-Hakra system was rain-fed, and water-supply depended on the monsoons. The Indus Valley climate grew significantly cooler and drier from about 1800 BC, linked to a general weakening of the monsoon at that time.
The Indian monsoon declined and aridity increased, with the Ghaggar-Hakra retracting its reach towards the foothills of the Himalaya, leading to erratic and less extensive floods that made inundation agriculture less sustainable. Aridification reduced the water supply enough to cause the civilisation's demise, and to scatter its population eastward. As the monsoons kept shifting south, the floods grew too erratic for sustainable agricultural activities. The residents then migrated away into smaller communities.
However trade with the old cities did not flourish. The small surplus produced in these small communities did not allow development of trade, and the cities died out. The Indo-Aryan peoples migrated into the Indus River Valley during this period and began the Vedic age of India. The Indus Valley Civilisation did not disappear suddenly and many elements of the civilization continued in later Indian subcontinent and Vedic cultures.
Ancient China:
Main articles: History of China, Xia dynasty, and Erlitou culture
Drawing on archaeology, geology and anthropology, modern scholars do not see the origins of the Chinese civilization or history as a linear story but rather the history of the interactions of different and distinct cultures and ethnic groups that influenced each other's development.
The specific cultural regions that developed Chinese civilization were the Yellow River civilization, the Yangtze civilization, and Liao civilization. Early evidence for Chinese millet agriculture is dated to around 7000 BC, with the earliest evidence of cultivated rice found at Chengtoushan near the Yangtze River, dated to 6500 BC.
Chengtoushan may also be the site of the first walled city in China. By the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, the Yellow River valley began to establish itself as a center of the Peiligang culture, which flourished from 7000 to 5000 BC, with evidence of agriculture, constructed buildings, pottery, and burial of the dead.
With agriculture came increased population, the ability to store and redistribute crops, and the potential to support specialist craftsmen and administrators. Its most prominent site is Jiahu.
Some scholars have suggested that the Jiahu symbols (6600 BC) are the earliest form of proto-writing in China. However, it is likely that they should not be understood as writing itself, but as features of a lengthy period of sign-use, which led eventually to a fully-fledged system of writing. Archaeologists believe that the Peiligang culture was egalitarian, with little political organization.
It eventually evolved into the Yangshao culture (5000 to 3000 BC), and their stone tools were polished and highly specialized. They may also have practiced an early form of silkworm cultivation. The main food of the Yangshao people was millet, with some sites using foxtail millet and others broom-corn millet, though some evidence of rice has been found.
The exact nature of Yangshao agriculture, small-scale slash-and-burn cultivation versus intensive agriculture in permanent fields, is currently a matter of debate. Once the soil was exhausted, residents picked up their belongings, moved to new lands, and constructed new villages.
However, Middle Yangshao settlements such as Jiangzhi contain raised-floor buildings that may have been used for the storage of surplus grains. Grinding stones for making flour were also found.
Later, Yangshao culture was superseded by the Longshan culture, which was also centered on the Yellow River from about 3000 to 1900 BC, its most prominent site being Taosi. The population expanded dramatically during the 3rd millennium BC, with many settlements having rammed earth walls. It decreased in most areas around 2000 BC until the central area evolved into the Bronze Age Erlitou culture.
The earliest bronze artifacts have been found in the Majiayao culture site (3100 to 2700 BC).
Chinese civilization begins during the second phase of the Erlitou period (1900 to 1500 BC), with Erlitou considered the first state level society of East Asia. There is considerable debate whether Erlitou sites correlate to the semi-legendary Xia dynasty. The Xia dynasty (2070 to 1600 BC) is the first dynasty to be described in ancient Chinese historical records such as the Bamboo Annals, first published more than a millennium later during the Western Zhou period.
Although Xia is an important element in Chinese historiography, there is to date no contemporary written evidence to corroborate the dynasty. Erlitou saw an increase in bronze metallurgy and urbanization and was a rapidly growing regional center with palatial complexes that provide evidence for social stratification.
The Erlitou civilization is divided into four phases, each of roughly 50 years. During Phase I, covering 100 hectares (250 acres), Erlitou was a rapidly growing regional center with estimated population of several thousand but not yet an urban civilization or capital.
Urbanization began in Phase II, expanding to 300 ha (740 acres) with a population around 11,000. A palace area of 12 ha (30 acres) was demarcated by four roads. It contained the 150x50 m Palace 3, composed of three courtyards along a 150-meter axis, and Palace 5. A bronze foundry was established to the south of the palatial complex that was controlled by the elite who lived in palaces.
The city reached its peak in Phase III, and may have had a population of around 24,000. The palatial complex was surrounded by a two-meter-thick rammed-earth wall, and Palaces 1, 7, 8, 9 were built. The earthwork volume of rammed earth for the base of largest Palace 1 is 20,000 m³ at least. Palaces 3 and 5 were abandoned and replaced by 4,200-square-meter (45,000 sq ft) Palace 2 and Palace 4.
In Phase IV, the population decreased to around 20,000, but building continued. Palace 6 was built as an extension of Palace 2, and Palaces 10 and 11 were built. Phase IV overlaps with the Lower phase of the Erligang culture (1600–1450 BC).
Around 1600 to 1560 BC, about 6 km northeast of Erlitou, a culturally Eligang walled city was built at Yanshi, which coincides with an increase in production of arrowheads at Erlitou. This situation might indicate that the Yanshi city was competing for power and dominance with Erlitou.
Production of bronzes and other elite goods ceased at the end of Phase IV, at the same time as the Erligang city of Zhengzhou was established 85 km (53 mi) to the east. There is no evidence of destruction by fire or war, but, during the Upper Erligang phase (1450–1300 BC), all the palaces were abandoned, and Erlitou was reduced to a village of 30 ha (74 acres).
The earliest traditional Chinese dynasty for which there is both archeological and written evidence is the Shang dynasty (1600 to 1046 BC). Shang sites have yielded the earliest known body of Chinese writing, the oracle bone script, mostly divinations inscribed on bones. These inscriptions provide critical insight into many topics from the politics, economy, and religious practices to the art and medicine of this early stage of Chinese civilization.
Some historians argue that Erlitou should be considered an early phase of the Shang dynasty. The U.S. National Gallery of Art defines the Chinese Bronze Age as the period between about 2000 and 771 BC; a period that begins with the Erlitou culture and ends abruptly with the disintegration of Western Zhou rule. The Sanxingdui culture is another Chinese Bronze Age society, contemporaneous to the Shang dynasty, however they developed a different method of bronze-making from the Shang.
Ancient Andes:
Main article: Norte Chico civilization
The earliest evidence of agriculture in the Andean region dates to around 9000 BC in Ecuador at sites of the Las Vegas Culture. The bottle gourd may have been the first plant cultivated. The oldest evidence of canal irrigation in South America dates to 4700 to 2500 BC in the Zaña Valley of northern Peru. The earliest urban settlements of the Andes, as well as North and South America, are dated to 3500 BC at Huaricanga, in the Fortaleza area, and Sechin Bajo near the Sechin River. Both sites are in Peru.
The Norte Chico civilization proper is understood to have emerged around 3200 BC, as it is at that point that large-scale human settlement and communal construction across multiple sites becomes clearly apparent. Since the early 21st century, it has been established as the oldest known civilization in the Americas.
The civilization flourished near the Pacific coast in the valleys of three small rivers, the Fortaleza, the Pativilca, and the Supe. These river valleys each have large clusters of sites.
Further south, there are several associated sites along the Huaura River. Notable settlements include the cities of Caral, the largest and most complex Preceramic site, and Aspero.
Norte Chico sites are known for their density of large sites with immense architecture. Haas argues that the density of sites in such a small area is globally unique for a nascent civilization. During the third millennium BC, Norte Chico may have been the most densely populated area of the world (excepting, possibly, northern China). The Supe, Pativilca, Fortaleza, and Huaura River valleys each have several related sites.
Norte Chico is unusual in that it completely lacked ceramics and apparently had almost no visual art. Nevertheless, the civilization exhibited impressive architectural feats, including large earthwork platform mounds and sunken circular plazas, and an advanced textile industry. The platform mounds, as well as large stone warehouses, provide evidence for a stratified society and a centralized authority necessary to distribute resources such as cotton.
However, there is no evidence of warfare or defensive structures during this period. Originally, it was theorized that, unlike other early civilizations, Norte Chico developed by relying on maritime food sources in place of a staple cereal. This hypothesis, the Maritime Foundation of Andean Civilization, is still hotly debated; however, most researches now agree that agriculture played a central role in the civilization's development while still acknowledging a strong supplemental reliance on maritime proteins.
The Norte Chico chiefdoms were "...almost certainly theocratic, though not brutally so," according to Mann. Construction areas show possible evidence of feasting, which would have included music and likely alcohol, suggesting an elite able to both mobilize and reward the population.
The degree of centralized authority is difficult to ascertain, but architectural construction patterns are indicative of an elite that, at least in certain places at certain times, wielded considerable power: while some of the monumental architecture was constructed incrementally, other buildings, such as the two main platform mounds at Caral, appear to have been constructed in one or two intense construction phases.
As further evidence of centralized control, Haas points to remains of large stone warehouses found at Upaca, on the Pativilca, as emblematic of authorities able to control vital resources such as cotton. Economic authority would have rested on the control of cotton and edible plants and associated trade relationships, with power centered on the inland sites.
Haas tentatively suggests that the scope of this economic power base may have extended widely: there are only two confirmed shore sites in the Norte Chico (Aspero and Bandurria) and possibly two more, but cotton fishing nets and domesticated plants have been found up and down the Peruvian coast. It is possible that the major inland centers of Norte Chico were at the center of a broad regional trade network centered on these resources.
Discover magazine, citing Shady, suggests a rich and varied trade life: "[Caral] exported its own products and those of Aspero to distant communities in exchange for exotic imports: Spondylus shells from the coast of Ecuador, rich dyes from the Andean highlands, hallucinogenic snuff from the Amazon." (Given the still limited extent of Norte Chico research, such claims should be treated circumspectly.)
Other reports on Shady's work indicate Caral traded with communities in the Andes and in the jungles of the Amazon basin on the opposite side of the Andes.
Leaders' ideological power was based on apparent access to deities and the supernatural. Evidence regarding Norte Chico religion is limited: an image of the Staff God, a leering figure with a hood and fangs, has been found on a gourd dated to 2250 BC.
The Staff God is a major deity of later Andean cultures, and Winifred Creamer suggests the find points to worship of common symbols of gods. As with much other research at Norte Chico, the nature and significance of the find has been disputed by other researchers.
The act of architectural construction and maintenance may also have been a spiritual or religious experience: a process of communal exaltation and ceremony. Shady has called Caral "the sacred city" (la ciudad sagrada): socio-economic and political focus was on the temples, which were periodically remodeled, with major burnt offerings associated with the remodeling.
The discovery of quipu, string-based recording devices, at Caral can be understood as a form of "proto-writing" at Norte Chico. However, the exact use of quipu in this and later Andean cultures has been widely debated. The presence of quipu and the commonality of religious symbols suggests a cultural link between Norte Chico and later Andean cultures.
Circa 1800 BC, the Norte Chico civilization began to decline, with more powerful centers appearing to the south and north along the coast and to the east inside the belt of the Andes. Pottery eventually developed in the Amazon Basin and spread to the Andean culture region around 2000 BC.
The next major civilization to arise in the Andes would be the Chavín culture at Chavín de Huantar, located in the Andean highlands of the present-day Ancash Region. It is believed to have been built around 900 BC and was the religious and political center of the Chavín people.
Mesoamerica:
Main articles: Mesoamerican chronology and Olmec civilization
Maize is believed to have been first domesticated in southern Mexico about 7000 BC. The Coxcatlan caves in the Valley of Tehuacán provide evidence for agriculture in components dated between 5000 and 3400 BC.
Similarly, sites such as Sipacate in Guatemala provide maize pollen samples dating to 3500 BC. Around 1900 BC, the Mokaya domesticated one of the dozen species of cacao. A Mokaya archaeological site provides evidence of cacao beverages dating to this time. The Mokaya are also thought to have been among the first cultures in Mesoamerica to develop a hierarchical society. What would become the Olmec civilization had its roots in early farming cultures of Tabasco, which began around 5100 to 4600 BC.
The emergence of the Olmec civilization has traditionally been dated to around 1600 to 1500 BC. Olmec features first emerged in the city of San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, fully coalescing around 1400 BC. The rise of civilization was assisted by the local ecology of well-watered alluvial soil, as well as by the transportation network provided by the Coatzacoalcos River basin.
This environment encouraged a densely concentrated population, which in turn triggered the rise of an elite class and an associated demand for the production of the symbolic and sophisticated luxury artifacts that define Olmec culture. Many of these luxury artifacts were made from materials such as jade, obsidian, and magnetite, which came from distant locations and suggest that early Olmec elites had access to an extensive trading network in Mesoamerica.
The aspect of Olmec culture perhaps most familiar today is their artwork, particularly the Olmec colossal heads. San Lorenzo was situated in the midst of a large agricultural area. San Lorenzo seems to have been largely a ceremonial site, a town without city walls, centered in the midst of a widespread medium-to-large agricultural population.
The ceremonial center and attendant buildings could have housed 5,500 while the entire area, including hinterlands, could have reached 13,000. It is thought that while San Lorenzo controlled much or all of the Coatzacoalcos basin, areas to the east (such as the area where La Venta would rise to prominence) and north-northwest (such as the Tuxtla Mountains) were home to independent polities.
San Lorenzo was all but abandoned around 900 BC at about the same time that La Venta rose to prominence. A wholesale destruction of many San Lorenzo monuments also occurred circa 950 BC, which may indicate an internal uprising or, less likely, an invasion.
The latest thinking, however, is that environmental changes may have been responsible for this shift in Olmec centers, with certain important rivers changing course.
La Venta became the cultural capital of the Olmec concentration in the region until its abandonment around 400 BC; constructing monumental architectural achievements such as the Great Pyramid of La Venta. It contained a "concentration of power", as reflected by the sheer enormity of the architecture and the extreme value of the artifacts uncovered.
La Venta is perhaps the largest Olmec city and it was controlled and expanded by an extremely complex hierarchical system with a king, as the ruler and the elites below him. Priests had power and influence over life and death and likely great political sway as well.
Unfortunately, not much is known about the political or social structure of the Olmec, though new dating techniques might, at some point, reveal more information about this elusive culture. It is possible that the signs of status exist in the artifacts recovered at the site such as depictions of feathered headdresses or of individuals wearing a mirror on their chest or forehead.
"High-status objects were a significant source of power in the La Venta polity political power, economic power, and ideological power. They were tools used by the elite to enhance and maintain rights to rulership".
It has been estimated that La Venta would need to be supported by a population of at least 18,000 people during its principal occupation. To add to the mystique of La Venta, the alluvial soil did not preserve skeletal remains, so it is difficult to observe differences in burials.
However, colossal heads provide proof that the elite had some control over the lower classes, as their construction would have been extremely labor-intensive. "Other features similarly indicate that many laborers were involved". In addition, excavations over the years have discovered that different parts of the site were likely reserved for elites and other parts for non-elites. This segregation of the city indicates that there must have been social classes and therefore social inequality.
The exact cause of the decline of the Olmec culture is uncertain. Between 400 and 350 BC, the population in the eastern half of the Olmec heartland dropped precipitously. This depopulation was probably the result of serious environmental changes that rendered the region unsuited for large groups of farmers, in particular changes to the riverine environment that the Olmec depended upon for agriculture, hunting and gathering, and transportation.
These changes may have been triggered by tectonic upheavals or subsidence, or the silting up of rivers due to agricultural practices. Within a few hundred years of the abandonment of the last Olmec cities, successor cultures became firmly established. The Tres Zapotes site, on the western edge of the Olmec heartland, continued to be occupied well past 400 BC, but without the hallmarks of the Olmec culture. This post-Olmec culture, often labeled Epi-Olmec, has features similar to those found at Izapa, some 550 km (330 miles) to the southeast.
The Olmecs are sometimes referred to as the mother culture of Mesoamerica, as they were the first Mesoamerican civilization and laid many of the foundations for the civilizations that followed. However, the causes and degree of Olmec influences on Mesoamerican cultures has been a subject of debate over many decades.
Practices introduced by the Olmec include ritual bloodletting and the Mesoamerican ballgame; hallmarks of subsequent Mesoamerican societies such as the Maya and Aztec. Although the Mesoamerican writing system would fully develop later, early Olmec ceramics show representations that may be interpreted as codices.
Cradle of Western civilization:
Main articles below:
There is academic consensus that Classical Greece was the seminal culture that provided the foundation of modern Western culture, democracy, art, theatre, philosophy, and science. For this reason it is known as the cradle of Western Civilization.
Along with Greece, Rome has sometimes been described as a birthplace or as the cradle of Western Civilization because of the role the city had in politics, republicanism, law, architecture, warfare and Western Christianity.
Timeline:
The following timeline shows a timeline of cultures, with the approximate dates of the emergence of civilization (as discussed in the article) in the featured areas, the primary cultures associated with these early civilizations.
It is important to note that the timeline is not indicative of the beginning of human habitation, the start of a specific ethnic group, or the development of Neolithic cultures in the area – any of which often occurred significantly earlier than the emergence of civilization proper.
In the case of the Indus Valley Civilization, this was followed by a period of de-urbanization and regionalisation, and the co-existence of indigenous local agricultural cultures and the pastoral Indo-Aryans, who came from Central Asia.
According to current thinking, there was no single "cradle" of civilization; instead, several cradles of civilization developed independently: the following are believed to be the oldest in the Old World:
The extent to which there was significant influence between the early civilizations of the Near East and the Indus Valley with the Chinese civilization of East Asia (Far East) is disputed.
Scholars accept that the Olmec civilization of Mesoamerica, which existed in modern-day Mexico, and the civilization in Caral-Supe, a region in modern-day Peru, rival in age the civilizations of the Old World and emerged independently of the Old World and of each other.
Scholars have defined civilization by using various criteria such as the use of writing, cities, a class-based society, agriculture, animal husbandry, public buildings, metallurgy, and monumental architecture.
The term cradle of civilization has frequently been applied to a variety of regions and cultures, in particular to the Ancient Near East during the Chalcolithic (see Ubaid period), which contained the Fertile Crescent, and to Ancient India, and Ancient China. The term has also been applied to ancient Anatolia, the Levant, and the Iranian plateau, and is used to refer to cultural predecessors such as Ancient Greece, which is widely considered the predecessor to Western civilization.
History of the idea:
The concept "cradle of civilization" is the subject of much debate. The figurative use of cradle to mean "the place or region in which anything is nurtured or sheltered in its earlier stage" is traced by the Oxford English Dictionary to Spenser (1590).
Charles Rollin's Ancient History (1734) has "Egypt that served at first as the cradle of the holy nation".
The phrase "cradle of civilization" plays a certain role in national mysticism. It has been used in Eastern as well as Western cultures, for instance, in Indian nationalism (In Search of the Cradle of Civilization 1995) and Taiwanese nationalism (Taiwan;— The Cradle of Civilization 2002).
The terms also appear in esoteric pseudohistory, such as the Urantia Book, claiming the title for "the second Eden", or the pseudoarchaeology related to Megalithic Britain (Civilization One 2004, Ancient Britain: The Cradle of Civilization 1921).
Rise of civilization:
Further information: Neolithic Revolution, Urban revolution, and Chalcolithic
The earliest signs of a process leading to sedentary culture can be seen in the Levant to as early as 12,000 BC, when the Natufian culture became sedentary; it evolved into an agricultural society by 10,000 BC.
The importance of water to safeguard an abundant and stable food supply, due to favourable conditions for hunting, fishing and gathering resources including cereals, provided an initial wide spectrum economy that triggered the creation of permanent villages.
The earliest proto-urban settlements with several thousand inhabitants emerged in the Neolithic. The first cities to house several tens of thousands were Memphis and Uruk, by the 31st century BC (see Historical urban community sizes).
Historic times are marked apart from prehistoric times when "records of the past begin to be kept for the benefit of future generations"—in written or oral form.
If the rise of civilization is taken to coincide with the development of writing out of proto-writing, the Near Eastern Chalcolithic, the transitional period between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age during the 4th millennium BC, and the development of proto-writing in Harappa in the Indus Valley of South Asia around 3300 BC are the earliest incidences, followed by Chinese proto-writing evolving into the oracle bone script, and again by the emergence of Mesoamerican writing systems from about 900 BC.
In the absence of written documents, most aspects of the rise of early civilizations are contained in archaeological assessments that document the development of formal institutions and the material culture. A "civilized" way of life is ultimately linked to conditions coming almost exclusively from intensive agriculture.
Gordon Childe defined the development of civilization as the result of two successive revolutions: the Neolithic Revolution, triggering the development of settled communities, and the Urban Revolution, which enhanced tendencies towards dense settlements, specialized occupational groups, social classes, exploitation of surpluses, monumental public buildings and writing.
Few of those conditions, however, are unchallenged by the records: dense cities were not attested in Egypt's Old Kingdom and cities had a dispersed population in the Maya area; the Incas lacked writing although they could keep records with Quipus which might also have had literary uses; and often monumental architecture preceded any indication of village settlement.
For instance, in present-day Louisiana, researchers have determined that cultures that were primarily nomadic organized over generations to build earthwork mounds at seasonal settlements as early as 3400 BC. Rather than a succession of events and preconditions, the rise of civilization could equally be hypothesized as an accelerated process that started with incipient agriculture and culminated in the Oriental Bronze Age.
Single or multiple cradles:
A traditional theory of the spread of civilization is that it began in the Fertile Crescent and spread out from there by influence. Scholars more generally now believe that civilizations arose independently at several locations in both hemispheres. They have observed that sociocultural developments occurred along different timeframes. "Sedentary" and "nomadic" communities continued to interact considerably; they were not strictly divided among widely different cultural groups.
The concept of a cradle of civilization has a focus where the inhabitants came to build cities, to create writing systems, to experiment in techniques for making pottery and using metals, to domesticate animals, and to develop complex social structures involving class systems.
Current scholarship generally identifies six sites where civilization emerged independently:
- Fertile Crescent
- Tigris–Euphrates Valley
- Nile Valley
- Indo-Gangetic Plain
- North China Plain
- Andean Coast
- Mesoamerican Gulf Coast
A question that intrigues scholars is why pristine civilizations rose when and where they did. The economies of all of the pristine civilizations depended upon agriculture, with the possible exception of the Andean coast civilization which may have initially relied as much or more on marine resources.
Jared Diamond postulates that the reason the Fertile Crescent was the earliest civilization was that large-seeded, easily-domesticable plants (wheat and barley, among others) and large domesticable animals (cattle, pigs, sheep, horses) were native to the region.
By contrast, it took thousands of years of selective breeding in Mesoamerica for maize to become productive enough to be a staple crop. Mesoamerica also lacked large domesticable animals. Llamas were the only large, domesticable animal in the Andes of South America. Llamas are large enough to be pack animals but not large enough to be ridden or as draft animals.
Australia lacked both easily domesticable plants and large animals.
Cradles of civilization:
Fertile Crescent:
Mesopotamia:
Main articles: History of Mesopotamia, History of Sumer, and Sumer
Around 10,200 BC the first fully developed Neolithic cultures belonging to the phases Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) and Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (7600 to 6000 BC) appeared in the Fertile Crescent and from there spread eastward and westward.
One of the most notable PPNA settlements is Jericho in the Levant region, thought to be the world's first town (settled around 9600 BC and fortified around 6800 BC).
In Mesopotamia, the convergence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers produced rich fertile soil and a supply of water for irrigation. The civilizations that emerged around these rivers are among the earliest known non-nomadic agrarian societies. It is because of this that the Fertile Crescent region, and Mesopotamia in particular, are often referred to as the cradle of civilization.
The period known as the Ubaid period (c. 6500 to 3800 BC) is the earliest known period on the alluvial plain, although it is likely earlier periods exist obscured under the alluvium. It was during the Ubaid period that the movement toward urbanization began.
Agriculture and animal husbandry were widely practiced in sedentary communities, particularly in Northern Mesopotamia, and intensive irrigated hydraulic agriculture began to be practiced in the south.
Around 6000 BC, Neolithic settlements appear all over Egypt. Studies based on morphological, genetic, and archaeological data have attributed these settlements to migrants from the Fertile Crescent in the Near East returning during the Egyptian and North African Neolithic Revolution and bringing agriculture to the region.
Tell el-'Oueili is the oldest Sumerian site settled during this period, around 5300 BC, and the city of Ur also first dates to the end of this period. In the south, the Ubaid period took place from around 6500 to 3800 BC, when it was replaced by the Uruk period.
Sumerian civilization coalesced in the subsequent Uruk period (4000 to 3100 BC). Named after the Sumerian city of Uruk, this period saw the emergence of urban life in Mesopotamia and, during its later phase, the gradual emergence of the cuneiform script.
Proto-writing in the region dates to around 3500 BC, with the earliest texts dating to 3300 BC; early cuneiform writing emerged in 3000 BC. It was also during this period that pottery painting declined as copper started to become popular, along with cylinder seals.
Sumerian cities during the Uruk period were probably theocratic and were most likely headed by a priest-king (ensi), assisted by a council of elders, including both men and women. It is quite possible that the later Sumerian pantheon was modeled upon this political structure.
Uruk trade networks started to expand to other parts of Mesopotamia and as far as North Caucasus, and strong signs of governmental organization and social stratification began to emerge leading to the Early Dynastic Period (c. 2900 BC).
The Jemdet Nasr period, which is generally dated from 3100 to 2900 BC and succeeds the Uruk period, is known as one of the formative stages in the development of the cuneiform script. The oldest clay tablets come from Uruk and date to the late fourth millennium BC, slightly earlier than the Jemdet Nasr Period.
By the time of the Jemdet Nasr Period, the script had already undergone a number of significant changes. It originally consisted of pictographs, but by the time of the Jemdet Nasr Period it was already adopting simpler and more abstract designs. It is also during this period that the script acquired its iconic wedge-shaped appearance.
After the Early Dynastic period begins, there was a shift in control of the city-states from the temple establishment headed by council of elders led by a priestly "En" (a male figure when it was a temple for a goddess, or a female figure when headed by a male god) towards a more secular Lugal (Lu = man, Gal = great) and includes such legendary patriarchal figures as Enmerkar, Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh—who are supposed to have reigned shortly before the historic record opens c. 2700 BC, when the now deciphered syllabic writing started to develop from the early pictograms.
The center of Sumerian culture remained in southern Mesopotamia, even though rulers soon began expanding into neighboring areas, and neighboring Semitic groups adopted much of Sumerian culture for their own. The earliest ziggurats began near the end of the Early Dynastic Period, although architectural precursors in the form of raised platforms date back to the Ubaid period.
The well-known Sumerian King List dates to the early second millennium BC. It consists of a succession of royal dynasties from different Sumerian cities, ranging back into the Early Dynastic Period. Each dynasty rises to prominence and dominates the region, only to be replaced by the next. The document was used by later Mesopotamian kings to legitimize their rule. While some of the information in the list can be checked against other texts such as economic documents, much of it is probably purely fictional, and its use as a historical document is limited.
Eannatum, the Sumerian king of Lagash, established one of the first verifiable empires in history in 2500 BC. The neighboring Elam, in modern Iran, was also part of the early urbanization during the Chalcolithic period. Elamite states were among the leading political forces of the Ancient Near East.
The emergence of Elamite written records from around 3000 BC also parallels Sumerian history, where slightly earlier records have been found. During the 3rd millennium BC, there developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and the Akkadians.
Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language somewhere between the 3rd and the 2nd millennia BC. The Semitic-speaking Akkadian empire emerged around 2350 BC under Sargon the Great. The Akkadian Empire reached its political peak between the 24th and 22nd centuries BC.
Under Sargon and his successors, the Akkadian language was briefly imposed on neighboring conquered states such as Elam and Gutium. After the fall of the Akkadian Empire and the overthrow of the Gutians, there was a brief reassertion of Sumerian dominance in Mesopotamia under the Third Dynasty of Ur.
After the final collapse of Sumerian hegemony in Mesopotamia around 2004 BC, the Semitic Akkadian people of Mesopotamia eventually coalesced into two major Akkadian-speaking nations: Assyria in the north, and, a few centuries later, Babylonia in the south.
Ancient Egypt:
Main articles: History of ancient Egypt and Ancient Egypt
The developed Neolithic cultures belonging to the phases Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (10,200 BC) and Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (7600 to 6000 BC) appeared in the fertile crescent and from there spread eastwards and westwards. Contemporaneously, a grain-grinding culture using the earliest type of sickle blades had replaced the culture of hunters, fishers, and gathering people using stone tools along the Nile.
Geological evidence and computer climate modeling studies also suggest that natural climate changes around 8000 BC began to desiccate the extensive pastoral lands of northern Africa, eventually forming the Sahara. Continued desiccation forced the early ancestors of the Egyptians to settle around the Nile more permanently and to adopt a more sedentary lifestyle. The oldest fully developed neolithic culture in Egypt is Fayum A culture that began around 5500 B.C.
By about 5500 BC, small tribes living in the Nile valley had developed into a series of inter-related cultures as far south as Sudan, demonstrating firm control of agriculture and animal husbandry, and identifiable by their pottery and personal items, such as combs, bracelets, and beads.
The largest of these early cultures in upper Southern Egypt was the Badari, which probably originated in the Western Desert; it was known for its high quality ceramics, stone tools, and use of copper. The oldest known domesticated bovine in Africa are from Fayum dating to around 4400 BC.
The Badari cultures was followed by the Naqada culture, which brought a number of technological improvements. As early as the first Naqada Period, Amratia, Egyptians imported obsidian from Ethiopia, used to shape blades and other objects from flakes. By 3300 BC, just before the first Egyptian dynasty, Egypt was divided into two kingdoms, known as Upper Egypt to the south, and Lower Egypt to the north.
Egyptian civilization begins during the second phase of the Naqda culture, known as the Gerzeh period, around 3500 BC and coalesces with the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt around 3150 BC. Farming produced the vast majority of food; with increased food supplies, the populace adopted a much more sedentary lifestyle, and the larger settlements grew to cities of about 5,000 residents.
It was in this time that the city dwellers started using mud brick to build their cities, and the use of the arch and recessed walls for decorative effect became popular. Copper instead of stone was increasingly used to make tools and weaponry. Symbols on Gerzean pottery also resemble nascent Egyptian hieroglyphs. Early evidence also exists of contact with the Near East, particularly Canaan and the Byblos coast, during this time.
Concurrent with these cultural advances, a process of unification of the societies and towns of the upper Nile River, or Upper Egypt, occurred. At the same time the societies of the Nile Delta, or Lower Egypt, also underwent a unification process. During his reign in Upper Egypt, King Narmer defeated his enemies on the Delta and merged both the Kingdom of Upper and Lower Egypt under his single rule.
The Early Dynastic Period of Egypt immediately followed the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt. It is generally taken to include the First and Second Dynasties, lasting from the Naqada III archaeological period until about the beginning of the Old Kingdom, c. 2686 BC. With the First Dynasty, the capital moved from Thinis to Memphis with a unified Egypt ruled by a god-king.
The hallmarks of ancient Egyptian civilization, such as art, architecture and many aspects of religion, took shape during the Early Dynastic period. The strong institution of kingship developed by the pharaohs served to legitimize state control over the land, labour, and resources that were essential to the survival and growth of ancient Egyptian civilization.
Major advances in architecture, art, and technology were made during the subsequent Old Kingdom, fueled by the increased agricultural productivity and resulting population, made possible by a well-developed central administration. Some of ancient Egypt's crowning achievements, the Giza pyramids and Great Sphinx, were constructed during the Old Kingdom.
Under the direction of the vizier, state officials collected taxes, coordinated irrigation projects to improve crop yield, drafted peasants to work on construction projects, and established a justice system to maintain peace and order. Along with the rising importance of a central administration there arose a new class of educated scribes and officials who were granted estates by the pharaoh in payment for their services.
Pharaohs also made land grants to their mortuary cults and local temples, to ensure that these institutions had the resources to worship the pharaoh after his death. Scholars believe that five centuries of these practices slowly eroded the economic power of the pharaoh, and that the economy could no longer afford to support a large centralized administration.
As the power of the pharaoh diminished, regional governors called nomarchs began to challenge the supremacy of the pharaoh. This, coupled with severe droughts between 2200 and 2150 BC, is assumed to have caused the country to enter the 140-year period of famine and strife known as the First Intermediate Period.
Ancient India:
Main articles:
One of the earliest Neolithic sites in the Indian subcontinent is Bhirrana along the ancient Ghaggar-Hakra riverine system in the present day state of Haryana in India, dating to around 7600 BC. Other early sites include Lahuradewa in the Middle Ganges region and Jhusi near the confluence of Ganges and Yamuna rivers, both dating to around 7000 BC.
The aceramic Neolithic at Mehrgarh in present day Pakistan lasts from 7000 to 5500 BC, with the ceramic Neolithic at Mehrgarh lasting up to 3300 BC; blending into the Early Bronze Age. Mehrgarh is one of the earliest sites with evidence of farming and herding in the Indian subcontinent.
It is likely that the culture centered around Mehrgarh migrated into the Indus Valley in present day Pakistan and became the Indus Valley Civilisation. The earliest fortified town in the region is found at Rehman Dheri, dated 4000 BC in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa close to River Zhob Valley in present day Pakistan .
Other fortified towns found to date are at Amri (3600–3300 BC), Kot Diji in Sindh, and at Kalibangan (3000 BC) at the Hakra River.
The Indus Valley Civilisation starts around 3300 BC with what is referred to as the Early Harappan Phase (3300 to 2600 BC). The earliest examples of the Indus script date to this period, as well as the emergence of citadels representing centralised authority and an increasingly urban quality of life.
Trade networks linked this culture with related regional cultures and distant sources of raw materials, including lapis lazuli and other materials for bead-making. By this time, villagers had domesticated numerous crops, including peas, sesame seeds, dates, and cotton, as well as animals, including the water buffalo.
2600 BC marks the Mature Harappan Phase during which Early Harappan communities turned into large urban centres including Harappa, Dholavira, Mohenjo-Daro, Lothal, Rupar, and Rakhigarhi, and more than 1,000 towns and villages, often of relatively small size.
Mature Harappans evolved new techniques in metallurgy and produced copper, bronze, lead, and tin and displayed advanced levels of engineering. As seen in Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and the recently partially excavated Rakhigarhi, this urban plan included the world's first known urban sanitation systems: see hydraulic engineering of the Indus Valley Civilisation.
Within the city, individual homes or groups of homes obtained water from wells. From a room that appears to have been set aside for bathing, waste water was directed to covered drains, which lined the major streets. Houses opened only to inner courtyards and smaller lanes. The house-building in some villages in the region still resembles in some respects the house-building of the Harappans.
The advanced architecture of the Harappans is shown by their impressive dockyards, granaries, warehouses, brick platforms, and protective walls. The massive walls of Indus cities most likely protected the Harappans from floods and may have dissuaded military conflicts.
The people of the Indus Civilisation achieved great accuracy in measuring length, mass, and time. They were among the first to develop a system of uniform weights and measures. A comparison of available objects indicates large scale variation across the Indus territories.
Their smallest division, which is marked on an ivory scale found in Lothal in Gujarat, was approximately 1.704 mm, the smallest division ever recorded on a scale of the Bronze Age. Harappan engineers followed the decimal division of measurement for all practical purposes, including the measurement of mass as revealed by their hexahedron weights.
These chert weights were in a ratio of 5:2:1 with weights of 0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, and 500 units, with each unit weighing approximately 28 grams, similar to the English Imperial ounce or Greek uncia, and smaller objects were weighed in similar ratios with the units of 0.871. However, as in other cultures, actual weights were not uniform throughout the area. The weights and measures later used in Kautilya's Arthashastra (4th century BC) are the same as those used in Lothal.
Around 1800 BC, signs of a gradual decline began to emerge, and by around 1700 BC most of the cities had been abandoned. Suggested contributory causes for the localisation of the IVC include changes in the course of the river, and climate change that is also signalled for the neighbouring areas of the Middle East.
As of 2016 many scholars believe that drought led to a decline in trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia contributing to the collapse of the Indus Civilisation. The Ghaggar-Hakra system was rain-fed, and water-supply depended on the monsoons. The Indus Valley climate grew significantly cooler and drier from about 1800 BC, linked to a general weakening of the monsoon at that time.
The Indian monsoon declined and aridity increased, with the Ghaggar-Hakra retracting its reach towards the foothills of the Himalaya, leading to erratic and less extensive floods that made inundation agriculture less sustainable. Aridification reduced the water supply enough to cause the civilisation's demise, and to scatter its population eastward. As the monsoons kept shifting south, the floods grew too erratic for sustainable agricultural activities. The residents then migrated away into smaller communities.
However trade with the old cities did not flourish. The small surplus produced in these small communities did not allow development of trade, and the cities died out. The Indo-Aryan peoples migrated into the Indus River Valley during this period and began the Vedic age of India. The Indus Valley Civilisation did not disappear suddenly and many elements of the civilization continued in later Indian subcontinent and Vedic cultures.
Ancient China:
Main articles: History of China, Xia dynasty, and Erlitou culture
Drawing on archaeology, geology and anthropology, modern scholars do not see the origins of the Chinese civilization or history as a linear story but rather the history of the interactions of different and distinct cultures and ethnic groups that influenced each other's development.
The specific cultural regions that developed Chinese civilization were the Yellow River civilization, the Yangtze civilization, and Liao civilization. Early evidence for Chinese millet agriculture is dated to around 7000 BC, with the earliest evidence of cultivated rice found at Chengtoushan near the Yangtze River, dated to 6500 BC.
Chengtoushan may also be the site of the first walled city in China. By the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, the Yellow River valley began to establish itself as a center of the Peiligang culture, which flourished from 7000 to 5000 BC, with evidence of agriculture, constructed buildings, pottery, and burial of the dead.
With agriculture came increased population, the ability to store and redistribute crops, and the potential to support specialist craftsmen and administrators. Its most prominent site is Jiahu.
Some scholars have suggested that the Jiahu symbols (6600 BC) are the earliest form of proto-writing in China. However, it is likely that they should not be understood as writing itself, but as features of a lengthy period of sign-use, which led eventually to a fully-fledged system of writing. Archaeologists believe that the Peiligang culture was egalitarian, with little political organization.
It eventually evolved into the Yangshao culture (5000 to 3000 BC), and their stone tools were polished and highly specialized. They may also have practiced an early form of silkworm cultivation. The main food of the Yangshao people was millet, with some sites using foxtail millet and others broom-corn millet, though some evidence of rice has been found.
The exact nature of Yangshao agriculture, small-scale slash-and-burn cultivation versus intensive agriculture in permanent fields, is currently a matter of debate. Once the soil was exhausted, residents picked up their belongings, moved to new lands, and constructed new villages.
However, Middle Yangshao settlements such as Jiangzhi contain raised-floor buildings that may have been used for the storage of surplus grains. Grinding stones for making flour were also found.
Later, Yangshao culture was superseded by the Longshan culture, which was also centered on the Yellow River from about 3000 to 1900 BC, its most prominent site being Taosi. The population expanded dramatically during the 3rd millennium BC, with many settlements having rammed earth walls. It decreased in most areas around 2000 BC until the central area evolved into the Bronze Age Erlitou culture.
The earliest bronze artifacts have been found in the Majiayao culture site (3100 to 2700 BC).
Chinese civilization begins during the second phase of the Erlitou period (1900 to 1500 BC), with Erlitou considered the first state level society of East Asia. There is considerable debate whether Erlitou sites correlate to the semi-legendary Xia dynasty. The Xia dynasty (2070 to 1600 BC) is the first dynasty to be described in ancient Chinese historical records such as the Bamboo Annals, first published more than a millennium later during the Western Zhou period.
Although Xia is an important element in Chinese historiography, there is to date no contemporary written evidence to corroborate the dynasty. Erlitou saw an increase in bronze metallurgy and urbanization and was a rapidly growing regional center with palatial complexes that provide evidence for social stratification.
The Erlitou civilization is divided into four phases, each of roughly 50 years. During Phase I, covering 100 hectares (250 acres), Erlitou was a rapidly growing regional center with estimated population of several thousand but not yet an urban civilization or capital.
Urbanization began in Phase II, expanding to 300 ha (740 acres) with a population around 11,000. A palace area of 12 ha (30 acres) was demarcated by four roads. It contained the 150x50 m Palace 3, composed of three courtyards along a 150-meter axis, and Palace 5. A bronze foundry was established to the south of the palatial complex that was controlled by the elite who lived in palaces.
The city reached its peak in Phase III, and may have had a population of around 24,000. The palatial complex was surrounded by a two-meter-thick rammed-earth wall, and Palaces 1, 7, 8, 9 were built. The earthwork volume of rammed earth for the base of largest Palace 1 is 20,000 m³ at least. Palaces 3 and 5 were abandoned and replaced by 4,200-square-meter (45,000 sq ft) Palace 2 and Palace 4.
In Phase IV, the population decreased to around 20,000, but building continued. Palace 6 was built as an extension of Palace 2, and Palaces 10 and 11 were built. Phase IV overlaps with the Lower phase of the Erligang culture (1600–1450 BC).
Around 1600 to 1560 BC, about 6 km northeast of Erlitou, a culturally Eligang walled city was built at Yanshi, which coincides with an increase in production of arrowheads at Erlitou. This situation might indicate that the Yanshi city was competing for power and dominance with Erlitou.
Production of bronzes and other elite goods ceased at the end of Phase IV, at the same time as the Erligang city of Zhengzhou was established 85 km (53 mi) to the east. There is no evidence of destruction by fire or war, but, during the Upper Erligang phase (1450–1300 BC), all the palaces were abandoned, and Erlitou was reduced to a village of 30 ha (74 acres).
The earliest traditional Chinese dynasty for which there is both archeological and written evidence is the Shang dynasty (1600 to 1046 BC). Shang sites have yielded the earliest known body of Chinese writing, the oracle bone script, mostly divinations inscribed on bones. These inscriptions provide critical insight into many topics from the politics, economy, and religious practices to the art and medicine of this early stage of Chinese civilization.
Some historians argue that Erlitou should be considered an early phase of the Shang dynasty. The U.S. National Gallery of Art defines the Chinese Bronze Age as the period between about 2000 and 771 BC; a period that begins with the Erlitou culture and ends abruptly with the disintegration of Western Zhou rule. The Sanxingdui culture is another Chinese Bronze Age society, contemporaneous to the Shang dynasty, however they developed a different method of bronze-making from the Shang.
Ancient Andes:
Main article: Norte Chico civilization
The earliest evidence of agriculture in the Andean region dates to around 9000 BC in Ecuador at sites of the Las Vegas Culture. The bottle gourd may have been the first plant cultivated. The oldest evidence of canal irrigation in South America dates to 4700 to 2500 BC in the Zaña Valley of northern Peru. The earliest urban settlements of the Andes, as well as North and South America, are dated to 3500 BC at Huaricanga, in the Fortaleza area, and Sechin Bajo near the Sechin River. Both sites are in Peru.
The Norte Chico civilization proper is understood to have emerged around 3200 BC, as it is at that point that large-scale human settlement and communal construction across multiple sites becomes clearly apparent. Since the early 21st century, it has been established as the oldest known civilization in the Americas.
The civilization flourished near the Pacific coast in the valleys of three small rivers, the Fortaleza, the Pativilca, and the Supe. These river valleys each have large clusters of sites.
Further south, there are several associated sites along the Huaura River. Notable settlements include the cities of Caral, the largest and most complex Preceramic site, and Aspero.
Norte Chico sites are known for their density of large sites with immense architecture. Haas argues that the density of sites in such a small area is globally unique for a nascent civilization. During the third millennium BC, Norte Chico may have been the most densely populated area of the world (excepting, possibly, northern China). The Supe, Pativilca, Fortaleza, and Huaura River valleys each have several related sites.
Norte Chico is unusual in that it completely lacked ceramics and apparently had almost no visual art. Nevertheless, the civilization exhibited impressive architectural feats, including large earthwork platform mounds and sunken circular plazas, and an advanced textile industry. The platform mounds, as well as large stone warehouses, provide evidence for a stratified society and a centralized authority necessary to distribute resources such as cotton.
However, there is no evidence of warfare or defensive structures during this period. Originally, it was theorized that, unlike other early civilizations, Norte Chico developed by relying on maritime food sources in place of a staple cereal. This hypothesis, the Maritime Foundation of Andean Civilization, is still hotly debated; however, most researches now agree that agriculture played a central role in the civilization's development while still acknowledging a strong supplemental reliance on maritime proteins.
The Norte Chico chiefdoms were "...almost certainly theocratic, though not brutally so," according to Mann. Construction areas show possible evidence of feasting, which would have included music and likely alcohol, suggesting an elite able to both mobilize and reward the population.
The degree of centralized authority is difficult to ascertain, but architectural construction patterns are indicative of an elite that, at least in certain places at certain times, wielded considerable power: while some of the monumental architecture was constructed incrementally, other buildings, such as the two main platform mounds at Caral, appear to have been constructed in one or two intense construction phases.
As further evidence of centralized control, Haas points to remains of large stone warehouses found at Upaca, on the Pativilca, as emblematic of authorities able to control vital resources such as cotton. Economic authority would have rested on the control of cotton and edible plants and associated trade relationships, with power centered on the inland sites.
Haas tentatively suggests that the scope of this economic power base may have extended widely: there are only two confirmed shore sites in the Norte Chico (Aspero and Bandurria) and possibly two more, but cotton fishing nets and domesticated plants have been found up and down the Peruvian coast. It is possible that the major inland centers of Norte Chico were at the center of a broad regional trade network centered on these resources.
Discover magazine, citing Shady, suggests a rich and varied trade life: "[Caral] exported its own products and those of Aspero to distant communities in exchange for exotic imports: Spondylus shells from the coast of Ecuador, rich dyes from the Andean highlands, hallucinogenic snuff from the Amazon." (Given the still limited extent of Norte Chico research, such claims should be treated circumspectly.)
Other reports on Shady's work indicate Caral traded with communities in the Andes and in the jungles of the Amazon basin on the opposite side of the Andes.
Leaders' ideological power was based on apparent access to deities and the supernatural. Evidence regarding Norte Chico religion is limited: an image of the Staff God, a leering figure with a hood and fangs, has been found on a gourd dated to 2250 BC.
The Staff God is a major deity of later Andean cultures, and Winifred Creamer suggests the find points to worship of common symbols of gods. As with much other research at Norte Chico, the nature and significance of the find has been disputed by other researchers.
The act of architectural construction and maintenance may also have been a spiritual or religious experience: a process of communal exaltation and ceremony. Shady has called Caral "the sacred city" (la ciudad sagrada): socio-economic and political focus was on the temples, which were periodically remodeled, with major burnt offerings associated with the remodeling.
The discovery of quipu, string-based recording devices, at Caral can be understood as a form of "proto-writing" at Norte Chico. However, the exact use of quipu in this and later Andean cultures has been widely debated. The presence of quipu and the commonality of religious symbols suggests a cultural link between Norte Chico and later Andean cultures.
Circa 1800 BC, the Norte Chico civilization began to decline, with more powerful centers appearing to the south and north along the coast and to the east inside the belt of the Andes. Pottery eventually developed in the Amazon Basin and spread to the Andean culture region around 2000 BC.
The next major civilization to arise in the Andes would be the Chavín culture at Chavín de Huantar, located in the Andean highlands of the present-day Ancash Region. It is believed to have been built around 900 BC and was the religious and political center of the Chavín people.
Mesoamerica:
Main articles: Mesoamerican chronology and Olmec civilization
Maize is believed to have been first domesticated in southern Mexico about 7000 BC. The Coxcatlan caves in the Valley of Tehuacán provide evidence for agriculture in components dated between 5000 and 3400 BC.
Similarly, sites such as Sipacate in Guatemala provide maize pollen samples dating to 3500 BC. Around 1900 BC, the Mokaya domesticated one of the dozen species of cacao. A Mokaya archaeological site provides evidence of cacao beverages dating to this time. The Mokaya are also thought to have been among the first cultures in Mesoamerica to develop a hierarchical society. What would become the Olmec civilization had its roots in early farming cultures of Tabasco, which began around 5100 to 4600 BC.
The emergence of the Olmec civilization has traditionally been dated to around 1600 to 1500 BC. Olmec features first emerged in the city of San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, fully coalescing around 1400 BC. The rise of civilization was assisted by the local ecology of well-watered alluvial soil, as well as by the transportation network provided by the Coatzacoalcos River basin.
This environment encouraged a densely concentrated population, which in turn triggered the rise of an elite class and an associated demand for the production of the symbolic and sophisticated luxury artifacts that define Olmec culture. Many of these luxury artifacts were made from materials such as jade, obsidian, and magnetite, which came from distant locations and suggest that early Olmec elites had access to an extensive trading network in Mesoamerica.
The aspect of Olmec culture perhaps most familiar today is their artwork, particularly the Olmec colossal heads. San Lorenzo was situated in the midst of a large agricultural area. San Lorenzo seems to have been largely a ceremonial site, a town without city walls, centered in the midst of a widespread medium-to-large agricultural population.
The ceremonial center and attendant buildings could have housed 5,500 while the entire area, including hinterlands, could have reached 13,000. It is thought that while San Lorenzo controlled much or all of the Coatzacoalcos basin, areas to the east (such as the area where La Venta would rise to prominence) and north-northwest (such as the Tuxtla Mountains) were home to independent polities.
San Lorenzo was all but abandoned around 900 BC at about the same time that La Venta rose to prominence. A wholesale destruction of many San Lorenzo monuments also occurred circa 950 BC, which may indicate an internal uprising or, less likely, an invasion.
The latest thinking, however, is that environmental changes may have been responsible for this shift in Olmec centers, with certain important rivers changing course.
La Venta became the cultural capital of the Olmec concentration in the region until its abandonment around 400 BC; constructing monumental architectural achievements such as the Great Pyramid of La Venta. It contained a "concentration of power", as reflected by the sheer enormity of the architecture and the extreme value of the artifacts uncovered.
La Venta is perhaps the largest Olmec city and it was controlled and expanded by an extremely complex hierarchical system with a king, as the ruler and the elites below him. Priests had power and influence over life and death and likely great political sway as well.
Unfortunately, not much is known about the political or social structure of the Olmec, though new dating techniques might, at some point, reveal more information about this elusive culture. It is possible that the signs of status exist in the artifacts recovered at the site such as depictions of feathered headdresses or of individuals wearing a mirror on their chest or forehead.
"High-status objects were a significant source of power in the La Venta polity political power, economic power, and ideological power. They were tools used by the elite to enhance and maintain rights to rulership".
It has been estimated that La Venta would need to be supported by a population of at least 18,000 people during its principal occupation. To add to the mystique of La Venta, the alluvial soil did not preserve skeletal remains, so it is difficult to observe differences in burials.
However, colossal heads provide proof that the elite had some control over the lower classes, as their construction would have been extremely labor-intensive. "Other features similarly indicate that many laborers were involved". In addition, excavations over the years have discovered that different parts of the site were likely reserved for elites and other parts for non-elites. This segregation of the city indicates that there must have been social classes and therefore social inequality.
The exact cause of the decline of the Olmec culture is uncertain. Between 400 and 350 BC, the population in the eastern half of the Olmec heartland dropped precipitously. This depopulation was probably the result of serious environmental changes that rendered the region unsuited for large groups of farmers, in particular changes to the riverine environment that the Olmec depended upon for agriculture, hunting and gathering, and transportation.
These changes may have been triggered by tectonic upheavals or subsidence, or the silting up of rivers due to agricultural practices. Within a few hundred years of the abandonment of the last Olmec cities, successor cultures became firmly established. The Tres Zapotes site, on the western edge of the Olmec heartland, continued to be occupied well past 400 BC, but without the hallmarks of the Olmec culture. This post-Olmec culture, often labeled Epi-Olmec, has features similar to those found at Izapa, some 550 km (330 miles) to the southeast.
The Olmecs are sometimes referred to as the mother culture of Mesoamerica, as they were the first Mesoamerican civilization and laid many of the foundations for the civilizations that followed. However, the causes and degree of Olmec influences on Mesoamerican cultures has been a subject of debate over many decades.
Practices introduced by the Olmec include ritual bloodletting and the Mesoamerican ballgame; hallmarks of subsequent Mesoamerican societies such as the Maya and Aztec. Although the Mesoamerican writing system would fully develop later, early Olmec ceramics show representations that may be interpreted as codices.
Cradle of Western civilization:
Main articles below:
There is academic consensus that Classical Greece was the seminal culture that provided the foundation of modern Western culture, democracy, art, theatre, philosophy, and science. For this reason it is known as the cradle of Western Civilization.
Along with Greece, Rome has sometimes been described as a birthplace or as the cradle of Western Civilization because of the role the city had in politics, republicanism, law, architecture, warfare and Western Christianity.
Timeline:
The following timeline shows a timeline of cultures, with the approximate dates of the emergence of civilization (as discussed in the article) in the featured areas, the primary cultures associated with these early civilizations.
It is important to note that the timeline is not indicative of the beginning of human habitation, the start of a specific ethnic group, or the development of Neolithic cultures in the area – any of which often occurred significantly earlier than the emergence of civilization proper.
In the case of the Indus Valley Civilization, this was followed by a period of de-urbanization and regionalisation, and the co-existence of indigenous local agricultural cultures and the pastoral Indo-Aryans, who came from Central Asia.
See also:
- Chronology of the ancient Near East
- Cradle of Humankind
- Human history
- Civilization state
- Skara Brae and Barnhouse Settlement 3180 BC.
Archeology including its History
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Archaeology, or archeology, is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, and cultural landscapes.
Archaeology can be considered both a social science and a branch of the humanities. In North America, archaeology is considered a sub-field of anthropology, while in Europe archaeology is often viewed as either a discipline in its own right or a sub-field of other disciplines.
Archaeologists study human prehistory and history, from the development of the first stone tools at Lomekwi in East Africa 3.3 million years ago up until recent decades. Archaeology as a field is distinct from the discipline of paleontology, the study of fossil remains.
Archaeology is particularly important for learning about prehistoric societies, for whom there may be no written records to study. Prehistory includes over 99% of the human past, from the Paleolithic until the advent of literacy in societies across the world. Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.
The discipline involves surveying, excavation and eventually analysis of data collected to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research.
Archeology draws upon the following:
Archaeology developed out of antiquarianism in Europe during the 19th century, and has since become a discipline practiced across the world. Archeology has been used by nation-states to create particular visions of the past.
Since its early development, various specific sub-disciplines of archaeology have developed, including maritime archaeology, feminist archaeology and archaeoastronomy, and numerous different scientific techniques have been developed to aid archaeological investigation.
Nonetheless, today, archaeologists face many problems, such as dealing with pseudoarchaeology, the looting of artifacts, a lack of public interest, and opposition to the excavation of human remains.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Archaeology:
Archaeology can be considered both a social science and a branch of the humanities. In North America, archaeology is considered a sub-field of anthropology, while in Europe archaeology is often viewed as either a discipline in its own right or a sub-field of other disciplines.
Archaeologists study human prehistory and history, from the development of the first stone tools at Lomekwi in East Africa 3.3 million years ago up until recent decades. Archaeology as a field is distinct from the discipline of paleontology, the study of fossil remains.
Archaeology is particularly important for learning about prehistoric societies, for whom there may be no written records to study. Prehistory includes over 99% of the human past, from the Paleolithic until the advent of literacy in societies across the world. Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.
The discipline involves surveying, excavation and eventually analysis of data collected to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research.
Archeology draws upon the following:
- anthropology,
- history,
- art history,
- classics,
- ethnology,
- geography,
- geology,
- linguistics,
- semiology,
- physics,
- information sciences,
- chemistry,
- statistics,
- paleoecology,
- paleontology,
- paleozoology,
- paleoethnobotany,
- and paleobotany.
Archaeology developed out of antiquarianism in Europe during the 19th century, and has since become a discipline practiced across the world. Archeology has been used by nation-states to create particular visions of the past.
Since its early development, various specific sub-disciplines of archaeology have developed, including maritime archaeology, feminist archaeology and archaeoastronomy, and numerous different scientific techniques have been developed to aid archaeological investigation.
Nonetheless, today, archaeologists face many problems, such as dealing with pseudoarchaeology, the looting of artifacts, a lack of public interest, and opposition to the excavation of human remains.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Archaeology:
- History
- Purpose
- Methods
- Academic sub-disciplines
- Protection
- Popular views of archaeology
- Current issues and controversy
- See also:
- Archaeobiology
- Archaeogenetics – Application of the techniques of molecular population genetics to the study of the human past
- Archaeology of religion and ritual
- Area of archaeological potential
- Conservation and restoration of archaeological sites
- Chronological dating
- Classical archaeology – Sub-discipline of archeology
- Dump digging
- GIS in archaeology – Aspect of GIS usage
- Harris matrix – Method in archaeology
- Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage project – Cultural heritage research initiative
- Urban archaeology – Archaeological sub-discipline
- Lists:
- Works related to Archaeology at Wikisource
- Wikimedia Commons has media related to Archaeology.
- Wikiquote has quotations related to: Archaeology
- Wikibooks has more on the topic of: Archaeology
- 400,000 records of archaeological sites and architecture in England
- Archaeolog.org
- Archaeology Daily News
- Council for British Archaeology
- Estudio de Museología Rosario
- Fasti Online – an online database of archaeological sites
- Great Archaeology
- NPS Archeology Program: Visit Archeology (Archeology travel guides)
- Sri Lanka Archaeology
- The Archaeological Institute of America
- The Archaeology Channel
- The Archaeology Data Service – Open access online archive for UK and global archaeology
- The Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association
- The Society for American Archaeology
- The World Archaeological Congress
- US Forest Service Volunteer program Passport in Time
- World Archaeology News – weekly update from BBC Radio archaeologist, Win Scutt
- The Italian Archaeological Mission in Uşaklı Höyük
- Comprehensive Database of Archaeological Site Reports in Japan
Anthropology, including its History
- YouTube Video: An introduction to the discipline of Anthropology
- YouTube Video: What Is Cultural Anthropology?
- YouTube Video: Social Anthropology vs Cultural Anthropology: What's the Difference | Off the Shelf 4
Click here for a List of Anthropologists.
Anthropology is the study of various aspects of humans within past and present societies.
Social anthropology and cultural anthropology study the norms and values of societies. Linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.
Archaeology, which studies past human cultures through investigation of physical evidence, is thought of as a branch of anthropology in the United States, while in Europe, it is viewed as a discipline in its own right, or grouped under other related disciplines such as history.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Anthropology:
Anthropology is the study of various aspects of humans within past and present societies.
Social anthropology and cultural anthropology study the norms and values of societies. Linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.
Archaeology, which studies past human cultures through investigation of physical evidence, is thought of as a branch of anthropology in the United States, while in Europe, it is viewed as a discipline in its own right, or grouped under other related disciplines such as history.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Anthropology:
- Origin and development of the term
- Through the 19th century
20th and 21st centuries
- Through the 19th century
- Fields
- Key topics by field: sociocultural
- Key topics by field: archaeological and biological
- Organizations including a List of major organizations
- Ethics
- Post–World War II developments
- See also:
- Main article: Outline of anthropology
- Anthropological Index Online (AIO)
- Anthropological science fiction
- Engaged theory
- Ethnology
- Ethnobiology
- Ethology
- Folklore
- Human ethology
- Human evolution
- Human Relations Area Files
- Intangible Cultural Heritage
- Memetics
- Origins of society
- Prehistoric medicine
- Qualitative research
- Sociology
- Theological anthropology, a sub-field of theology
- Philosophical anthropology, a sub-field of philosophy
- Anthropology in Tinbergen's four questions
- Haller, Dieter. "Interviews with German Anthropologists: Video Portal for the History of German Anthropology post 1945". Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Retrieved 22 March 2015.
- "AAANet Home". American Anthropological Association. 2010.
- "Home". European Association of Social Anthropologists. 2015.
- Hagen, Ed (2015). "AAPA". American Association of Physical Anthropologists.
- "AIBR, Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana" (in Spanish). Antropólogos Iberoamericanos en Red. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
- "Home". Human Relations Area Files. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
- "Home". National Association for the Practice of Anthropology. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
- "About". Radical Anthropology Group. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
- "Home". Royal Anthropological Institute. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
- "Home". The Society for Applied Anthropology. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
- "Anthropology". American Museum of Natural History. Retrieved 25 March 2015.
- "Department of Anthropology". Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Retrieved 25 March 2015.
- Main article: Outline of anthropology
Paleoanthropology
- YouTube Video: Rick Barker - Paleoanthropology: Early Human Evolution
- YouTube Video: The New Revolution In HUMAN ORIGINS, Dr. Richard Leakey, Leakey Foundation
- YouTube Video: The Fossil Chronicles: Revolutions in Paleoanthropology
Paleoanthropology or paleo-anthropology is a branch of paleontology and anthropology which seeks to understand the early development of anatomically modern humans, a process known as hominization, through the reconstruction of evolutionary kinship lines within the family Hominidae, working from biological evidence (such as petrified skeletal remains, bone fragments, footprints) and cultural evidence (such as stone tools, artifacts, and settlement localities).
The field draws from and combines primatology, paleontology, biological anthropology, and cultural anthropology. As technologies and methods advance, genetics plays an ever-increasing role, in particular to examine and compare DNA structure as a vital tool of research of the evolutionary kinship lines of related species and genera.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Paleoanthropology:
The field draws from and combines primatology, paleontology, biological anthropology, and cultural anthropology. As technologies and methods advance, genetics plays an ever-increasing role, in particular to examine and compare DNA structure as a vital tool of research of the evolutionary kinship lines of related species and genera.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Paleoanthropology:
- Etymology
- Hominoid taxonomies
- History
- Renowned paleoanthropologists
- See also:
- Dawn of Humanity (2015 PBS film)
- Human evolution
- List of human evolution fossils
- The Incredible Human Journey
- Timeline of human evolution
- Fossil Hominids
- Aspects of Paleoanthropology
- Becoming Human: Paleoanthropology, Evolution and Human Origins
- Department of Human Evolution ~ Max Planck Institute, Leipzig
- Human Timeline (Interactive) – Smithsonian, National Museum of Natural History (August 2016).
The Roman Empire (509 BC -- 1453 AD)
including Christianity as the Roman state religion Pictured below: A gallery of images about the Roman Empire
including Christianity as the Roman state religion Pictured below: A gallery of images about the Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings around the Mediterranean Sea in Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia, and was ruled by emperors.
From the accession of Caesar Augustus as the first Roman emperor to the military anarchy of the 3rd century, it was a Principate with Italia as the metropole of its provinces and the city of Rome as its sole capital.
The Empire was later ruled by multiple emperors who shared control over the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire. The imperial seat moved from Rome to Byzantium and following the collapse of the West in AD 476, it became its sole capital as Constantinople.
The adoption of Christianity as the state church of the Roman Empire in AD 380 and the fall of the Western Roman Empire to Germanic kings conventionally marks the end of classical antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages.
Because of these events, along with the prevalence of Greek instead of Latin, some historians distinguish the medieval Roman Empire that remained in the Eastern provinces as the Byzantine Empire.
The predecessor state of the Roman Empire, the Roman Republic, became severely destabilized in civil wars and political conflicts. In the middle of the 1st century BC, Julius Caesar was appointed as dictator perpetuo ("dictator in perpetuity"), and then assassinated in 44 BC.
Civil wars and proscriptions continued, eventually culminating in the victory of Octavian over Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. The following year, Octavian conquered the Ptolemaic Kingdom in Egypt, ending the Hellenistic period that had begun with the 4th century BC conquests of Alexander the Great. Octavian's power became unassailable and the Roman Senate granted him overarching power (imperium) and the new title of Augustus, making him the first Roman emperor.
The vast Roman territories were organized in senatorial and imperial provinces except Italy, which continued to serve as a metropole.
The first two centuries of the Roman Empire saw a period of unprecedented stability and prosperity known as the Pax Romana (lit. 'Roman Peace'). Rome reached its greatest territorial expanse during the reign of Trajan (AD 98–117); a period of increasing trouble and decline began with the reign of Commodus (177–192).
In the 3rd century, the Empire underwent a crisis that threatened its existence, as the Gallic and Palmyrene Empires broke away from the Roman state, and a series of short-lived emperors, often from the legions, led the Empire. It was reunified under Aurelian (r. 270–275). To stabilize it, Diocletian set up two different imperial courts in the Greek East and Latin West in 286; Christians rose to positions of power in the 4th century following the Edict of Milan of 313.
Shortly after, the Migration Period, involving large invasions by Germanic peoples and by the Huns of Attila, led to the decline of the Western Roman Empire. With the fall of Ravenna to the Germanic Herulians and the deposition of Romulus Augustus in AD 476 by Odoacer, the Western Roman Empire finally collapsed; the Eastern Roman emperor Zeno formally abolished it in AD 480.
The Eastern Roman Empire survived for another millennium, until Constantinople fell in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks under Mehmed II.
Due to the Roman Empire's vast extent and long endurance, the institutions and culture of Rome had a profound and lasting influence on the development of the following:
The Latin language of the Romans evolved into the Romance languages of the medieval and modern world, while Medieval Greek became the language of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Empire's adoption of Christianity led to the formation of medieval Christendom. Roman and Greek art had a profound impact on the Italian Renaissance.
Rome's architectural tradition served as the basis for Romanesque, Renaissance and Neoclassical architecture, and also had a strong influence on Islamic architecture. The rediscovery of Greek and Roman science and technology (which also formed the basis for Islamic science) in Medieval Europe led to the Scientific Renaissance and Scientific Revolution.
The corpus of Roman law has its descendants in many modern legal systems of the world, such as the Napoleonic Code of France, while Rome's republican institutions have left an enduring legacy, influencing the Italian city-state republics of the medieval period, as well as the early United States and other modern democratic republics.
Click on any blue hyperlink below to be taken to that topic:
Christianity as the Roman state religion:
Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire when Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, which recognized the catholic orthodoxy of Nicene Christians in the Great Church as the Roman Empire's state religion.
Most historians refer to the Nicene church associated with emperors in a variety of ways: as the catholic church, the orthodox church, the imperial church, the imperial Roman church, or the Byzantine church, although some of those terms are also used for wider communions extending outside the Roman Empire.
The Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodoxy, and the Catholic Church all claim to stand in continuity from the Nicene church to which Theodosius granted recognition.
Earlier in the 4th century, following the Diocletianic Persecution of 303–313 and the Donatist controversy that arose in consequence, Constantine the Great had convened councils of bishops to define the orthodoxy of the Christian faith and to expand on earlier Christian councils.
A series of ecumenical councils convened by successive Roman emperors met during the 4th and the 5th centuries, but Christianity continued to suffer rifts and schisms surrounding the theological and christological doctrines of Arianism, Nestorianism, and Miaphysitism.
In the 5th century, the Western Roman Empire decayed as a polity; invaders sacked Rome in 410 and in 455, and Odoacer, an Arian barbarian warlord, forced Romulus Augustus, the last nominal Western Emperor, to abdicate in 476.
However, apart from the aforementioned schisms, the church as an institution persisted in communion, if not without tension, between the East and West.
In the 6th century, the Byzantine armies of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I recovered Italy and other regions of the Western Mediterranean shore. The Byzantine Empire soon lost most of these gains, but it held Rome, as part of the Exarchate of Ravenna, until 751, a period known in church history as the Byzantine Papacy.
The early Muslim conquests of the 7th–9th centuries would begin a process of converting most of the then-Christian world in the Levant, Middle East, North Africa, regions of Southern Italy and the Iberian Peninsula to Islam, severely restricting the reach both of the Byzantine Empire and of its church.
Christian missionary activity directed from the capital of Constantinople did not lead to a lasting expansion of the formal link between the church and the Byzantine emperor, since areas outside the Byzantine Empire's political and military control set up their own distinct churches, as in the case of Bulgaria in 919.
Justinian I, who became emperor in 527, recognized the patriarchs of the following:
However, Justinian claimed "the right and duty of regulating by his laws the minutest details of worship and discipline, and also of dictating the theological opinions to be held in the Church".
In Justinian's day, the Christian church was not entirely under the emperor's control even in the East: the Oriental Orthodox Churches had seceded, having rejected the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and called the adherents of the imperially-recognized church "Melkites", from Syriac malkâniya ("imperial").
In Western Europe, Christianity was mostly subject to the laws and customs of nations that owed no allegiance to the emperor in Constantinople. While Eastern-born popes appointed or at least confirmed by the emperor continued to be loyal to him as their political lord, they refused to accept his authority in religious matters, or the authority of such a council as the imperially convoked Council of Hieria of 754. Pope Gregory III (731–741) was the last Bishop of Rome to ask the Byzantine ruler to ratify his election.
With the crowning of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800 as Imperator Romanorum, the political split between East and West became irrevocable.
Spiritually, Chalcedonian Christianity persisted, at least in theory, as a unified entity until the Great Schism and its formal division with the mutual excommunication in 1054 of Rome and Constantinople. The empire finally collapsed with the Fall of Constantinople to the Islamic Ottoman Turks in 1453.
The obliteration of the empire's boundaries by Germanic peoples and an outburst of missionary activity among these peoples, who had no direct links with the empire, and among Pictic and Celtic peoples who had never been part of the Roman Empire, fostered the idea of a universal church free from association with a particular state.
On the contrary, "in the East Roman or Byzantine view, when the Roman Empire became Christian, the perfect world order willed by God had been achieved: one universal empire was sovereign, and coterminous with it was the one universal church"; and the church came, by the time of the demise of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, to merge psychologically with it to the extent that its bishops had difficulty in thinking of Nicene Christianity without an emperor.
The legacy of the idea of a universal church carries on in today's Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Church of the East. Many other churches, such as the Anglican Communion, claim succession to this universal church.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Christianity as the Roman state religion:
From the accession of Caesar Augustus as the first Roman emperor to the military anarchy of the 3rd century, it was a Principate with Italia as the metropole of its provinces and the city of Rome as its sole capital.
The Empire was later ruled by multiple emperors who shared control over the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire. The imperial seat moved from Rome to Byzantium and following the collapse of the West in AD 476, it became its sole capital as Constantinople.
The adoption of Christianity as the state church of the Roman Empire in AD 380 and the fall of the Western Roman Empire to Germanic kings conventionally marks the end of classical antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages.
Because of these events, along with the prevalence of Greek instead of Latin, some historians distinguish the medieval Roman Empire that remained in the Eastern provinces as the Byzantine Empire.
The predecessor state of the Roman Empire, the Roman Republic, became severely destabilized in civil wars and political conflicts. In the middle of the 1st century BC, Julius Caesar was appointed as dictator perpetuo ("dictator in perpetuity"), and then assassinated in 44 BC.
Civil wars and proscriptions continued, eventually culminating in the victory of Octavian over Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. The following year, Octavian conquered the Ptolemaic Kingdom in Egypt, ending the Hellenistic period that had begun with the 4th century BC conquests of Alexander the Great. Octavian's power became unassailable and the Roman Senate granted him overarching power (imperium) and the new title of Augustus, making him the first Roman emperor.
The vast Roman territories were organized in senatorial and imperial provinces except Italy, which continued to serve as a metropole.
The first two centuries of the Roman Empire saw a period of unprecedented stability and prosperity known as the Pax Romana (lit. 'Roman Peace'). Rome reached its greatest territorial expanse during the reign of Trajan (AD 98–117); a period of increasing trouble and decline began with the reign of Commodus (177–192).
In the 3rd century, the Empire underwent a crisis that threatened its existence, as the Gallic and Palmyrene Empires broke away from the Roman state, and a series of short-lived emperors, often from the legions, led the Empire. It was reunified under Aurelian (r. 270–275). To stabilize it, Diocletian set up two different imperial courts in the Greek East and Latin West in 286; Christians rose to positions of power in the 4th century following the Edict of Milan of 313.
Shortly after, the Migration Period, involving large invasions by Germanic peoples and by the Huns of Attila, led to the decline of the Western Roman Empire. With the fall of Ravenna to the Germanic Herulians and the deposition of Romulus Augustus in AD 476 by Odoacer, the Western Roman Empire finally collapsed; the Eastern Roman emperor Zeno formally abolished it in AD 480.
The Eastern Roman Empire survived for another millennium, until Constantinople fell in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks under Mehmed II.
Due to the Roman Empire's vast extent and long endurance, the institutions and culture of Rome had a profound and lasting influence on the development of the following:
- language,
- religion,
- art,
- architecture,
- literature,
- philosophy,
- law,
- and forms of government in the territory it governed.
The Latin language of the Romans evolved into the Romance languages of the medieval and modern world, while Medieval Greek became the language of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Empire's adoption of Christianity led to the formation of medieval Christendom. Roman and Greek art had a profound impact on the Italian Renaissance.
Rome's architectural tradition served as the basis for Romanesque, Renaissance and Neoclassical architecture, and also had a strong influence on Islamic architecture. The rediscovery of Greek and Roman science and technology (which also formed the basis for Islamic science) in Medieval Europe led to the Scientific Renaissance and Scientific Revolution.
The corpus of Roman law has its descendants in many modern legal systems of the world, such as the Napoleonic Code of France, while Rome's republican institutions have left an enduring legacy, influencing the Italian city-state republics of the medieval period, as well as the early United States and other modern democratic republics.
Click on any blue hyperlink below to be taken to that topic:
- History
- Geography and demography
- Languages
- Society
- Government and military
- Economy
- Architecture and engineering
- Health and disease
- Daily life
- Arts
- Literacy, books, and education
- See also:
- Legacy of the Roman Empire
- Outline of ancient Rome
- Fall of the Western Roman Empire
- List of political systems in France
- List of Roman dynasties
- Daqin ("Great Qin"), the ancient Chinese name for the Roman Empire; see also Sino-Roman relations
- Imperial Italy
- Byzantine Empire under the Justinian dynasty
Christianity as the Roman state religion:
Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire when Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, which recognized the catholic orthodoxy of Nicene Christians in the Great Church as the Roman Empire's state religion.
Most historians refer to the Nicene church associated with emperors in a variety of ways: as the catholic church, the orthodox church, the imperial church, the imperial Roman church, or the Byzantine church, although some of those terms are also used for wider communions extending outside the Roman Empire.
The Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodoxy, and the Catholic Church all claim to stand in continuity from the Nicene church to which Theodosius granted recognition.
Earlier in the 4th century, following the Diocletianic Persecution of 303–313 and the Donatist controversy that arose in consequence, Constantine the Great had convened councils of bishops to define the orthodoxy of the Christian faith and to expand on earlier Christian councils.
A series of ecumenical councils convened by successive Roman emperors met during the 4th and the 5th centuries, but Christianity continued to suffer rifts and schisms surrounding the theological and christological doctrines of Arianism, Nestorianism, and Miaphysitism.
In the 5th century, the Western Roman Empire decayed as a polity; invaders sacked Rome in 410 and in 455, and Odoacer, an Arian barbarian warlord, forced Romulus Augustus, the last nominal Western Emperor, to abdicate in 476.
However, apart from the aforementioned schisms, the church as an institution persisted in communion, if not without tension, between the East and West.
In the 6th century, the Byzantine armies of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I recovered Italy and other regions of the Western Mediterranean shore. The Byzantine Empire soon lost most of these gains, but it held Rome, as part of the Exarchate of Ravenna, until 751, a period known in church history as the Byzantine Papacy.
The early Muslim conquests of the 7th–9th centuries would begin a process of converting most of the then-Christian world in the Levant, Middle East, North Africa, regions of Southern Italy and the Iberian Peninsula to Islam, severely restricting the reach both of the Byzantine Empire and of its church.
Christian missionary activity directed from the capital of Constantinople did not lead to a lasting expansion of the formal link between the church and the Byzantine emperor, since areas outside the Byzantine Empire's political and military control set up their own distinct churches, as in the case of Bulgaria in 919.
Justinian I, who became emperor in 527, recognized the patriarchs of the following:
- Rome,
- Constantinople,
- Alexandria,
- Antioch,
- and Jerusalem
However, Justinian claimed "the right and duty of regulating by his laws the minutest details of worship and discipline, and also of dictating the theological opinions to be held in the Church".
In Justinian's day, the Christian church was not entirely under the emperor's control even in the East: the Oriental Orthodox Churches had seceded, having rejected the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and called the adherents of the imperially-recognized church "Melkites", from Syriac malkâniya ("imperial").
In Western Europe, Christianity was mostly subject to the laws and customs of nations that owed no allegiance to the emperor in Constantinople. While Eastern-born popes appointed or at least confirmed by the emperor continued to be loyal to him as their political lord, they refused to accept his authority in religious matters, or the authority of such a council as the imperially convoked Council of Hieria of 754. Pope Gregory III (731–741) was the last Bishop of Rome to ask the Byzantine ruler to ratify his election.
With the crowning of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800 as Imperator Romanorum, the political split between East and West became irrevocable.
Spiritually, Chalcedonian Christianity persisted, at least in theory, as a unified entity until the Great Schism and its formal division with the mutual excommunication in 1054 of Rome and Constantinople. The empire finally collapsed with the Fall of Constantinople to the Islamic Ottoman Turks in 1453.
The obliteration of the empire's boundaries by Germanic peoples and an outburst of missionary activity among these peoples, who had no direct links with the empire, and among Pictic and Celtic peoples who had never been part of the Roman Empire, fostered the idea of a universal church free from association with a particular state.
On the contrary, "in the East Roman or Byzantine view, when the Roman Empire became Christian, the perfect world order willed by God had been achieved: one universal empire was sovereign, and coterminous with it was the one universal church"; and the church came, by the time of the demise of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, to merge psychologically with it to the extent that its bishops had difficulty in thinking of Nicene Christianity without an emperor.
The legacy of the idea of a universal church carries on in today's Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Church of the East. Many other churches, such as the Anglican Communion, claim succession to this universal church.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Christianity as the Roman state religion:
Generational Differences in the Workplace: Infographic Content
Traditionalists
Born: 1925–1945
Dependable, straightforward, tactful, loyal:
Baby Boomers
Generation X
Millennials
Generation Z:
References:
Click Here for More About Purdue Global
Traditionalists
Born: 1925–1945
Dependable, straightforward, tactful, loyal:
- Shaped by: The Great Depression, World War II, radio, and movies
- Motivated by: Respect, recognition, providing long-term value to the company
- Communication style: Personal touch, handwritten notes instead of email
- Worldview: Obedience over individualism; age equals seniority; advancing through the hierarchy
Baby Boomers
- Born: 1946–1964
- Optimistic, competitive, workaholic, team-oriented
- Shaped by: The Vietnam War, civil rights movement, Watergate
- Motivated by: Company loyalty, teamwork, duty
- Communication style: Whatever is most efficient, including phone calls and face-to-face
- Worldview: Achievement comes after paying one’s dues; sacrifice for success
- 49% of Baby Boomers expect to or already are working past age 70 or do not plan to retire1
- 10,000 Baby Boomers reach retirement age every day2
Generation X
- Born: 1965–1980
- Flexible, informal, skeptical, independent
- Shaped by: The AIDs epidemic, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dot-com boom
- Motivated by: Diversity, work-life balance, their personal-professional interests rather than the company's interests
- Communication style: Whatever is most efficient, including phone calls and face-to-face
- Worldview: Favoring diversity; quick to move on if their employer fails to meet their needs; resistant to change at work if it affects their personal lives
- 55% of startup founders are Gen Xers — the highest percentage3
- By 2028, Gen Xers will outnumber Baby Boomers4
Millennials
- Born: 1981–2000
- Competitive, civic- and open-minded, achievement-oriented
- Shaped by: Columbine, 9/11, the internet
- Motivated by: Responsibility, the quality of their manager, unique work experiences
- Communication style: IMs, texts, and email
- Worldview: Seeking challenge, growth, and development; a fun work life and work-life balance; likely to leave an organization if they don't like change
- 75% percent of the global workforce will be made up of Millennials by 20255
- 18% of Millennial men ages 25–34 live at home with their parents6
- 12% of Millennial women ages 25–34 live at home with their parents6
Generation Z:
- Born: 2001–2020
- Global, entrepreneurial, progressive, less focused
- Shaped by: Life after 9/11, the Great Recession, access to technology from a young age
- Motivated by: Diversity, personalization, individuality, creativity
- Communication style: Social media, texts, IMs
- Worldview: Self-identifying as digital device addicts; valuing independence and individuality; prefer to work with Millennial managers, innovative coworkers, and new technologies
- 67% of Gen Zers want to work at companies where they can learn skills to advance their careers
- 80% of Gen Zers believe government and employers should subsidize, pay full tuition, or provide direct training for students
References:
- Report: Almost Half of Baby Boomers Still Working Past Age 70. NRMLA.
- Aging. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
- Generation X: Connecting with Health Care’s Next Big Consumer. Cosimano L. LinkedIn.
- Millennials Overtake Baby Boomers as America’s Largest Generation. Pew Research Center.
- Millennials in the Workplace Statistics: Generational Disparities in 2023. TeamStage.
- Millennials Are Living with Their Parents at Higher Rates than Past Generations, and They’re not Ashamed. Business Insider.
Click Here for More About Purdue Global
World Population
by American Museum of Natural History
- YouTube Video: Human Population Through Time
- YouTube Video: Millennials: The Unluckiest Generation In Modern History?
- YouTube Video: What Generational Differences Tell Us About the Future | Jean Twenge
by American Museum of Natural History
In demographics, the world population is the total number of humans currently living. As of March 2017, it was estimated at 7.49 billion. The United Nations estimates it will further increase to 11.2 billion in the year 2100.
World population has experienced continuous growth since the end of the Great Famine of 1315–17 and the Black Death in 1350, when it was near 370 million. The highest population growth rates – global population increases above 1.8% per year – occurred between 1955-1975 peaking to 2.06% between 1965-1970. The growth rate has declined to 1.18% between 2010-2015 and is projected to decline to 0.13% by the year 2100.
Total annual births were highest in the late 1980s at about 139 million, and are now expected to remain essentially constant at their 2011 level of 135 million, while deaths number 56 million per year and are expected to increase to 80 million per year by 2040. World population reached 7 billion on October 31, 2011 according to the United Nations Population Fund, and on March 12, 2012 according to the United States Census Bureau.
The median age of the world's population was estimated to be 30.1 years in 2016, with the male median age estimated to be 29.4 years and female, 30.9 years.
The 2012 UN projections show a continued increase in population in the near future with a steady decline in population growth rate; the global population is expected to reach between 8.3 and 10.9 billion by 2050.
2003 UN Population Division population projections for the year 2150 range between 3.2 and 24.8 billion. One of many independent mathematical models supports the lower estimate, while a 2014 estimate forecasts between 9.3 and 12.6 billion in 2100, and continued growth thereafter.
Some analysts have questioned the sustainability of further world population growth, highlighting the growing pressures on the environment, global food supplies, and energy resources.
Estimates on the total number of humans who have ever lived range in the order of 106 to 108 billion.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about World Population:
World population has experienced continuous growth since the end of the Great Famine of 1315–17 and the Black Death in 1350, when it was near 370 million. The highest population growth rates – global population increases above 1.8% per year – occurred between 1955-1975 peaking to 2.06% between 1965-1970. The growth rate has declined to 1.18% between 2010-2015 and is projected to decline to 0.13% by the year 2100.
Total annual births were highest in the late 1980s at about 139 million, and are now expected to remain essentially constant at their 2011 level of 135 million, while deaths number 56 million per year and are expected to increase to 80 million per year by 2040. World population reached 7 billion on October 31, 2011 according to the United Nations Population Fund, and on March 12, 2012 according to the United States Census Bureau.
The median age of the world's population was estimated to be 30.1 years in 2016, with the male median age estimated to be 29.4 years and female, 30.9 years.
The 2012 UN projections show a continued increase in population in the near future with a steady decline in population growth rate; the global population is expected to reach between 8.3 and 10.9 billion by 2050.
2003 UN Population Division population projections for the year 2150 range between 3.2 and 24.8 billion. One of many independent mathematical models supports the lower estimate, while a 2014 estimate forecasts between 9.3 and 12.6 billion in 2100, and continued growth thereafter.
Some analysts have questioned the sustainability of further world population growth, highlighting the growing pressures on the environment, global food supplies, and energy resources.
Estimates on the total number of humans who have ever lived range in the order of 106 to 108 billion.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about World Population:
- Population by region
- History including Milestones by the billions
- Global demographics
- Largest populations by country
- Most densely populated countries
- Fluctuation:
- Population growth by region
Past population
Projections
- Population growth by region
- Mathematical approximations including Years for world population to double
- Overpopulation
- See also:
- Anthropocene
- Birth control
- Coastal population growth
- Demographic transition
- Depopulation
- Doomsday argument
- Family planning
- Food security
- Megacity
- Natalism
- One-child policy
- Population boom
- Population Matters, population control think tank and campaign group
- Two-child policy
- World's largest cities
- Lists:
- List of urban areas by population
- List of population concern organizations
- List of countries by fertility rate
- List of countries by past and future population
- List of countries by population in 1900
- List of countries by population density
- List of countries by population growth rate
- Lists of organisms by population – for non-human global populations
- List of religious populations
- Historical:
Ranking U.S. Generations on Their Power and Influence Over Society by Visual Capitalist
Pictured below: The Generational Power Index The Generational Power Index
Introducing our new index, which ranks U.S. generations on their economic, political, and cultural influence.
- YouTube Video about U..S. Generations on Power and Influence
- YouTube Video: Every Birth Generation Explained in 9 Minutes
- YouTube Video: Generation Comparison (1901-2024)
Pictured below: The Generational Power Index The Generational Power Index
Introducing our new index, which ranks U.S. generations on their economic, political, and cultural influence.
Which U.S. Generation has the Most Power and Influence? We’re on the cusp of one of the most impactful generational shifts in history.
As it stands, the Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) are America’s most wealthy and influential generation. But even the youngest Boomers are close to retirement, with millions leaving the workforce every year. As Baby Boomers pass the torch, which generation will take their place as America’s most powerful?
In our inaugural Generational Power Index (GPI) for 2021, we’ve attempted to quantify how much power and influence each generation holds in American society, and what that means for the near future.
Generation and Power, DefinedBefore diving into the results of the first GPI, it’s important to explain how we’ve chosen to define both generations and power.
Here’s the breakdown of how we categorized each generation, along with their age ranges and birth years.
As it stands, the Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) are America’s most wealthy and influential generation. But even the youngest Boomers are close to retirement, with millions leaving the workforce every year. As Baby Boomers pass the torch, which generation will take their place as America’s most powerful?
In our inaugural Generational Power Index (GPI) for 2021, we’ve attempted to quantify how much power and influence each generation holds in American society, and what that means for the near future.
Generation and Power, DefinedBefore diving into the results of the first GPI, it’s important to explain how we’ve chosen to define both generations and power.
Here’s the breakdown of how we categorized each generation, along with their age ranges and birth years.
Ranking U.S. Generations on Their Power and Influence Over Society
The Generational Power Index
Introducing our new index, which ranks U.S. generations on their economic, political, and cultural influence.
>> Download the Report (.pdf)
Which U.S. Generation has the Most Power and Influence? We’re on the cusp of one of the most impactful generational shifts in history.
As it stands, the Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) are America’s most wealthy and influential generation. But even the youngest Boomers are close to retirement, with millions leaving the workforce every year. As Baby Boomers pass the torch, which generation will take their place as America’s most powerful?
In our inaugural Generational Power Index (GPI) for 2021, we’ve attempted to quantify how much power and influence each generation holds in American society, and what that means for the near future.
Click here to Download the Generational Power Report (.pdf)
Generation and Power, Defined
Before diving into the results of the first GPI, it’s important to explain how we’ve chosen to define both generations and power.
Here’s the breakdown of how we categorized each generation, along with their age ranges and birth years.
The Generational Power Index
Introducing our new index, which ranks U.S. generations on their economic, political, and cultural influence.
>> Download the Report (.pdf)
Which U.S. Generation has the Most Power and Influence? We’re on the cusp of one of the most impactful generational shifts in history.
As it stands, the Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) are America’s most wealthy and influential generation. But even the youngest Boomers are close to retirement, with millions leaving the workforce every year. As Baby Boomers pass the torch, which generation will take their place as America’s most powerful?
In our inaugural Generational Power Index (GPI) for 2021, we’ve attempted to quantify how much power and influence each generation holds in American society, and what that means for the near future.
Click here to Download the Generational Power Report (.pdf)
Generation and Power, Defined
Before diving into the results of the first GPI, it’s important to explain how we’ve chosen to define both generations and power.
Here’s the breakdown of how we categorized each generation, along with their age ranges and birth years.
The above age brackets for each generation aren’t universally accepted. However, since our report largely focuses on U.S. data, we went with the most widely cited definitions, used by establishments such as Pew Research Center and the U.S. Federal Reserve.
To measure power, we considered a variety of factors that fell under three main categories:
We’ll dive deeper into each category, and which generations dominated each one, below.
Overall Power, By Generation
Baby Boomers lead the pack when it comes to overall generational power, capturing 38.6%
To measure power, we considered a variety of factors that fell under three main categories:
- Economic Power
- Political Power
- Cultural Power
We’ll dive deeper into each category, and which generations dominated each one, below.
Overall Power, By Generation
Baby Boomers lead the pack when it comes to overall generational power, capturing 38.6%
While Boomers hold the largest share of power, it’s interesting to note that they only make up 21.8% of the total U.S. population.
Gen X comes in second place, capturing 30.4% of power, while Gen Z ranks last, snagging a mere 3.7%. Gen Alpha has yet to score on the ranking, but keep in mind that the oldest members of this generation will only be eight years old this year—they haven’t even reached double digits yet.
Generational Power: Economics:
Considering that Baby Boomers hold nearly 53% of all U.S. household wealth, it makes sense that they dominate when it comes to our measurement of Economic Power.
At 43.4%, the GPI shows that Boomers hold more economic influence than Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z combined. They make up a majority of business leaders in the U.S., and hold 42% of billionaire wealth in America.
Timing plays a role in the economic prosperity of Baby Boomers. They grew up in a post-WWII era, and spent their primary working years in a relatively stable, prosperous economy.
In contrast, Millennials entered the workforce during the Great Recession and have seen only tenuous economic and wage growth, impacting their ability to accumulate wealth.
Combine this with crippling amounts of student debt, and it’s no surprise that Millennials have nearly 50% less wealth than other generations (Boomers, Gen X) at a comparable age.
Generational Power: Political:
In addition to holding the most Economic Power in the GPI, Baby Boomers also rank number one when it comes to Political Power.
Gen X comes in second place, capturing 30.4% of power, while Gen Z ranks last, snagging a mere 3.7%. Gen Alpha has yet to score on the ranking, but keep in mind that the oldest members of this generation will only be eight years old this year—they haven’t even reached double digits yet.
Generational Power: Economics:
Considering that Baby Boomers hold nearly 53% of all U.S. household wealth, it makes sense that they dominate when it comes to our measurement of Economic Power.
At 43.4%, the GPI shows that Boomers hold more economic influence than Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z combined. They make up a majority of business leaders in the U.S., and hold 42% of billionaire wealth in America.
Timing plays a role in the economic prosperity of Baby Boomers. They grew up in a post-WWII era, and spent their primary working years in a relatively stable, prosperous economy.
In contrast, Millennials entered the workforce during the Great Recession and have seen only tenuous economic and wage growth, impacting their ability to accumulate wealth.
Combine this with crippling amounts of student debt, and it’s no surprise that Millennials have nearly 50% less wealth than other generations (Boomers, Gen X) at a comparable age.
Generational Power: Political:
In addition to holding the most Economic Power in the GPI, Baby Boomers also rank number one when it comes to Political Power.
Boomers capture 47.4% of political influence. This generation accounts for 32% of all U.S. voters, and holds the majority of federal and state positions. For instance, 68% of U.S. senators are Baby Boomers.
Political spending on election campaigns and lobbying predominantly comes from Boomers, too. When it comes to money spent on lobbying, we found that 60% of the top 20 spenders were from organizations led by Baby Boomers.
In contrast, Millennials and Gen Zers barely make a splash in the political realm. That said, in the coming years, it’s estimated that the combined voting power of Millennials and Gen Z will see immense growth, rising from 32% of voters in 2020 up to 55% by 2036.
Cultural Power:
There is one category where other generations gave Boomers a run for their money, which is in Cultural Power.
Political spending on election campaigns and lobbying predominantly comes from Boomers, too. When it comes to money spent on lobbying, we found that 60% of the top 20 spenders were from organizations led by Baby Boomers.
In contrast, Millennials and Gen Zers barely make a splash in the political realm. That said, in the coming years, it’s estimated that the combined voting power of Millennials and Gen Z will see immense growth, rising from 32% of voters in 2020 up to 55% by 2036.
Cultural Power:
There is one category where other generations gave Boomers a run for their money, which is in Cultural Power.

In this category, it’s actually Gen X that leads the pack, capturing 36.0% of Cultural Power. Gen X is especially dominant in press and news media—over half of America’s largest news corporations have a Gen Xer as their CEO, and a majority of the most influential news personalities are also members of Gen X.
Despite a strong showing in our culture category, Gen X falls short in one key variable we looked at—the digital realm. On digital platforms, Millennials dominate when it comes to both users and content creators, and Gen Z has growing influence here as well.
The Future of Generational Power
Generational power is not stagnant, and it ebbs and flows over time.
As this process naturally plays out, our new Generational Power Index and the coinciding annual report will aim to help quantify future shifts in power each year, while also highlighting the key stories that exemplify these new developments.
For a full methodology of how we built the Generational Power Index, see pages 28-30 in the report PDF. This is the first year of the report, and any feedback is welcomed.
Despite a strong showing in our culture category, Gen X falls short in one key variable we looked at—the digital realm. On digital platforms, Millennials dominate when it comes to both users and content creators, and Gen Z has growing influence here as well.
The Future of Generational Power
Generational power is not stagnant, and it ebbs and flows over time.
As this process naturally plays out, our new Generational Power Index and the coinciding annual report will aim to help quantify future shifts in power each year, while also highlighting the key stories that exemplify these new developments.
For a full methodology of how we built the Generational Power Index, see pages 28-30 in the report PDF. This is the first year of the report, and any feedback is welcomed.
Diversity: herein we initially cover racial and ethnic diversity in the USA, then we separately cover all of the forms of Diversity:
- YouTube Video: Your Community by the Numbers Race and Ethnicity (U.S. Census Bureau)
- YouTube Video: Redefining Race and Ethnicity in the US (Voice of America)
- YouTube Video: America is becoming more urban, more diverse and less white, 2020 Census reveals (PBS News Hour)
* -- The increasingly diverse United States of America (By Dan Keating and Laris Karklis, The Washington Post (11/25/2016)
The racial and ethnic diversity of communities varies greatly across the country, but rapid change is coming to many of the least-diverse areas.
Farmland outside a Midwestern city turns into a bedroom enclave of commuting urban professionals. A handful of non-white people move to Dubuque, Iowa. Already diverse cities become increasingly mixed with immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
These are just some of the ways diversity is increasing in U.S. communities.
[ Donald Trump lost most of the American economy in this election]
To quantify how America is changing, we used the diversity index, which measures the chance that two people chosen at random will not be the same race and ethnicity. A high score means a county has people of many races and ethnicities, while a low score means the community is made up of a single dominant group.
To make these maps, we calculated the racial and ethnic diversity in every county in the contiguous United States for 2000, and again with the latest data from 2014.
The racial and ethnic diversity of communities varies greatly across the country, but rapid change is coming to many of the least-diverse areas.
Farmland outside a Midwestern city turns into a bedroom enclave of commuting urban professionals. A handful of non-white people move to Dubuque, Iowa. Already diverse cities become increasingly mixed with immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
These are just some of the ways diversity is increasing in U.S. communities.
[ Donald Trump lost most of the American economy in this election]
To quantify how America is changing, we used the diversity index, which measures the chance that two people chosen at random will not be the same race and ethnicity. A high score means a county has people of many races and ethnicities, while a low score means the community is made up of a single dominant group.
To make these maps, we calculated the racial and ethnic diversity in every county in the contiguous United States for 2000, and again with the latest data from 2014.
The bright yellow areas had very little diversity in 2000 but are experiencing the greatest rate of change. This pattern is evident from northern New England through vast swaths of the Midwest. It covers 56 million people. That’s one-sixth of the country that remained almost completely white all the way to 2000, but is now beginning the gradual change to a multicultural mix.
“When I was growing up in 1960s Dubuque, you didn’t see any other race, practically everybody was white,” said Janelle Lutgen, a Republican activist in Iowa. “I don’t think I worked with anybody of color, or went to school with anybody of color.”
But now Dubuque and the neighboring tri-State area of Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin along the Mississippi River is bright yellow with change, enough to generate some friction.
[ If you’ve ever described people as ‘white working class,’ read this]
Dubuque had a Black Lives Matter march and rally earlier this month. The participants mirrored the Iowa community — they were virtually all white — but said that addressing division was a goal. Lutgen, the Republican activist, agreed that change doesn’t have to mean conflict.
“I think it’s more the unknown than the actual problem,” she said of neighbors uncomfortable with increased diversity. “It’s more a perceived problem than an actual problem.”
A different type of bright yellow spot is Hamilton County, Ind., a commuter haven just north of Indianapolis, where diversity is arriving in the form of rapid growth. This county’s population increased by 59 percent since 2000, and the community offers affordable housing, a thriving business community and excellent schools.
The arrivals are often professional and diverse. In 2000, the county was 93 percent white, while in 2014, it was 85 percent white, with the second-largest group being Asians, followed by Hispanics and African Americans.
Cities in this county made it on lists of “ best places to live” and “ happiest suburb.” Hamilton had the nation’s greatest increase in racial and ethnic diversity of any county with at least 50,000 people.
“When I was growing up in 1960s Dubuque, you didn’t see any other race, practically everybody was white,” said Janelle Lutgen, a Republican activist in Iowa. “I don’t think I worked with anybody of color, or went to school with anybody of color.”
But now Dubuque and the neighboring tri-State area of Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin along the Mississippi River is bright yellow with change, enough to generate some friction.
[ If you’ve ever described people as ‘white working class,’ read this]
Dubuque had a Black Lives Matter march and rally earlier this month. The participants mirrored the Iowa community — they were virtually all white — but said that addressing division was a goal. Lutgen, the Republican activist, agreed that change doesn’t have to mean conflict.
“I think it’s more the unknown than the actual problem,” she said of neighbors uncomfortable with increased diversity. “It’s more a perceived problem than an actual problem.”
A different type of bright yellow spot is Hamilton County, Ind., a commuter haven just north of Indianapolis, where diversity is arriving in the form of rapid growth. This county’s population increased by 59 percent since 2000, and the community offers affordable housing, a thriving business community and excellent schools.
The arrivals are often professional and diverse. In 2000, the county was 93 percent white, while in 2014, it was 85 percent white, with the second-largest group being Asians, followed by Hispanics and African Americans.
Cities in this county made it on lists of “ best places to live” and “ happiest suburb.” Hamilton had the nation’s greatest increase in racial and ethnic diversity of any county with at least 50,000 people.
The blue swath of the country is made of counties that are already diverse. More than 190 million people, 60 percent of the country, lives in this blue area. It includes big cities, which are magnets for diverse populations. The curved region in the Southeast includes areas with white and African American communities, as well as Georgia and the Carolinas, where the Hispanic population is increasing.
[ How rural resentment helps explain the surprising victory of Donald Trump]
The Southwest is a mix of Hispanic, white and Native American. The Pacific Northwest is similar, but has an additional Asian population which increases diversity.
Some places in these blue areas, however, can be very different at the neighborhood level. A county can contain smaller segregated communities in addition to more diverse neighborhoods.
[ How rural resentment helps explain the surprising victory of Donald Trump]
The Southwest is a mix of Hispanic, white and Native American. The Pacific Northwest is similar, but has an additional Asian population which increases diversity.
Some places in these blue areas, however, can be very different at the neighborhood level. A county can contain smaller segregated communities in addition to more diverse neighborhoods.
The diversity index measurement has a natural cap, so once a place is very diverse, the measurement will not keep increasing. There is no place that registered the highest level of diversity and also in the highest rate of change. These scattered light blue and light green areas, however, have become more diverse since 2000.
Notable clusters of increasing diversity surround Boston, Seattle and Orlando. The area covers almost 60 million people, just under one-fifth of the country.
Notable clusters of increasing diversity surround Boston, Seattle and Orlando. The area covers almost 60 million people, just under one-fifth of the country.
Even when most of the country is becoming more diverse, there is an exception to every rule. The isolated zones of dark green are neither diverse nor experiencing change. They include just over 8 million people, 3 percent of the nation.
Some of them are areas that are almost all Hispanic, such as along the Texas-Mexico border, or are entirely Native American. Some of those places are likely to remain homogeneous into the foreseeable future.
[ To improve diversity, don’t make people go to diversity training. Really.]
In addition, clusters of counties in West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana and Idaho have remained virtually all white since 2000.
How people react to changing diversity:
Before and since the election, diversity has been at the heart of issues such as the Black Lives Matter movement, resistance to political correctness, the “Hamilton” cast’s message to Vice President-elect Mike Pence and attitudes about immigration.
Perceptions of “other” people lead not only to misunderstandings, experts said, but also to hostility. Some of it is simple psychology. People know their own lives are complex and have many explanations for what they do, said Patrick R. Grzanka, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee who studies social inequality. But people then reduce “outside groups” to a cardboard caricature – and a negative one at that.
[ Urban and rural America are becoming increasingly polarized]
For instance, residents in a multiethnic urban society can think that they live in a cooperative community of people coming together but disparage rural areas as backward. Meanwhile, people in rural communities prize their tight relationships but describe cities as crime-ridden and harsh. Both sides are shocked at the generalizations used by the other side.
In the wake of the election, Grzanka said, the depth of misunderstanding creates “a profoundly important moment. It is really dangerous.” To cross the barrier, he said, people must say “I need to learn why their version of America is so terrifying to me. … If you hate NAFTA and I love NAFTA, we’ve got to be able to talk about this stuff and not just characterize each other as ridiculous human beings.”
Diversity also makes the country more dynamic and bolsters the workforce, benefits highlighted by demographer William Frey, a research professor at the University of Michigan and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Frey recently published “ Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics are Remaking America.” If you only look at the country’s white population, Frey said, it would look like Japan, with an aging population and too few young workers to grow the economy.
[ Residents in most diverse areas say their neighborhoods are better than others]
He said it’s important to see the diversity question in terms of age. Forty-seven states and 90 percent of the counties have an absolute decline in white population under age 20. All net growth of children in this country is coming from racial and ethnic minorities.
“If we’re going to have a productive economy in the future, new young people with new ideas energizing the labor force — taxpayers supporting the Social Security Trust Fund and Medicare for retirees — it’s in our best interest if this younger generation is treated well and welcomed with open arms into the labor force,” Frey said.
[End of Washington Post Article]
Source: Post analysis of Census Bureau data. Bonnie Berkowitz contributed to this report.
___________________________________________________________________________
Below, you will find the Complete Wikipedia Article on "Diversity", which has many meanings and applications:
Business
Politics:
Science:
Biology:
Technology:
As a proper name:
Music:
Other:
See also:
Wikiquote has quotations related to Diversity.
Some of them are areas that are almost all Hispanic, such as along the Texas-Mexico border, or are entirely Native American. Some of those places are likely to remain homogeneous into the foreseeable future.
[ To improve diversity, don’t make people go to diversity training. Really.]
In addition, clusters of counties in West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana and Idaho have remained virtually all white since 2000.
How people react to changing diversity:
Before and since the election, diversity has been at the heart of issues such as the Black Lives Matter movement, resistance to political correctness, the “Hamilton” cast’s message to Vice President-elect Mike Pence and attitudes about immigration.
Perceptions of “other” people lead not only to misunderstandings, experts said, but also to hostility. Some of it is simple psychology. People know their own lives are complex and have many explanations for what they do, said Patrick R. Grzanka, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee who studies social inequality. But people then reduce “outside groups” to a cardboard caricature – and a negative one at that.
[ Urban and rural America are becoming increasingly polarized]
For instance, residents in a multiethnic urban society can think that they live in a cooperative community of people coming together but disparage rural areas as backward. Meanwhile, people in rural communities prize their tight relationships but describe cities as crime-ridden and harsh. Both sides are shocked at the generalizations used by the other side.
In the wake of the election, Grzanka said, the depth of misunderstanding creates “a profoundly important moment. It is really dangerous.” To cross the barrier, he said, people must say “I need to learn why their version of America is so terrifying to me. … If you hate NAFTA and I love NAFTA, we’ve got to be able to talk about this stuff and not just characterize each other as ridiculous human beings.”
Diversity also makes the country more dynamic and bolsters the workforce, benefits highlighted by demographer William Frey, a research professor at the University of Michigan and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Frey recently published “ Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics are Remaking America.” If you only look at the country’s white population, Frey said, it would look like Japan, with an aging population and too few young workers to grow the economy.
[ Residents in most diverse areas say their neighborhoods are better than others]
He said it’s important to see the diversity question in terms of age. Forty-seven states and 90 percent of the counties have an absolute decline in white population under age 20. All net growth of children in this country is coming from racial and ethnic minorities.
“If we’re going to have a productive economy in the future, new young people with new ideas energizing the labor force — taxpayers supporting the Social Security Trust Fund and Medicare for retirees — it’s in our best interest if this younger generation is treated well and welcomed with open arms into the labor force,” Frey said.
[End of Washington Post Article]
Source: Post analysis of Census Bureau data. Bonnie Berkowitz contributed to this report.
___________________________________________________________________________
Below, you will find the Complete Wikipedia Article on "Diversity", which has many meanings and applications:
Business
- Diversity (business), the inclusion of people of different identities (ethnicity, gender, age) in the workforce
- Diversity marketing, marketing communication targeting diverse customers
- Supplier diversity, the use of diverse suppliers
Politics:
- Diversity (politics), the political and social policy of encouraging tolerance for people of different cultural and racial backgrounds
- Diversity Immigrant Visa or Green Card Lottery, a United States immigration program
- Diversity jurisdiction, a concept under which U.S. federal courts can hear suits between parties from different states
- Diversity training, the process of educating people to function in a diverse environment
- Cultural diversity, the respect of different cultures and interculturality
- Functional diversity (disability), a term for special needs, disability, impairment and handicap
- Gerodiversity, a multicultural approach to issues of aging
- Multiculturalism, or ethnic diversity, the promotion of multiple ethnic cultures
- Neurodiversity, a movement in support of civil rights of people with atypical neurological characteristics
Science:
- Diversity factor, a concept in electrical engineering
- Functional diversity, a term in geography
- Linguistic diversity
- Diversity (mathematics), a generalization of metric space
Biology:
- Biodiversity, degree of variation of life forms within an ecosystem
- Crop diversity, the variance in genetic and phenotypic characteristics of plants used in agriculture
- Diversity index, a statistic to assess the diversity of a population
- Ecosystem diversity, the diversity of a place at the level of ecosystems
- Functional diversity (ecology), the elements of biodiversity that influence how ecosystems function
- Genetic diversity, the total number of genetic characteristics in the genetic makeup of a species
- Nucleotide diversity, a measure of the degree of polymorphism within a population
- Phylogenetic diversity, a measure of biodiversity which incorporates phylogenetic difference between species
- Species diversity, the effective number of species represented in a data set
- Diversity (journal), an academic journal published by MDPI
Technology:
- Diversity combining, the combining of multiple received signals into a single improved signal
- Diversity gain, the increase in signal-to-interference ratio due to a diversity scheme
- Diversity scheme, a method for improving reliability of a message signal by using multiple communications channels
- Antenna diversity or space diversity, a method of wireless communication that use two or more antennas to improve reliability
- Cooperative diversity, a multiple antenna technique for improving or maximising total network channel capacities
- Site diversity, multiple receivers for satellite communication
- Time diversity, a technique used in digital communication systems
- Transmit diversity, wireless communication using signals originating from two or more independent sources
As a proper name:
Music:
- Diversity (album), a 2010 reggae album by Gentleman
- Diversity (dance troupe), an English dance troupe based in London
- Diversity FM, a radio station in Lancaster, England
- Diverse (rapper)
- "Diverse", a song by Charlie Parker
Other:
- Diversity University, a virtual reality system for education
See also:
Wikiquote has quotations related to Diversity.
- Diversity (business), the inclusion of people of different identities (ethnicity, gender, age) in the workforce
- Diversity marketing, marketing communication targeting diverse customers
- Supplier diversity, the use of diverse suppliers
A generation gap or generational gap, is a difference of opinions between one generation and another regarding beliefs, politics, or values. In today's usage, "generation gap" often refers to a perceived gap between younger people and their parents or grandparents.
Early sociologists such as Karl Mannheim noted differences across generations in how the youth transistions into adulthood. and studied the ways in which generations separate themselves from one another, in the home and in social situations and areas (such as churches, clubs, senior centers, and youth centers).
The sociological theory of a generation gap first came to light in the 1960s, when the younger generation (later known as Baby Boomers) seemed to go against everything their parents had previously believed in terms of music, values, governmental and political views. Sociologists now refer to "generation gap" as "institutional age segregation".
Usually, when any of these age groups is engaged in its primary activity, the individual members are physically isolated from people of other generations, with little interaction across age barriers except at the nuclear family level.
Distinguishing generation gaps:
There are several ways to make distinctions between generations. For example, names are given to major groups (Baby boomers, Gen X, etc.) and each generation sets its own trends and has its own cultural impact.
Language use:
Generation gaps can be distinguished by the differences in their language use. The generation gap has created a parallel gap in language that can be difficult to communicate across. This issue is one visible throughout society, creating complications within day to day communication at home, in the work place, and within schools.
As new generations seek to define themselves as something apart from the old, they adopt new lingo and slang, allowing a generation to create a sense of division from the previous one. This is a visible gap between generations we see every day. "Man's most important symbol is his language and through this language he defines his reality."
Slang:
Slang is an ever-changing set of colloquial words and phrases that speakers use to establish or reinforce social identity or cohesiveness within a group or with a trend in society at large.
As each successive generation of society struggles to establish its own unique identity among its predecessors it can be determined that generational gaps provide a large influence over the continual change and adaptation of slang.
As slang is often regarded as an ephemeral dialect, a constant supply of new words is required to meet the demands of the rapid change in characteristics. And while most slang terms maintain a fairly brief duration of popularity, slang provides a quick and readily available vernacular screen to establish and maintain generational gaps in a societal context.
Technological influences:
Every generation develops new slang, but with the development of technology, understanding gaps have widened between the older and younger generations. "The term 'communication skills,' for example, might mean formal writing and speaking abilities to an older worker. But it might mean e-mail and instant-messenger savvy to a twenty something."
People often have private conversations in secret in a crowded room in today's age due to the advances of mobile phones and text messaging. Among "texters" a form of slang or texting lingo has developed, often keeping those not as tech savvy out of the loop:
"Children increasingly rely on personal technological devices like cell phones to define themselves and create social circles apart from their families, changing the way they communicate with their parents. Cell phones, instant messaging, e-mail and the like have encouraged younger users to create their own inventive, quirky and very private written language. That has given them the opportunity to essentially hide in plain sight. They are more connected than ever, but also far more independent. Text messaging, in particular, has perhaps become this generation's version of pig Latin."
While in the case with language skills such as shorthand, a system of stenography popular during the twentieth century, technological innovations occurring between generations have made these skills obsolete. Older generations used shorthand to be able to take notes and write faster using abbreviated symbols, rather than having to write each word. However, with new technology and keyboards, newer generations no longer need these older communication skills, like Gregg shorthand.
Although over 20 years ago, language skills such as shorthand classes were taught in many high schools, now students have rarely seen or even heard of forms like shorthand.
The transitions from each level of lifespan development have remained the same throughout history. They have all shared the same basic milestones in their travel from childhood, through midlife and into retirement.
However, while the pathways remain the same—i.e. attending school, marriage, raising families, retiring—the actual journey varies not only with each individual, but with each new generation. For instance, as time goes on, technology is being introduced to individuals at younger and younger ages.
While the Baby Boomers had to introduce Atari and VCRs to their parents, Generation Y’ers had to teach their parents how to maneuver such things as DVRs, cell phones and social media. There is a vast difference in Generation Y’ers and the Baby Boomers when it comes to technology.
In 2011, the National Sleep Foundation conducted a poll that focused on sleep and the use of technology; 95% of those polled admitted to using some form of technology within the last hour before going to bed at night. The study compared the difference in sleep patterns in those who watched TV or listened to music prior to bedtime compared to those who used cell phones, video games and the Internet.
The study looked at Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964), Generation X’ers (born 1965-1980), Generation Y’ers (born 1981-2000) and Generation Z’ers (born mid 1990s or 2000 to present). The research, as expected, showed generational gaps between the different forms of technology used.
The largest gap was shown between texting and talking on the phone; 56% of Gen Z’ers and 42% of Gen Y’ers admitted to sending, receiving, reading text messages every night within one hour prior to bedtime, compared to only 15% of Gen X’ers (born 1965-1980), and 5% of Baby Boomers.
Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964), were more likely to watch TV within the last hour prior to bedtime, 67%, compared to Gen Y’ers (born 1981-2000), who came in at 49%. When asked about computer/internet use within the last hour prior to bedtime, 70% of those polled admitted to using a computer "a few times a week", and from those, 55% of the Gen Z’ers (born mid-1990s or 2000 to present), said they "surf the web" every night before bed.
Language brokering:
Another phenomenon within language that works to define a generation gap occurs within families in which different generations speak different primary languages. In order to find a means to communicate within the household environment, many have taken up the practice of language brokering, which refers to the "interpretation and translation performed in everyday situations by bilinguals who have had no special training".
In immigrant families where the first generation speaks primarily in their native tongue, the second generation primarily in the language of the country in which they now live while still retaining fluency in their parent's dominant language, and the third generation primarily in the language of the country they were born in while retaining little to no conversational language in their grandparent's native tongue, the second generation family members serve as interpreters not only to outside persons, but within the household, further propelling generational differences and divisions by means of linguistic communication.
Furthermore, in some immigrant families and communities, language brokering is also used to integrate children into family endeavors and into civil society. Child integration has become very important to form linkages between new immigrant communities and the predominant culture and new forms of bureaucratic systems. In addition, it also serves towards child development by learning and pitching in.
Workplace Attitudes:
USA Today reported that younger generations are "entering the workplace in the face of demographic change and an increasingly multi-generational workplace". Multiple engagement studies show that the interests shared across the generation gap by members of this increasingly multi-generational workplace can differ substantially.
A popular belief held by older generations is that the characteristics of Millennials can potentially complicate professional interactions. To some managers, this generation is a group of coddled, lazy, disloyal, and narcissistic young people, who are incapable of handling the simplest task without guidance. For this reason, when millennials first enter a new organization, they are often greeted with wary coworkers.
Career was an essential component of the identities of Baby boomers; they made many sacrifices, working 55 to 60 hour weeks, patiently waiting for promotions.
Millennials, on the other hand, are not workaholics and do not place such a strong emphasis on their careers. Even so, they expect all the perks, in terms of good pay and benefits, rapid advancement, work-life balance, stimulating work, and giving back to their community.
Studies have found that millennials are usually exceptionally confident in their abilities and, as a result, fail to prove themselves by working hard, seeking key roles in significant projects early on in their careers, which frustrates their older coworkers.
Most of these inflated expectations are direct results of the generation's upbringing. During the Great Recession, millennials watched first-hand as their parents worked long hours, only to fall victim to downsizing and layoffs.
Many families could not withstand these challenges, leading to high divorce rates and broken families. Millennials do not want to be put in the same position as their parents, so they have made their personal lives a main priority. In fact, fifty-nine percent of Millennials say the Great Recession negatively impacted their career plans, while only 35% of mature workers feel the same way.
For these reasons, millennials are more likely to negotiate the terms of their work. Though some boomers view this as lazy behavior, others have actually been able to learn from millennials, reflecting on whether the sacrifices that they had made in their lives provided them with the happiness that they had hoped for.
Growing up, millennials looked to parents, teachers, and coaches as a source of praise and support. They were a part of an educational system with inflated grades and Standardized tests, in which they were skilled at performing well. They were brought up believing they could be anything and everything they dreamed of. As a result, millennials developed a strong need for frequent, positive feedback from supervisors.
Today, managers find themselves assessing their subordinates’ productivity quite frequently, despite the fact that they often find it burdensome. Additionally, millennials’ salaries and Employee benefits give this generation an idea of how well they are performing. Millennials crave success, and good paying jobs have been proven to make them feel more successful.
Additionally, studies show that promotions are very important to millennials, and when they do not see opportunities for rapid advancement at one organization, they are quick to quit in an effort to find better opportunities. They have an unrealistic timeline for these promotions, however, which frustrates older generations.
They also have a low tolerance for unchallenging work; when work is not stimulating, they often perform poorly out of boredom. As a result, managers must constantly provide millennials with greater responsibility so that they feel more involved and needed in the organization.
Because group projects and presentations were commonplace during the schooling of millennials, this generation enjoys collaborating and even developing close friendships with colleagues. While working as part of a team enhances innovation, enhances productivity, and lowers personnel costs, downsides still exist.
Supervisors find that millennials avoid risk and independent responsibility by relying on team members when making decisions, which prevents them from showcasing their own abilities.
Perhaps the most commonly cited difference between older and younger generations is technological proficiency. Studies have shown that their reliance on technology has made millennials less comfortable with face-to-face interaction and deciphering verbal cues.
However, technological proficiency also has its benefits; millennials are far more effective in multitasking, responding to visual stimulation, and filtering information than older generations.
However, according to the engagement studies, mature workers and the new generations of workers share similar thoughts on a number of topics across the generation gap. Their opinions overlap on flexible working hours/arrangements, promotions/bonuses, the importance of computer proficiency, and leadership. Additionally, the majority of Millennials and mature workers enjoy going to work every day, and feel inspired to do their best.
Generational consciousness:
Generational consciousness is another way of distinguishing among generations that was worked on by social scientist Karl Mannheim. Generational consciousness is when a group of people become mindful of their place in a distinct group identifiable by their shared interests and values.
Social, economic, or political changes can bring awareness to these shared interests and values for similarly-aged people who experience these events together, and thereby form a generational consciousness. These types of experiences can impact individuals' development at a young age and enable them to begin making their own interpretations of the world based on personal encounters that set them apart from other generations.
Inter-generational Living:
"Both social isolation and loneliness in older men and women are associated with increased mortality, according to a 2012 Report by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America".
Inter-generational living is one method being used currently worldwide as a means of combating such feelings. A nursing home in Deventer, The Netherlands, developed a program wherein students from a local university are provided small, rent-free apartments within the nursing home facility. In exchange, the students volunteer a minimum of 30 hours per month to spend time with the seniors.
The students will watch sports with the seniors, celebrate birthdays, and simply keep them company during illnesses and times of distress. Programs similar to the Netherlands’ program were developed as far back as the mid-1990s in Barcelona, Spain.
In Spain's program, students were placed in seniors’ homes, with a similar goal of free/cheap housing in exchange for companionship for the elderly. That program quickly spread to 27 other cities throughout Spain, and similar programs can be found in Lyons, France, and Cleveland, Ohio.
Demographics:
In order for sociologists to understand the transition into adulthood of children in different generation gaps, they compare the current generation to both older and earlier generations at the same time.
Not only does each generation experience their own ways of mental and physical maturation, but they also create new aspects of attending school, forming new households, starting families and even creating new demographics. The difference in demographics regarding values, attitudes and behaviors between the two generations are used to create a profile for the emerging generation of young adults.
Following the thriving economic success that was a product of the Second World War, America's population skyrocketed between the years 1940-1959, to which the new American generation was called the Baby Boomers.
Today, as of 2017, many of these Baby Boomers have celebrated their 60th birthdays and in the next few years America's senior citizen population will boost exponentially due to the population of people who were born during the years 1940 and 1959. The generation gap, however, between the Baby Boomers and earlier generations is growing due to the Boomers population post-war.
There is a large demographic difference between the Baby Boomer generation and earlier generations, where earlier generations are less racially and ethnically diverse than the Baby Boomers’ population.
Where this drastic racial demographic difference occurs also holds to a continually growing cultural gap as well; baby boomers have had generally higher education, with a higher percentage of women in the labor force and more often occupying professional and managerial positions. These drastic culture and generation gaps create issues of community preferences as well as spending.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Generation Gap:
Early sociologists such as Karl Mannheim noted differences across generations in how the youth transistions into adulthood. and studied the ways in which generations separate themselves from one another, in the home and in social situations and areas (such as churches, clubs, senior centers, and youth centers).
The sociological theory of a generation gap first came to light in the 1960s, when the younger generation (later known as Baby Boomers) seemed to go against everything their parents had previously believed in terms of music, values, governmental and political views. Sociologists now refer to "generation gap" as "institutional age segregation".
Usually, when any of these age groups is engaged in its primary activity, the individual members are physically isolated from people of other generations, with little interaction across age barriers except at the nuclear family level.
Distinguishing generation gaps:
There are several ways to make distinctions between generations. For example, names are given to major groups (Baby boomers, Gen X, etc.) and each generation sets its own trends and has its own cultural impact.
Language use:
Generation gaps can be distinguished by the differences in their language use. The generation gap has created a parallel gap in language that can be difficult to communicate across. This issue is one visible throughout society, creating complications within day to day communication at home, in the work place, and within schools.
As new generations seek to define themselves as something apart from the old, they adopt new lingo and slang, allowing a generation to create a sense of division from the previous one. This is a visible gap between generations we see every day. "Man's most important symbol is his language and through this language he defines his reality."
Slang:
Slang is an ever-changing set of colloquial words and phrases that speakers use to establish or reinforce social identity or cohesiveness within a group or with a trend in society at large.
As each successive generation of society struggles to establish its own unique identity among its predecessors it can be determined that generational gaps provide a large influence over the continual change and adaptation of slang.
As slang is often regarded as an ephemeral dialect, a constant supply of new words is required to meet the demands of the rapid change in characteristics. And while most slang terms maintain a fairly brief duration of popularity, slang provides a quick and readily available vernacular screen to establish and maintain generational gaps in a societal context.
Technological influences:
Every generation develops new slang, but with the development of technology, understanding gaps have widened between the older and younger generations. "The term 'communication skills,' for example, might mean formal writing and speaking abilities to an older worker. But it might mean e-mail and instant-messenger savvy to a twenty something."
People often have private conversations in secret in a crowded room in today's age due to the advances of mobile phones and text messaging. Among "texters" a form of slang or texting lingo has developed, often keeping those not as tech savvy out of the loop:
"Children increasingly rely on personal technological devices like cell phones to define themselves and create social circles apart from their families, changing the way they communicate with their parents. Cell phones, instant messaging, e-mail and the like have encouraged younger users to create their own inventive, quirky and very private written language. That has given them the opportunity to essentially hide in plain sight. They are more connected than ever, but also far more independent. Text messaging, in particular, has perhaps become this generation's version of pig Latin."
While in the case with language skills such as shorthand, a system of stenography popular during the twentieth century, technological innovations occurring between generations have made these skills obsolete. Older generations used shorthand to be able to take notes and write faster using abbreviated symbols, rather than having to write each word. However, with new technology and keyboards, newer generations no longer need these older communication skills, like Gregg shorthand.
Although over 20 years ago, language skills such as shorthand classes were taught in many high schools, now students have rarely seen or even heard of forms like shorthand.
The transitions from each level of lifespan development have remained the same throughout history. They have all shared the same basic milestones in their travel from childhood, through midlife and into retirement.
However, while the pathways remain the same—i.e. attending school, marriage, raising families, retiring—the actual journey varies not only with each individual, but with each new generation. For instance, as time goes on, technology is being introduced to individuals at younger and younger ages.
While the Baby Boomers had to introduce Atari and VCRs to their parents, Generation Y’ers had to teach their parents how to maneuver such things as DVRs, cell phones and social media. There is a vast difference in Generation Y’ers and the Baby Boomers when it comes to technology.
In 2011, the National Sleep Foundation conducted a poll that focused on sleep and the use of technology; 95% of those polled admitted to using some form of technology within the last hour before going to bed at night. The study compared the difference in sleep patterns in those who watched TV or listened to music prior to bedtime compared to those who used cell phones, video games and the Internet.
The study looked at Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964), Generation X’ers (born 1965-1980), Generation Y’ers (born 1981-2000) and Generation Z’ers (born mid 1990s or 2000 to present). The research, as expected, showed generational gaps between the different forms of technology used.
The largest gap was shown between texting and talking on the phone; 56% of Gen Z’ers and 42% of Gen Y’ers admitted to sending, receiving, reading text messages every night within one hour prior to bedtime, compared to only 15% of Gen X’ers (born 1965-1980), and 5% of Baby Boomers.
Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964), were more likely to watch TV within the last hour prior to bedtime, 67%, compared to Gen Y’ers (born 1981-2000), who came in at 49%. When asked about computer/internet use within the last hour prior to bedtime, 70% of those polled admitted to using a computer "a few times a week", and from those, 55% of the Gen Z’ers (born mid-1990s or 2000 to present), said they "surf the web" every night before bed.
Language brokering:
Another phenomenon within language that works to define a generation gap occurs within families in which different generations speak different primary languages. In order to find a means to communicate within the household environment, many have taken up the practice of language brokering, which refers to the "interpretation and translation performed in everyday situations by bilinguals who have had no special training".
In immigrant families where the first generation speaks primarily in their native tongue, the second generation primarily in the language of the country in which they now live while still retaining fluency in their parent's dominant language, and the third generation primarily in the language of the country they were born in while retaining little to no conversational language in their grandparent's native tongue, the second generation family members serve as interpreters not only to outside persons, but within the household, further propelling generational differences and divisions by means of linguistic communication.
Furthermore, in some immigrant families and communities, language brokering is also used to integrate children into family endeavors and into civil society. Child integration has become very important to form linkages between new immigrant communities and the predominant culture and new forms of bureaucratic systems. In addition, it also serves towards child development by learning and pitching in.
Workplace Attitudes:
USA Today reported that younger generations are "entering the workplace in the face of demographic change and an increasingly multi-generational workplace". Multiple engagement studies show that the interests shared across the generation gap by members of this increasingly multi-generational workplace can differ substantially.
A popular belief held by older generations is that the characteristics of Millennials can potentially complicate professional interactions. To some managers, this generation is a group of coddled, lazy, disloyal, and narcissistic young people, who are incapable of handling the simplest task without guidance. For this reason, when millennials first enter a new organization, they are often greeted with wary coworkers.
Career was an essential component of the identities of Baby boomers; they made many sacrifices, working 55 to 60 hour weeks, patiently waiting for promotions.
Millennials, on the other hand, are not workaholics and do not place such a strong emphasis on their careers. Even so, they expect all the perks, in terms of good pay and benefits, rapid advancement, work-life balance, stimulating work, and giving back to their community.
Studies have found that millennials are usually exceptionally confident in their abilities and, as a result, fail to prove themselves by working hard, seeking key roles in significant projects early on in their careers, which frustrates their older coworkers.
Most of these inflated expectations are direct results of the generation's upbringing. During the Great Recession, millennials watched first-hand as their parents worked long hours, only to fall victim to downsizing and layoffs.
Many families could not withstand these challenges, leading to high divorce rates and broken families. Millennials do not want to be put in the same position as their parents, so they have made their personal lives a main priority. In fact, fifty-nine percent of Millennials say the Great Recession negatively impacted their career plans, while only 35% of mature workers feel the same way.
For these reasons, millennials are more likely to negotiate the terms of their work. Though some boomers view this as lazy behavior, others have actually been able to learn from millennials, reflecting on whether the sacrifices that they had made in their lives provided them with the happiness that they had hoped for.
Growing up, millennials looked to parents, teachers, and coaches as a source of praise and support. They were a part of an educational system with inflated grades and Standardized tests, in which they were skilled at performing well. They were brought up believing they could be anything and everything they dreamed of. As a result, millennials developed a strong need for frequent, positive feedback from supervisors.
Today, managers find themselves assessing their subordinates’ productivity quite frequently, despite the fact that they often find it burdensome. Additionally, millennials’ salaries and Employee benefits give this generation an idea of how well they are performing. Millennials crave success, and good paying jobs have been proven to make them feel more successful.
Additionally, studies show that promotions are very important to millennials, and when they do not see opportunities for rapid advancement at one organization, they are quick to quit in an effort to find better opportunities. They have an unrealistic timeline for these promotions, however, which frustrates older generations.
They also have a low tolerance for unchallenging work; when work is not stimulating, they often perform poorly out of boredom. As a result, managers must constantly provide millennials with greater responsibility so that they feel more involved and needed in the organization.
Because group projects and presentations were commonplace during the schooling of millennials, this generation enjoys collaborating and even developing close friendships with colleagues. While working as part of a team enhances innovation, enhances productivity, and lowers personnel costs, downsides still exist.
Supervisors find that millennials avoid risk and independent responsibility by relying on team members when making decisions, which prevents them from showcasing their own abilities.
Perhaps the most commonly cited difference between older and younger generations is technological proficiency. Studies have shown that their reliance on technology has made millennials less comfortable with face-to-face interaction and deciphering verbal cues.
However, technological proficiency also has its benefits; millennials are far more effective in multitasking, responding to visual stimulation, and filtering information than older generations.
However, according to the engagement studies, mature workers and the new generations of workers share similar thoughts on a number of topics across the generation gap. Their opinions overlap on flexible working hours/arrangements, promotions/bonuses, the importance of computer proficiency, and leadership. Additionally, the majority of Millennials and mature workers enjoy going to work every day, and feel inspired to do their best.
Generational consciousness:
Generational consciousness is another way of distinguishing among generations that was worked on by social scientist Karl Mannheim. Generational consciousness is when a group of people become mindful of their place in a distinct group identifiable by their shared interests and values.
Social, economic, or political changes can bring awareness to these shared interests and values for similarly-aged people who experience these events together, and thereby form a generational consciousness. These types of experiences can impact individuals' development at a young age and enable them to begin making their own interpretations of the world based on personal encounters that set them apart from other generations.
Inter-generational Living:
"Both social isolation and loneliness in older men and women are associated with increased mortality, according to a 2012 Report by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America".
Inter-generational living is one method being used currently worldwide as a means of combating such feelings. A nursing home in Deventer, The Netherlands, developed a program wherein students from a local university are provided small, rent-free apartments within the nursing home facility. In exchange, the students volunteer a minimum of 30 hours per month to spend time with the seniors.
The students will watch sports with the seniors, celebrate birthdays, and simply keep them company during illnesses and times of distress. Programs similar to the Netherlands’ program were developed as far back as the mid-1990s in Barcelona, Spain.
In Spain's program, students were placed in seniors’ homes, with a similar goal of free/cheap housing in exchange for companionship for the elderly. That program quickly spread to 27 other cities throughout Spain, and similar programs can be found in Lyons, France, and Cleveland, Ohio.
Demographics:
In order for sociologists to understand the transition into adulthood of children in different generation gaps, they compare the current generation to both older and earlier generations at the same time.
Not only does each generation experience their own ways of mental and physical maturation, but they also create new aspects of attending school, forming new households, starting families and even creating new demographics. The difference in demographics regarding values, attitudes and behaviors between the two generations are used to create a profile for the emerging generation of young adults.
Following the thriving economic success that was a product of the Second World War, America's population skyrocketed between the years 1940-1959, to which the new American generation was called the Baby Boomers.
Today, as of 2017, many of these Baby Boomers have celebrated their 60th birthdays and in the next few years America's senior citizen population will boost exponentially due to the population of people who were born during the years 1940 and 1959. The generation gap, however, between the Baby Boomers and earlier generations is growing due to the Boomers population post-war.
There is a large demographic difference between the Baby Boomer generation and earlier generations, where earlier generations are less racially and ethnically diverse than the Baby Boomers’ population.
Where this drastic racial demographic difference occurs also holds to a continually growing cultural gap as well; baby boomers have had generally higher education, with a higher percentage of women in the labor force and more often occupying professional and managerial positions. These drastic culture and generation gaps create issues of community preferences as well as spending.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Generation Gap:
- Achievement gap
- Ageism
- Digital divide
- Income gap
- Inter-generational contract
- Intergenerational equity
- List of Generations
- Marriage gap
- Moral panic
- Student activism
- Student voice
- Transgenerational design
- Youth activism
- Youth voice
- Slang
- Technology
Generation X
YouTube Video from the Gen X-inspired Movie "The Breakfast Club" (1985)
Pictures below: LEFT: Illustration of "Gen X"; and RIGHT: Time Magazine Cover
YouTube Video from the Gen X-inspired Movie "The Breakfast Club" (1985)
Pictures below: LEFT: Illustration of "Gen X"; and RIGHT: Time Magazine Cover
Generation X, commonly abbreviated to Gen X, is the generation born after the Western Post–World War II baby boom. Most demographers and commentators use birth dates ranging from the early 1960s to the early 1980s.
The term Generation X was coined by the Magnum photographer Robert Capa in the early 1950s. He used it later as a title for a photo-essay about young men and women growing up immediately after the Second World War.
The project first appeared in Picture Post in the UK and Holiday in the U.S. in 1953. Describing his intention, Capa said "We named this unknown generation, The Generation X, and even in our first enthusiasm we realised that we had something far bigger than our talents and pockets could cope with."
The name was popularized by Canadian author Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, concerning young adults during the late 1980s and their lifestyles.
While Coupland's book helped to popularize the phrase Generation X, he erroneously attributed it to English rock musician Billy Idol in a 1989 magazine article. In fact, Idol had been a member of the punk band Generation X from 1976 to 1981, which was named after Deverson and Hamblett's 1965 sociology book on British youth, Generation X—a copy of which was owned by Idol's mother.
Gen X is the generation born after the Western World War II baby boom describing a generational change from the Baby Boomers.
In a 2012 article for the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, George Masnick wrote that the "Census counted 82.1 million" Gen Xers in the U.S. The Harvard Center uses 1965 to 1984 to define Gen X so that Boomers, Xers, and Millennials "cover equal 20-year age spans".
Masnick concluded that immigration filled in any birth year deficits during low fertility years of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Jon Miller at the Longitudinal Study of American Youth at the University of Michigan wrote that "Generation X refers to adults born between 1961 and 1981" and it "includes 84 million people" in the U.S.
John Markert at Cumberland University employs a similar approach, but wrote a 2004 article in which "Generations should be discrete twenty-year periods" but with "ten-year cohorts" and 5-year "bihorts" (his word) non-simultaneously, classifies Generation X as those born in the years 1966 to 1985. Markert censures other methods and tactics to define Generation X in his article stating that "inconsistent use of dates by the same author" simply results "in an apple to lemon measurement standard".
In contrast to this 20-year approach to defining generations, which, when applied to Generation X, can push the age of the conventionally post-war baby boomers well into or before World War II, or, conversely, set the upper-age of generation X as 1986 or later, many writers have adopted a more conservative span of 15 years or fewer.
Some, such as Tamara Erickson, in What's Next Gen X?, and Elwood Watson, in Generation X Professors Speak, use the dates of 1965-1979. While in at least one of their studies, the Pew Research Center defines Generation X births as from 1965 to 1980.
In 2011, "The Generation X Report", based on annual surveys used in the longitudinal study of today's adults, found Gen Xers, defined in the report as people born between 1961 and 1981, to be highly educated, active, balanced, happy, and family-oriented.
The study contrasted with the slacker, disenfranchised stereotype associated with youth in the 1970s and 1980s. Various questions and responses from approximately 4,000 people who were surveyed each year from 1987 through 2010 made up the study. Clive Thompson, writing in Wired in 2014 claimed that the differences between Generation X and its predecessors had been over-hyped, quoting Kali Trzesniewski, a scholar of life-span changes, as saying that the basic personality metrics of Americans had remained stable for decades.
In 2012, the Corporation for National and Community Service ranked Gen X volunteer rates in the U.S. at "29.4% per year", the highest compared with other generations. The rankings were based on a three-year moving average between 2009 and 2011.
In the preface to Generation X Goes Global: Mapping a Youth Culture in Motion, a collection of global essays, Professor Christine Henseler summarizes it as "a generation whose worldview is based on change, on the need to combat corruption, dictatorships, abuse, AIDS, a generation in search of human dignity and individual freedom, the need for stability, love, tolerance, and human rights for all".
In cinema, directors Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, Jane Campion, Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater, and Todd Solondz have been called Generation X filmmakers.
Smith is most known for his View Askewniverse films, the flagship film being Clerks, which is set in New Jersey circa 1994, and focuses on two bored, convenience-store clerks in their twenties. Linklater's Slacker similarly explores young adult characters who were more interested in philosophizing than settling with a long-term career and family.
Solondz' Welcome to the Dollhouse touched on themes of school bullying, school violence, teen drug use, peer pressure and broken or dysfunctional families, set in a junior high school environment in New Jersey during the early to mid-1990s.
While not a member of Gen X himself, director John Hughes has been recognized as having created a series of classics "that an entire generation took ownership of with films like The Breakfast Club (see YouTube Video above), Sixteen Candles and Weird Science".
Gen Xers are often called the MTV Generation. They experienced the emergence of music videos, grunge, alternative rock and hip hop. Some called Xers the "latchkey generation" because their personal identity was in part shaped by the independence of being left alone after school when they were children.
Compared with previous generations, Generation X represents a more heterogeneous generation, embracing social diversity in terms of such characteristics as race, class, religion, ethnicity, culture, language, gender identity, and sexual orientation.
Unlike their parents who challenged leaders with an intent to replace them, Gen Xers are less likely to idolize leaders and are more inclined to work toward long-term institutional and systematic change through economic, media and consumer actions.
The U.S. Census Bureau reports that Generation X holds the highest education levels when looking at current age groups.
Pursuant to a study by Elwood Carlson on "how different generations respond in unique ways to common problems in some political, social, and consumption choices", the Population Reference Bureau, a private demographic research organization based in Washington, D.C., cited Generation X birth years as falling between 1965 and 1982.
On the first page of the study, authors William Strauss and Neil Howe's definition of a "cohort generation" is cited. They define Generation X by the years 1961 to 1981.
In 2008, Details magazine editor-at-large Jeff Gordinier released his book X Saves the World -- How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking.
The term Generation X was coined by the Magnum photographer Robert Capa in the early 1950s. He used it later as a title for a photo-essay about young men and women growing up immediately after the Second World War.
The project first appeared in Picture Post in the UK and Holiday in the U.S. in 1953. Describing his intention, Capa said "We named this unknown generation, The Generation X, and even in our first enthusiasm we realised that we had something far bigger than our talents and pockets could cope with."
The name was popularized by Canadian author Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, concerning young adults during the late 1980s and their lifestyles.
While Coupland's book helped to popularize the phrase Generation X, he erroneously attributed it to English rock musician Billy Idol in a 1989 magazine article. In fact, Idol had been a member of the punk band Generation X from 1976 to 1981, which was named after Deverson and Hamblett's 1965 sociology book on British youth, Generation X—a copy of which was owned by Idol's mother.
Gen X is the generation born after the Western World War II baby boom describing a generational change from the Baby Boomers.
In a 2012 article for the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, George Masnick wrote that the "Census counted 82.1 million" Gen Xers in the U.S. The Harvard Center uses 1965 to 1984 to define Gen X so that Boomers, Xers, and Millennials "cover equal 20-year age spans".
Masnick concluded that immigration filled in any birth year deficits during low fertility years of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Jon Miller at the Longitudinal Study of American Youth at the University of Michigan wrote that "Generation X refers to adults born between 1961 and 1981" and it "includes 84 million people" in the U.S.
John Markert at Cumberland University employs a similar approach, but wrote a 2004 article in which "Generations should be discrete twenty-year periods" but with "ten-year cohorts" and 5-year "bihorts" (his word) non-simultaneously, classifies Generation X as those born in the years 1966 to 1985. Markert censures other methods and tactics to define Generation X in his article stating that "inconsistent use of dates by the same author" simply results "in an apple to lemon measurement standard".
In contrast to this 20-year approach to defining generations, which, when applied to Generation X, can push the age of the conventionally post-war baby boomers well into or before World War II, or, conversely, set the upper-age of generation X as 1986 or later, many writers have adopted a more conservative span of 15 years or fewer.
Some, such as Tamara Erickson, in What's Next Gen X?, and Elwood Watson, in Generation X Professors Speak, use the dates of 1965-1979. While in at least one of their studies, the Pew Research Center defines Generation X births as from 1965 to 1980.
In 2011, "The Generation X Report", based on annual surveys used in the longitudinal study of today's adults, found Gen Xers, defined in the report as people born between 1961 and 1981, to be highly educated, active, balanced, happy, and family-oriented.
The study contrasted with the slacker, disenfranchised stereotype associated with youth in the 1970s and 1980s. Various questions and responses from approximately 4,000 people who were surveyed each year from 1987 through 2010 made up the study. Clive Thompson, writing in Wired in 2014 claimed that the differences between Generation X and its predecessors had been over-hyped, quoting Kali Trzesniewski, a scholar of life-span changes, as saying that the basic personality metrics of Americans had remained stable for decades.
In 2012, the Corporation for National and Community Service ranked Gen X volunteer rates in the U.S. at "29.4% per year", the highest compared with other generations. The rankings were based on a three-year moving average between 2009 and 2011.
In the preface to Generation X Goes Global: Mapping a Youth Culture in Motion, a collection of global essays, Professor Christine Henseler summarizes it as "a generation whose worldview is based on change, on the need to combat corruption, dictatorships, abuse, AIDS, a generation in search of human dignity and individual freedom, the need for stability, love, tolerance, and human rights for all".
In cinema, directors Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, Jane Campion, Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater, and Todd Solondz have been called Generation X filmmakers.
Smith is most known for his View Askewniverse films, the flagship film being Clerks, which is set in New Jersey circa 1994, and focuses on two bored, convenience-store clerks in their twenties. Linklater's Slacker similarly explores young adult characters who were more interested in philosophizing than settling with a long-term career and family.
Solondz' Welcome to the Dollhouse touched on themes of school bullying, school violence, teen drug use, peer pressure and broken or dysfunctional families, set in a junior high school environment in New Jersey during the early to mid-1990s.
While not a member of Gen X himself, director John Hughes has been recognized as having created a series of classics "that an entire generation took ownership of with films like The Breakfast Club (see YouTube Video above), Sixteen Candles and Weird Science".
Gen Xers are often called the MTV Generation. They experienced the emergence of music videos, grunge, alternative rock and hip hop. Some called Xers the "latchkey generation" because their personal identity was in part shaped by the independence of being left alone after school when they were children.
Compared with previous generations, Generation X represents a more heterogeneous generation, embracing social diversity in terms of such characteristics as race, class, religion, ethnicity, culture, language, gender identity, and sexual orientation.
Unlike their parents who challenged leaders with an intent to replace them, Gen Xers are less likely to idolize leaders and are more inclined to work toward long-term institutional and systematic change through economic, media and consumer actions.
The U.S. Census Bureau reports that Generation X holds the highest education levels when looking at current age groups.
Pursuant to a study by Elwood Carlson on "how different generations respond in unique ways to common problems in some political, social, and consumption choices", the Population Reference Bureau, a private demographic research organization based in Washington, D.C., cited Generation X birth years as falling between 1965 and 1982.
On the first page of the study, authors William Strauss and Neil Howe's definition of a "cohort generation" is cited. They define Generation X by the years 1961 to 1981.
In 2008, Details magazine editor-at-large Jeff Gordinier released his book X Saves the World -- How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking.
Millennials (also known as the Millennial Generation or Generation Y, abbreviated to Gen Y) are the demographic cohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates for when the generation starts and ends; most researchers and commentators use birth years ranging from the early 1980s to around 2000.
Terminology:
Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe are widely credited with naming the Millennials. They coined the term in 1987, around the time the children born in 1982 were entering preschool, and the media were first identifying their prospective link to the millennial year as the high school graduating class of the year 2000. They wrote about the cohort in their 1991 book Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069, and released a book in 2000 titled Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation.
In August 1993, an Ad Age editorial coined the phrase Generation Y to describe those who were aged 11 or younger as well as the teenagers of the upcoming ten years who were defined as different from Generation X.
Since then, the company has sometimes used 1982 as the starting birth year. According to Horovitz, in 2012, Ad Age "threw in the towel by conceding that Millennials is a better name than Gen Y", and by 2014, a past director of data strategy at Ad Age said to NPR "the Generation Y label was a placeholder until we found out more about them".
Alternative names for this group proposed in the past include Generation We, Global Generation, Generation Next and the Net Generation. Millennials are sometimes also called Echo Boomers, referring to the generation's size relative to the Baby Boomer generation and due to the significant increase in birth rates during the 1980s and into the 1990s.
In the United States, birth rates peaked in August 1990 and a 20th-century trend toward smaller families in developed countries continued. Newsweek used the term Generation 9/11 to refer to young people who were between the ages of 10 and 20 years during the September 11 attacks.
The first reference to "Generation 9/11" was made in the cover story of the November 12, 2001 issue of Newsweek. In his book The Lucky Few: Between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boom, author Elwood Carlson called the generation the "New Boomers" (born 1983–2001), based on the upswing in births after 1983, finishing with the "political and social challenges" that occurred after the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, and the "persistent economic difficulties" of the time.
Chinese Millennials (in China, commonly called the 1980s and 1990s generations) were examined and contrasted with American Millennials at a 2015 conference in Shanghai organized by University of Southern California's US-China Institute. Findings included Millennials' marriage, childbearing, and child raising preferences, life and career ambitions, and attitudes towards volunteerism and activism.
Date and age range defining Authors Strauss and Howe use 1982 as the Millennials' starting birth year and 2004 as the last birth year, but Howe described the dividing line between Millennials and the following Generation Z as "tentative" saying, "you can’t be sure where history will someday draw a cohort dividing line until a generation fully comes of age."
In 2009, Australian McCrindle Research Center used 1980–1994 as Generation Y birth dates, starting with a recorded rise in birth rates, and fitting their newer definition of a generational span as 15 years. An earlier McCrindle report in 2006 gave a range of 1982–2000, in a document titled "Report on the Attitudes and Views of Generations X and Y on Superannuation".
In 2013, a global generational study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers with the University of Southern California and the London Business School defined Millennials as those born between 1980–1995.
In May 2013, a Time magazine cover story identified Millennials as those born from 1980 or 1981 to the year 2000.
For the purpose of a 2015 study, the Pew Research Center, an American think tank organization, defined Millennials as those born between 1981–1997. According to Pew, as the 16-year span of Millennial birth years is "already about as wide a range as those of the other living generations, [...] it seems likely that in the near future the youngest adults will be members of a post-Millennial generation."
In 2014, a comparative study from Dale Carnegie Training and MSW Research was released which studies Millennials compared to other generations in the workplace. This study described "Millennial" birth years as being between 1980–1996. Gallup Inc., an American research-based global performance-management consulting company, also tends to use 1980–1996 as birth years.
In 2015, the official body of Statistics Canada defined 1992 as the last year of birth for Generation Y.
Various other sources put the births of Millennials between 1983 and 2000, particularly in the United States and Canada.
Traits Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe believe that each generation has common characteristics that give it a specific character, with four basic generational archetypes, repeating in a cycle. According to their theory, they predicted Millennials will become more like the "civic-minded" G.I. Generation with a strong sense of community both local and global.
Strauss and Howe's research has been influential, but it also has critics. Jean Twenge, the author of the 2006 book Generation Me, considers Millennials, along with younger members of Generation X, to be part of what she calls "Generation Me". Twenge attributes Millennials with the traits of confidence and tolerance, but also identifies a sense of entitlement and narcissism based on personality surveys that showed increasing narcissism among Millennials compared to preceding generations when they were teens and in their twenties. She questions the predictions of Strauss and Howe that this generation will come out civic-minded.
The University of Michigan's "Monitoring the Future" study of high school seniors (conducted continually since 1975) and the American Freshman survey, conducted by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute of new college students since 1966, showed an increase in the proportion of students who consider wealth a very important attribute, from 45% for Baby Boomers (surveyed between 1967 and 1985) to 70% for Gen Xers, and 75% for Millennials.
The percentage who said it was important to keep abreast of political affairs fell, from 50% for Baby Boomers to 39% for Gen Xers, and 35% for Millennials. The notion of "developing a meaningful philosophy of life" decreased the most across generations, from 73% for Boomers to 45% for Millennials. The willingness to be involved in an environmental cleanup program dropped from 33% for Baby Boomers to 21% for Millennials.
In March 2014, the Pew Research Center issued a report about how "Millennials in adulthood" are "detached from institutions and networked with friends." The report said Millennials are somewhat more upbeat than older adults about America's future, with 49% of Millennials saying the country’s best years are ahead though they're the first in the modern era to have higher levels of student loan debt and unemployment.
Fred Bonner, a Samuel DeWitt Proctor Chair in Education at Rutgers University and author of Diverse Millennial Students in College: Implications for Faculty and Student Affairs, believes that much of the commentary on the Millennial Generation may be partially accurate, but overly general and that many of the traits they describe apply primarily to "white, affluent teenagers who accomplish great things as they grow up in the suburbs, who confront anxiety when applying to super-selective colleges, and who multitask with ease as their helicopter parents hover reassuringly above them."
During class discussions, Bonner listened to black and Hispanic students describe how some or all of the so-called core traits did not apply to them. They often said that the "special" trait, in particular, is unrecognizable. Other socio-economic groups often do not display the same attributes commonly attributed to Millennials. "It's not that many diverse parents don't want to treat their kids as special," he says, "but they often don't have the social and cultural capital, the time and resources, to do that."
In 2008, author Ron Alsop called the Millennials "Trophy Kids," a term that reflects a trend in competitive sports, as well as many other aspects of life, where mere participation is frequently enough for a reward. It has been reported that it's an issue in corporate environments.
Some employers are concerned that Millennials have too great expectations from the workplace. Some studies predict they will switch jobs frequently, holding many more jobs than Gen Xers due to their great expectations. Newer research shows that Millennials change jobs for the same reasons as other generations—namely, more money and a more innovative work environment.
They look for versatility and flexibility in the workplace, and strive for a strong work–life balance in their jobs and have similar career aspirations to other generations, valuing financial security and a diverse workplace just as much as their older colleagues.
Educational sociologist Andy Furlong described Millennials as optimistic, engaged, and team players.
In his book, Fast Future, author David Burstein describes Millennials' approach to social change as "pragmatic idealism" with a deep desire to make the world a better place combined with an understanding that doing so requires building new institutions while working inside and outside existing institutions.
Political viewsAccording to a 2013 article in The Economist, surveys of political attitudes among Millennials in the United Kingdom suggest increasingly liberal attitudes with regard to social and cultural issues, as well as higher overall support for classical liberal economic policies than preceding generations. They are more likely to support same-sex marriage and the legalization of drugs.
The Economist parallels this with Millennials in the United States, whose attitudes are more supportive of social liberal policies and same-sex marriage relative to other demographics, though less supportive of abortion than Gen X were in the early 1990s. They are also more likely to oppose animal testing for medical purposes.
A 2014 poll for the libertarian Reason magazine suggested that US Millennials were social liberals and fiscal centrists more often than their global peers. The magazine predicted that millennials would become more conservative on fiscal issues once they started paying taxes.
Demographics in the United States William Strauss and Neil Howe projected in their 1991 book Generations that the U.S. Millennial population would be 76 million.
Later Neil Howe revised the number to over 95 million people (in the U.S.). As of 2012, it was estimated that there were approximately 80 million U.S. Millennials. The estimated number of the U.S. Millennials in 2015 is 83.1 million people.
Economic prospects:
Economic prospects for some Millennials have declined largely due to the Great Recession in the late 2000s.
Several governments have instituted major youth employment schemes out of fear of social unrest due to the dramatically increased rates of youth unemployment. In Europe, youth unemployment levels were very high (56% in Spain, 44% in Italy, 35% in the Baltic states, 19.1% in Britain and more than 20% in many more).
In 2009, leading commentators began to worry about the long term social and economic effects of the unemployment. Unemployment levels in other areas of the world were also high, with the youth unemployment rate in the U.S. reaching a record 19.1% in July 2010 since the statistic started being gathered in 1948.
In Canada, unemployment among youths in July 2009 was 15.9%, the highest it had been in 11 years. Underemployment is also a major factor. In the U.S. the economic difficulties have led to dramatic increases in youth poverty, unemployment, and the numbers of young people living with their parents. In April 2012, it was reported that half of all new college graduates in the US were still either unemployed or underemployed. It has been argued that this unemployment rate and poor economic situation has given Millennials a rallying call with the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement. However, according to Christine Kelly, Occupy is not a youth movement and has participants that vary from the very young to very old.
A variety of names have emerged in different European countries particularly hard hit following the financial crisis of 2007–2008 to designate young people with limited employment and career prospects. These groups can be considered to be more or less synonymous with Millennials, or at least major sub-groups in those countries.
The Generation of €700 is a term popularized by the Greek mass media and refers to educated Greek twixters of urban centers who generally fail to establish a career. In Greece, young adults are being "excluded from the labor market" and some "leave their country of origin to look for better options". They're being "marginalized and face uncertain working conditions" in jobs that are unrelated to their educational background, and receive the minimum allowable base salary of €700. This generation evolved in circumstances leading to the Greek debt crisis and some participated in the 2010–2011 Greek protests.
In Spain, they're referred to as the mileurista (for €1,000), in France "The Precarious Generation," and as in Spain, Italy also has the "milleurista"; generation of 1,000 euros.
In 2015, Millennials in New York City were reported as earning 20% less than the generation before them, as a result of entering the workforce during the great recession. Despite higher college attendance rates than Generation X, many were stuck in low-paid jobs, with the percentage of degree-educated young adults working in low-wage industries rising from 23% to 33% between 2000 and 2014.
Geographic (not demographic) designation coined by Fast Company for American employees who need to make several changes in career throughout their working lives due to the chaotic nature of the job market following the Great Recession.
Societal change has been accelerated by the use of social media, smartphones, mobile computing, and other new technologies. Those in "Generation Flux" have birth-years in the ranges of both Generation X and Millennials. "Generation Sell" was used by author William Deresiewicz to describe Millennial's interest in small businesses.
According to Forbes, Millennials will make up approximately half of the U.S. workforce by 2020. Millennials are the most educated and culturally diverse group of all generations and they are also hard to please when it comes to employers.
To address these new challenges, many large firms are currently studying the social and behavioral patterns of Millennials and are trying to devise programs that decrease inter-generational estrangement, and increase relationships of reciprocal understanding between older employees and Millennials.
The UK's Institute of Leadership & Management researched the gap in understanding between Millennial recruits and their managers in collaboration with Ashridge Business School. The findings included high expectations for advancement, salary and for a coaching relationship with their manager, and suggested that organizations will need to adapt to accommodate and make the best use of Millennials.
In an example of a company trying to do just this, Goldman Sachs conducted training programs that used actors to portray Millennials who assertively sought more feedback, responsibility, and involvement in decision making. After the performance, employees discussed and debated the generational differences they saw played out.
According to a Bloomberg L.P. article, Millennials have benefited the least from the economic recovery following the Great Recession, as average incomes for this generation have fallen at twice the general adult population's total drop and are likely to be on a path toward lower incomes for at least another decade: "Three and a half years after the worst recession since the Great Depression, the earnings and employment gap between those in the under-35 population and their parents and grandparents threatens to unravel the American dream of each generation doing better than the last. The nation's younger workers have benefited least from an economic recovery that has been the most uneven in recent history."
USA Today reported in 2014 that Millennials were "entering the workplace in the face of demographic change and an increasingly multi-generational workplace". Even though research has shown that Millennials are joining the workforce during a tough economic time they still have remained optimistic, as shown when about nine out of ten Millennials surveyed by the Pew Research Center said that they currently have enough money or that they will eventually reach their long-term financial goals.
Peter Pan generation:
American sociologist Kathleen Shaputis labeled Millennials as the boomerang generation or Peter Pan generation, because of the members perceived tendency for delaying some rites of passage into adulthood for longer periods than most generations before them. These labels were also a reference to a trend toward members living with their parents for longer periods than previous generations.
According to Kimberly Palmer, "High housing prices, the rising cost of higher education, and the relative affluence of the older generation are among the factors driving the trend." However, other explanations are seen as contributing.
Questions regarding a clear definition of what it means to be an adult also impacts a debate about delayed transitions into adulthood and the emergence of a new life stage, Emerging Adulthood. For instance, a 2012 study by professors at Brigham Young University found that college students are more likely to define "adult" based on certain personal abilities and characteristics rather than more traditional "rite of passage" events.
Larry Nelson, one of the three marriage, family, and human development professors to perform the study, also noted that "In prior generations, you get married and you start a career and you do that immediately. What young people today are seeing is that approach has led to divorces, to people unhappy with their careers … The majority want to get married […] they just want to do it right the first time, the same thing with their careers."
The economy has had a dampening effect on Millennials' ability to date and get married. In 2012, the average American couple spent an average of over $27,000 on their wedding. A 2013 joint study by sociologists at the University of Virginia and Harvard University found that the decline and disappearance of stable full-time jobs with health insurance and pensions for people who lack a college degree has had profound effects on working-class Americans, who now are less likely to marry and have children within marriage than those with college degrees.
Data from a 2014 study of US Millennials revealed over 56% of that group considers themselves as part of the working class, while only nearly 35% consider themselves in the middle class; this class identity is the lowest polling of any generation.
Religion:
In the United States, Millennials are the least likely to be religious. There is a trend towards irreligion that has been increasing since the 1940s. 29 percent of Americans born between 1983 and 1994 are irreligious, as opposed to 21 percent born between 1963 and 1981, 15 percent born between 1948 and 1962 and only 7 percent born before 1948. A 2005 study looked at 1,385 people aged 18 to 25 and found that more than half of those in the study said that they pray regularly before a meal.
One-third said that they discussed religion with friends, attended religious services, and read religious material weekly. Twenty-three percent of those studied did not identify themselves as religious practitioners. A Pew Research Center study on Millennials shows that of those between 18–29 years old, only 3% of these emerging adults self-identified as "atheists" and only 4% self-identified as "agnostics". Overall, 25% of Millennials are "Nones" and 75% are religiously affiliated.
Over half of Millennials polled in the United Kingdom in 2013 said they had 'no religion nor attended a place of worship', other than for a wedding or a funeral. 25% said they 'believe in a God', while 19% believed in a 'spiritual greater power' and 38% said they did not believe in God nor any other 'greater spiritual power'. The poll also found 41% thought religion is 'the cause of evil' in the world more often than good.
Digital technologyIn their 2007 book, authors Junco and Mastrodicasa expanded on the work of William Strauss and Neil Howe to include research-based information about the personality profiles of Millennials, especially as it relates to higher education. They conducted a large-sample (7,705) research study of college students. They found that Next Generation college students, born between 1983–1992, were frequently in touch with their parents and they used technology at higher rates than people from other generations.
In their survey, they found that 97% of these students owned a computer, 94% owned a mobile phone, and 56% owned an MP3 player. They also found that students spoke with their parents an average of 1.5 times a day about a wide range of topics. Other findings in the Junco and Mastrodicasa survey revealed 76% of students used instant messaging, 92% of those reported multitasking while instant messaging, 40% of them used television to get most of their news, and 34% of students surveyed used the Internet as their primary news source.
Gen Xers and Millennials were the first to grow up with computers in their homes. In a 1999 speech at the New York Institute of Technology, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates encouraged America's teachers to use technology to serve the needs of the first generation of kids to grow up with the Internet.
Many Millennials enjoy a 250+-channel home cable TV universe. One of the more popular forms of media use by Millienials is social networking. In 2010, research was published in the Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research which claimed that students who used social media and decided to quit showed the same withdrawal symptoms of a drug addict who quit their stimulant.
Marc Prensky coined the term "digital native" to describe "K through college" students in 2001, explaining they "represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology." Millennials are identified as "digital natives" by the Pew Research Center which conducted a survey titled Millennials in Adulthood.
Millennials use social networking sites, such as Facebook, to create a different sense of belonging, make acquaintances, and to remain connected with friends. The Millennials are the generation that uses social media the most, with 59% of Millennials using it to find information on people and events, compared to only 29% of previous generations. 88% of Millennials use Facebook as their primary source of news.
In the Frontline episode "Generation Like", there is discussion about Millennials and their dependence on technology and ways to commoditize the social media sphere.
Cultural identity:
Strauss & Howe's book titled Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation describes the Millennial generation as "civic-minded", rejecting the attitudes of the Baby Boomers and Generation X.
Since the 2000 U.S. Census, which allowed people to select more than one racial group, Millennials in abundance have asserted the ideal that all their heritages should be respected, counted, and acknowledged.
Generally speaking, Millennials are the children of Baby Boomers or Generation Xers, while some older members may have parents from the Silent Generation. A 2013 poll in the United Kingdom found that Generation Y was more "open-minded than their parents on controversial topics". Of those surveyed, nearly 65% supported same-sex marriage.
A 2013 Pew Research Poll concluded that 84% of Millennials, born since 1980 and then between the ages of 18 and 32, favor legalizing the use of marijuana.
In 2015, the Pew Research Center also conducted research regarding generational identity. It was discovered that Millennials, or members of Generation Y, are less likely to strongly identify with the generational term when compared to Generation X or to the baby boomers. It was also found that Millennials chose most often to define itself with more negative terms such as self-absorbed, wasteful or greedy. In this 2015 report, Pew defined Millennials with birth years ranging from 1981 onward.
Millennials came of age in a time where the entertainment industry began to be affected by the Internet:
On top of Millennials being the most ethnically and racially diverse compared to the generations older than they are, they are also on pace to be the most educated. As of 2008, 39.6% of Millennials between the ages of 18–24 were enrolled in college, which was an American record.
Along with being educated, Millennials are also very upbeat. As stated above in the economic prospects section, about 9 out of 10 Millennials feel as though they have enough money or that they will reach their long-term financial goals, even during the tough economic times, and they are more optimistic about the future of the U.S.
Additionally, Millennials are also more open to change than older generations. According to the Pew Research Center that did a survey in 2008, Millennials are the most likely of any generation to self-identify as liberals and are also more supportive of progressive domestic social agenda than older generations. Finally, Millennials are the least overtly religious than the older generations. About one in four Millennials are unaffiliated with any religion, which is much more than the older generations when they were the ages of Millennials.
Inclusion and self-identification debate:
Due in part to the frequent birth-year overlap and resulting incongruence existing between attempts to define Generation X and Millennials, a growing number of individuals born in the late 1970s or early 1980s see themselves as either belonging to, and identifying with, neither of these traditional generations, or, rather, as trans-generational, included and identified with both, either in whole or to a degree. Some attempts to define those individuals born in the Generation X and Millennial overlapped years have given rise to inter- or micro-generations, such as Xennials, The Lucky Ones, Generation Catalano, and the Oregon Trail Generation.
In an article written for Popsugar, author Ashley Paige states that while Generation Z birth dates are commonly described as starting in 1995, she relates to them more than Millennials: "With a birth date near the end of 1994, I feel like I can't fully identify with millennials, especially in regards to 'the golden days.' Yeah, I remember when no one had cell phones — but only till sixth grade. Yeah, I thought Titanic was amazing — in 2005, when I was first allowed to see it. And no, I can't recall a time in my life when there wasn't a computer in my house. In second grade, I learned to use Google."
See also:
Terminology:
Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe are widely credited with naming the Millennials. They coined the term in 1987, around the time the children born in 1982 were entering preschool, and the media were first identifying their prospective link to the millennial year as the high school graduating class of the year 2000. They wrote about the cohort in their 1991 book Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069, and released a book in 2000 titled Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation.
In August 1993, an Ad Age editorial coined the phrase Generation Y to describe those who were aged 11 or younger as well as the teenagers of the upcoming ten years who were defined as different from Generation X.
Since then, the company has sometimes used 1982 as the starting birth year. According to Horovitz, in 2012, Ad Age "threw in the towel by conceding that Millennials is a better name than Gen Y", and by 2014, a past director of data strategy at Ad Age said to NPR "the Generation Y label was a placeholder until we found out more about them".
Alternative names for this group proposed in the past include Generation We, Global Generation, Generation Next and the Net Generation. Millennials are sometimes also called Echo Boomers, referring to the generation's size relative to the Baby Boomer generation and due to the significant increase in birth rates during the 1980s and into the 1990s.
In the United States, birth rates peaked in August 1990 and a 20th-century trend toward smaller families in developed countries continued. Newsweek used the term Generation 9/11 to refer to young people who were between the ages of 10 and 20 years during the September 11 attacks.
The first reference to "Generation 9/11" was made in the cover story of the November 12, 2001 issue of Newsweek. In his book The Lucky Few: Between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boom, author Elwood Carlson called the generation the "New Boomers" (born 1983–2001), based on the upswing in births after 1983, finishing with the "political and social challenges" that occurred after the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, and the "persistent economic difficulties" of the time.
Chinese Millennials (in China, commonly called the 1980s and 1990s generations) were examined and contrasted with American Millennials at a 2015 conference in Shanghai organized by University of Southern California's US-China Institute. Findings included Millennials' marriage, childbearing, and child raising preferences, life and career ambitions, and attitudes towards volunteerism and activism.
Date and age range defining Authors Strauss and Howe use 1982 as the Millennials' starting birth year and 2004 as the last birth year, but Howe described the dividing line between Millennials and the following Generation Z as "tentative" saying, "you can’t be sure where history will someday draw a cohort dividing line until a generation fully comes of age."
In 2009, Australian McCrindle Research Center used 1980–1994 as Generation Y birth dates, starting with a recorded rise in birth rates, and fitting their newer definition of a generational span as 15 years. An earlier McCrindle report in 2006 gave a range of 1982–2000, in a document titled "Report on the Attitudes and Views of Generations X and Y on Superannuation".
In 2013, a global generational study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers with the University of Southern California and the London Business School defined Millennials as those born between 1980–1995.
In May 2013, a Time magazine cover story identified Millennials as those born from 1980 or 1981 to the year 2000.
For the purpose of a 2015 study, the Pew Research Center, an American think tank organization, defined Millennials as those born between 1981–1997. According to Pew, as the 16-year span of Millennial birth years is "already about as wide a range as those of the other living generations, [...] it seems likely that in the near future the youngest adults will be members of a post-Millennial generation."
In 2014, a comparative study from Dale Carnegie Training and MSW Research was released which studies Millennials compared to other generations in the workplace. This study described "Millennial" birth years as being between 1980–1996. Gallup Inc., an American research-based global performance-management consulting company, also tends to use 1980–1996 as birth years.
In 2015, the official body of Statistics Canada defined 1992 as the last year of birth for Generation Y.
Various other sources put the births of Millennials between 1983 and 2000, particularly in the United States and Canada.
Traits Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe believe that each generation has common characteristics that give it a specific character, with four basic generational archetypes, repeating in a cycle. According to their theory, they predicted Millennials will become more like the "civic-minded" G.I. Generation with a strong sense of community both local and global.
Strauss and Howe's research has been influential, but it also has critics. Jean Twenge, the author of the 2006 book Generation Me, considers Millennials, along with younger members of Generation X, to be part of what she calls "Generation Me". Twenge attributes Millennials with the traits of confidence and tolerance, but also identifies a sense of entitlement and narcissism based on personality surveys that showed increasing narcissism among Millennials compared to preceding generations when they were teens and in their twenties. She questions the predictions of Strauss and Howe that this generation will come out civic-minded.
The University of Michigan's "Monitoring the Future" study of high school seniors (conducted continually since 1975) and the American Freshman survey, conducted by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute of new college students since 1966, showed an increase in the proportion of students who consider wealth a very important attribute, from 45% for Baby Boomers (surveyed between 1967 and 1985) to 70% for Gen Xers, and 75% for Millennials.
The percentage who said it was important to keep abreast of political affairs fell, from 50% for Baby Boomers to 39% for Gen Xers, and 35% for Millennials. The notion of "developing a meaningful philosophy of life" decreased the most across generations, from 73% for Boomers to 45% for Millennials. The willingness to be involved in an environmental cleanup program dropped from 33% for Baby Boomers to 21% for Millennials.
In March 2014, the Pew Research Center issued a report about how "Millennials in adulthood" are "detached from institutions and networked with friends." The report said Millennials are somewhat more upbeat than older adults about America's future, with 49% of Millennials saying the country’s best years are ahead though they're the first in the modern era to have higher levels of student loan debt and unemployment.
Fred Bonner, a Samuel DeWitt Proctor Chair in Education at Rutgers University and author of Diverse Millennial Students in College: Implications for Faculty and Student Affairs, believes that much of the commentary on the Millennial Generation may be partially accurate, but overly general and that many of the traits they describe apply primarily to "white, affluent teenagers who accomplish great things as they grow up in the suburbs, who confront anxiety when applying to super-selective colleges, and who multitask with ease as their helicopter parents hover reassuringly above them."
During class discussions, Bonner listened to black and Hispanic students describe how some or all of the so-called core traits did not apply to them. They often said that the "special" trait, in particular, is unrecognizable. Other socio-economic groups often do not display the same attributes commonly attributed to Millennials. "It's not that many diverse parents don't want to treat their kids as special," he says, "but they often don't have the social and cultural capital, the time and resources, to do that."
In 2008, author Ron Alsop called the Millennials "Trophy Kids," a term that reflects a trend in competitive sports, as well as many other aspects of life, where mere participation is frequently enough for a reward. It has been reported that it's an issue in corporate environments.
Some employers are concerned that Millennials have too great expectations from the workplace. Some studies predict they will switch jobs frequently, holding many more jobs than Gen Xers due to their great expectations. Newer research shows that Millennials change jobs for the same reasons as other generations—namely, more money and a more innovative work environment.
They look for versatility and flexibility in the workplace, and strive for a strong work–life balance in their jobs and have similar career aspirations to other generations, valuing financial security and a diverse workplace just as much as their older colleagues.
Educational sociologist Andy Furlong described Millennials as optimistic, engaged, and team players.
In his book, Fast Future, author David Burstein describes Millennials' approach to social change as "pragmatic idealism" with a deep desire to make the world a better place combined with an understanding that doing so requires building new institutions while working inside and outside existing institutions.
Political viewsAccording to a 2013 article in The Economist, surveys of political attitudes among Millennials in the United Kingdom suggest increasingly liberal attitudes with regard to social and cultural issues, as well as higher overall support for classical liberal economic policies than preceding generations. They are more likely to support same-sex marriage and the legalization of drugs.
The Economist parallels this with Millennials in the United States, whose attitudes are more supportive of social liberal policies and same-sex marriage relative to other demographics, though less supportive of abortion than Gen X were in the early 1990s. They are also more likely to oppose animal testing for medical purposes.
A 2014 poll for the libertarian Reason magazine suggested that US Millennials were social liberals and fiscal centrists more often than their global peers. The magazine predicted that millennials would become more conservative on fiscal issues once they started paying taxes.
Demographics in the United States William Strauss and Neil Howe projected in their 1991 book Generations that the U.S. Millennial population would be 76 million.
Later Neil Howe revised the number to over 95 million people (in the U.S.). As of 2012, it was estimated that there were approximately 80 million U.S. Millennials. The estimated number of the U.S. Millennials in 2015 is 83.1 million people.
Economic prospects:
Economic prospects for some Millennials have declined largely due to the Great Recession in the late 2000s.
Several governments have instituted major youth employment schemes out of fear of social unrest due to the dramatically increased rates of youth unemployment. In Europe, youth unemployment levels were very high (56% in Spain, 44% in Italy, 35% in the Baltic states, 19.1% in Britain and more than 20% in many more).
In 2009, leading commentators began to worry about the long term social and economic effects of the unemployment. Unemployment levels in other areas of the world were also high, with the youth unemployment rate in the U.S. reaching a record 19.1% in July 2010 since the statistic started being gathered in 1948.
In Canada, unemployment among youths in July 2009 was 15.9%, the highest it had been in 11 years. Underemployment is also a major factor. In the U.S. the economic difficulties have led to dramatic increases in youth poverty, unemployment, and the numbers of young people living with their parents. In April 2012, it was reported that half of all new college graduates in the US were still either unemployed or underemployed. It has been argued that this unemployment rate and poor economic situation has given Millennials a rallying call with the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement. However, according to Christine Kelly, Occupy is not a youth movement and has participants that vary from the very young to very old.
A variety of names have emerged in different European countries particularly hard hit following the financial crisis of 2007–2008 to designate young people with limited employment and career prospects. These groups can be considered to be more or less synonymous with Millennials, or at least major sub-groups in those countries.
The Generation of €700 is a term popularized by the Greek mass media and refers to educated Greek twixters of urban centers who generally fail to establish a career. In Greece, young adults are being "excluded from the labor market" and some "leave their country of origin to look for better options". They're being "marginalized and face uncertain working conditions" in jobs that are unrelated to their educational background, and receive the minimum allowable base salary of €700. This generation evolved in circumstances leading to the Greek debt crisis and some participated in the 2010–2011 Greek protests.
In Spain, they're referred to as the mileurista (for €1,000), in France "The Precarious Generation," and as in Spain, Italy also has the "milleurista"; generation of 1,000 euros.
In 2015, Millennials in New York City were reported as earning 20% less than the generation before them, as a result of entering the workforce during the great recession. Despite higher college attendance rates than Generation X, many were stuck in low-paid jobs, with the percentage of degree-educated young adults working in low-wage industries rising from 23% to 33% between 2000 and 2014.
Geographic (not demographic) designation coined by Fast Company for American employees who need to make several changes in career throughout their working lives due to the chaotic nature of the job market following the Great Recession.
Societal change has been accelerated by the use of social media, smartphones, mobile computing, and other new technologies. Those in "Generation Flux" have birth-years in the ranges of both Generation X and Millennials. "Generation Sell" was used by author William Deresiewicz to describe Millennial's interest in small businesses.
According to Forbes, Millennials will make up approximately half of the U.S. workforce by 2020. Millennials are the most educated and culturally diverse group of all generations and they are also hard to please when it comes to employers.
To address these new challenges, many large firms are currently studying the social and behavioral patterns of Millennials and are trying to devise programs that decrease inter-generational estrangement, and increase relationships of reciprocal understanding between older employees and Millennials.
The UK's Institute of Leadership & Management researched the gap in understanding between Millennial recruits and their managers in collaboration with Ashridge Business School. The findings included high expectations for advancement, salary and for a coaching relationship with their manager, and suggested that organizations will need to adapt to accommodate and make the best use of Millennials.
In an example of a company trying to do just this, Goldman Sachs conducted training programs that used actors to portray Millennials who assertively sought more feedback, responsibility, and involvement in decision making. After the performance, employees discussed and debated the generational differences they saw played out.
According to a Bloomberg L.P. article, Millennials have benefited the least from the economic recovery following the Great Recession, as average incomes for this generation have fallen at twice the general adult population's total drop and are likely to be on a path toward lower incomes for at least another decade: "Three and a half years after the worst recession since the Great Depression, the earnings and employment gap between those in the under-35 population and their parents and grandparents threatens to unravel the American dream of each generation doing better than the last. The nation's younger workers have benefited least from an economic recovery that has been the most uneven in recent history."
USA Today reported in 2014 that Millennials were "entering the workplace in the face of demographic change and an increasingly multi-generational workplace". Even though research has shown that Millennials are joining the workforce during a tough economic time they still have remained optimistic, as shown when about nine out of ten Millennials surveyed by the Pew Research Center said that they currently have enough money or that they will eventually reach their long-term financial goals.
Peter Pan generation:
American sociologist Kathleen Shaputis labeled Millennials as the boomerang generation or Peter Pan generation, because of the members perceived tendency for delaying some rites of passage into adulthood for longer periods than most generations before them. These labels were also a reference to a trend toward members living with their parents for longer periods than previous generations.
According to Kimberly Palmer, "High housing prices, the rising cost of higher education, and the relative affluence of the older generation are among the factors driving the trend." However, other explanations are seen as contributing.
Questions regarding a clear definition of what it means to be an adult also impacts a debate about delayed transitions into adulthood and the emergence of a new life stage, Emerging Adulthood. For instance, a 2012 study by professors at Brigham Young University found that college students are more likely to define "adult" based on certain personal abilities and characteristics rather than more traditional "rite of passage" events.
Larry Nelson, one of the three marriage, family, and human development professors to perform the study, also noted that "In prior generations, you get married and you start a career and you do that immediately. What young people today are seeing is that approach has led to divorces, to people unhappy with their careers … The majority want to get married […] they just want to do it right the first time, the same thing with their careers."
The economy has had a dampening effect on Millennials' ability to date and get married. In 2012, the average American couple spent an average of over $27,000 on their wedding. A 2013 joint study by sociologists at the University of Virginia and Harvard University found that the decline and disappearance of stable full-time jobs with health insurance and pensions for people who lack a college degree has had profound effects on working-class Americans, who now are less likely to marry and have children within marriage than those with college degrees.
Data from a 2014 study of US Millennials revealed over 56% of that group considers themselves as part of the working class, while only nearly 35% consider themselves in the middle class; this class identity is the lowest polling of any generation.
Religion:
In the United States, Millennials are the least likely to be religious. There is a trend towards irreligion that has been increasing since the 1940s. 29 percent of Americans born between 1983 and 1994 are irreligious, as opposed to 21 percent born between 1963 and 1981, 15 percent born between 1948 and 1962 and only 7 percent born before 1948. A 2005 study looked at 1,385 people aged 18 to 25 and found that more than half of those in the study said that they pray regularly before a meal.
One-third said that they discussed religion with friends, attended religious services, and read religious material weekly. Twenty-three percent of those studied did not identify themselves as religious practitioners. A Pew Research Center study on Millennials shows that of those between 18–29 years old, only 3% of these emerging adults self-identified as "atheists" and only 4% self-identified as "agnostics". Overall, 25% of Millennials are "Nones" and 75% are religiously affiliated.
Over half of Millennials polled in the United Kingdom in 2013 said they had 'no religion nor attended a place of worship', other than for a wedding or a funeral. 25% said they 'believe in a God', while 19% believed in a 'spiritual greater power' and 38% said they did not believe in God nor any other 'greater spiritual power'. The poll also found 41% thought religion is 'the cause of evil' in the world more often than good.
Digital technologyIn their 2007 book, authors Junco and Mastrodicasa expanded on the work of William Strauss and Neil Howe to include research-based information about the personality profiles of Millennials, especially as it relates to higher education. They conducted a large-sample (7,705) research study of college students. They found that Next Generation college students, born between 1983–1992, were frequently in touch with their parents and they used technology at higher rates than people from other generations.
In their survey, they found that 97% of these students owned a computer, 94% owned a mobile phone, and 56% owned an MP3 player. They also found that students spoke with their parents an average of 1.5 times a day about a wide range of topics. Other findings in the Junco and Mastrodicasa survey revealed 76% of students used instant messaging, 92% of those reported multitasking while instant messaging, 40% of them used television to get most of their news, and 34% of students surveyed used the Internet as their primary news source.
Gen Xers and Millennials were the first to grow up with computers in their homes. In a 1999 speech at the New York Institute of Technology, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates encouraged America's teachers to use technology to serve the needs of the first generation of kids to grow up with the Internet.
Many Millennials enjoy a 250+-channel home cable TV universe. One of the more popular forms of media use by Millienials is social networking. In 2010, research was published in the Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research which claimed that students who used social media and decided to quit showed the same withdrawal symptoms of a drug addict who quit their stimulant.
Marc Prensky coined the term "digital native" to describe "K through college" students in 2001, explaining they "represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology." Millennials are identified as "digital natives" by the Pew Research Center which conducted a survey titled Millennials in Adulthood.
Millennials use social networking sites, such as Facebook, to create a different sense of belonging, make acquaintances, and to remain connected with friends. The Millennials are the generation that uses social media the most, with 59% of Millennials using it to find information on people and events, compared to only 29% of previous generations. 88% of Millennials use Facebook as their primary source of news.
In the Frontline episode "Generation Like", there is discussion about Millennials and their dependence on technology and ways to commoditize the social media sphere.
Cultural identity:
Strauss & Howe's book titled Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation describes the Millennial generation as "civic-minded", rejecting the attitudes of the Baby Boomers and Generation X.
Since the 2000 U.S. Census, which allowed people to select more than one racial group, Millennials in abundance have asserted the ideal that all their heritages should be respected, counted, and acknowledged.
Generally speaking, Millennials are the children of Baby Boomers or Generation Xers, while some older members may have parents from the Silent Generation. A 2013 poll in the United Kingdom found that Generation Y was more "open-minded than their parents on controversial topics". Of those surveyed, nearly 65% supported same-sex marriage.
A 2013 Pew Research Poll concluded that 84% of Millennials, born since 1980 and then between the ages of 18 and 32, favor legalizing the use of marijuana.
In 2015, the Pew Research Center also conducted research regarding generational identity. It was discovered that Millennials, or members of Generation Y, are less likely to strongly identify with the generational term when compared to Generation X or to the baby boomers. It was also found that Millennials chose most often to define itself with more negative terms such as self-absorbed, wasteful or greedy. In this 2015 report, Pew defined Millennials with birth years ranging from 1981 onward.
Millennials came of age in a time where the entertainment industry began to be affected by the Internet:
On top of Millennials being the most ethnically and racially diverse compared to the generations older than they are, they are also on pace to be the most educated. As of 2008, 39.6% of Millennials between the ages of 18–24 were enrolled in college, which was an American record.
Along with being educated, Millennials are also very upbeat. As stated above in the economic prospects section, about 9 out of 10 Millennials feel as though they have enough money or that they will reach their long-term financial goals, even during the tough economic times, and they are more optimistic about the future of the U.S.
Additionally, Millennials are also more open to change than older generations. According to the Pew Research Center that did a survey in 2008, Millennials are the most likely of any generation to self-identify as liberals and are also more supportive of progressive domestic social agenda than older generations. Finally, Millennials are the least overtly religious than the older generations. About one in four Millennials are unaffiliated with any religion, which is much more than the older generations when they were the ages of Millennials.
Inclusion and self-identification debate:
Due in part to the frequent birth-year overlap and resulting incongruence existing between attempts to define Generation X and Millennials, a growing number of individuals born in the late 1970s or early 1980s see themselves as either belonging to, and identifying with, neither of these traditional generations, or, rather, as trans-generational, included and identified with both, either in whole or to a degree. Some attempts to define those individuals born in the Generation X and Millennial overlapped years have given rise to inter- or micro-generations, such as Xennials, The Lucky Ones, Generation Catalano, and the Oregon Trail Generation.
In an article written for Popsugar, author Ashley Paige states that while Generation Z birth dates are commonly described as starting in 1995, she relates to them more than Millennials: "With a birth date near the end of 1994, I feel like I can't fully identify with millennials, especially in regards to 'the golden days.' Yeah, I remember when no one had cell phones — but only till sixth grade. Yeah, I thought Titanic was amazing — in 2005, when I was first allowed to see it. And no, I can't recall a time in my life when there wasn't a computer in my house. In second grade, I learned to use Google."
See also:
Generation Z (commonly abbreviated to Gen Z, also known as iGeneration, Homeland Generation or Plurals) are the generation of people born after Generation Y/Millennials.
The generation is most commonly defined with birth years starting in the mid-1990s, although the early or late 1990s and early 2000s have also been used as starting birth years for this generation.
A significant aspect of this generation is its widespread usage of the internet from a young age. Members of Generation Z are typically thought of as being comfortable with technology, and interacting on social media websites for a significant portion of their socializing. Some commentators have suggested that growing up through the Great Recession has given the cohort a feeling of unsettlement and insecurity.
Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote several books on the subject of generations and are widely credited with coining the term Millennials. Howe has said "No one knows who will name the next generation after the Millennials". In 2005, their company sponsored an online contest in which respondents voted overwhelmingly for the name Homeland Generation. That was not long after the September 11th terrorist attacks, and one fallout of the disaster was that Americans may have felt more safe staying at home. Howe has described himself as "not totally wed" to the name and cautioned that "names are being invented by people who have a great press release. Everyone is looking for a hook."
In 2012, USA Today sponsored an online contest for readers to choose the name of the next generation after the Millennials. The name Generation Z was suggested, although journalist Bruce Horovitz thought that some might find the term "off-putting". Some other names that were proposed included: iGeneration, Gen Tech, Gen Wii, Net Gen, Digital Natives, and Plurals.
iGeneration (or iGen) is a name that several individuals claim to have coined. Psychology professor and author Jean Twenge claims that the name iGen "just popped into her head" while she was driving near Silicon Valley, and that she had intended to use it as the title of her 2006 book Generation Me until it was overridden by her publisher. Demographer Cheryl Russell claims to have first used the term in 2009.
Matt Carmichael, a past director of data strategy at Ad Age, said in 2012 "we think iGen is the name that best fits and will best lead to understanding of this generation".
In 2014, an NPR news intern noted that iGeneration "seems to be winning" as the name for the post-Millennials. It has been described as "a wink and nod to Apple's iPod and iPhone", while former Ad Age writer Matt Carmichael notes that the lowercase "i" in iGeneration "leaves room for interpretation" and "could be any number of things: It could be for interactive, it could be for international, it could be for something we haven't thought of yet."
In response to naming a generation after a branded product, Randy Apuzzo, technologist and CEO of Zesty.io, published an article titled "Always Connected: Generation Z, the Digitarians", in which he calls the new generation 'Digitarians' because they are the first generation that has been "always connected to the internet" and were raised with touch devices.
Statistics Canada has noted that the cohort is sometimes referred to as "the Internet generation," as it is the first generation to have been born after the invention of the Internet. Criticism of the term has been that it could "sound like an adapter used to charge your phone on the bus".
Frank N. Magid Associates, an advertising and marketing agency, nicknamed this cohort "The Pluralist Generation" or 'Plurals'. Turner Broadcasting System also advocated calling the post-millennial generation 'Plurals'. The Futures Company has named this cohort "The Centennials".
In Japan, the cohort is described as "Neo-Digital Natives", a step beyond the previous cohort described as "Digital Natives". Digital Natives primarily communicate by text or voice, while neo-digital natives use video or movies. This emphasizes the shift from PC to mobile and text to video among the neo-digital population.
MTV has labeled the generation that follows Millennials "The Founders", based on the results of a survey they conducted in March 2015. MTV President Sean Atkins commented, “they have this self-awareness that systems have been broken, but they can’t be the generation that says we’ll break it even more.”
Author Neil Howe defines the cohort as people born from approximately 2005–2025, but describes the dividing line between Generation Z and Millennials as "tentative" saying, "you can’t be sure where history will someday draw a cohort dividing line until a generation fully comes of age". He noted that the Millennials' range beginning in 1982 would point to the next generation's window starting between 2000 and 2006.
Australia's McCrindle Research Center defines Generation Z as those born between 1995–2009, starting with a recorded rise in birth rates, and fitting their newer definition of a generational span as 15 years. A previous McCrindle report used 2001 as the starting point for this generation.
Adweek defines Generation Z as those born in 1995 or later. Many other researchers also put the starting date for Generation Z at around the mid-1990s, in or after 1995 and 1996.
In Japan, generations are defined by a ten year span with "Neo-Digital natives" beginning after 1996.
Statistics Canada defines Generation Z as starting with the birth year 1993. The Futures Company uses 1997 as the first year of birth for this cohort. Frank N. Magid Associates, an advertising and marketing agency, uses birth years starting from 1997 into the present day.
According to Forbes, in 2015 Generation Z made up 25% of the U.S. population, making them a larger cohort than the Baby Boomers or Millennials. Frank N. Magid Associates estimates that in the United States, 55% of Plurals are Caucasian, 24% are Hispanic, 14% are African-American, 4% are Asian, and 4% are multiracial or other.
The oldest members of Generation Z will be the first to come of age after same-sex marriage was legalized nationally in 2015. Generation Z is the first to overwhelmingly approve of same-sex marriage in their adolescence. According to a Frank N. Magid Associates white paper, generation Z exhibits positive feelings about the increasing ethnic diversity in the U.S., and they are more likely than older generations to have social circles that include people from different ethnic groups, races and religions.
Generation Z are predominantly the children of Generation X. According to marketing firm Frank N. Magid they are "the least likely to believe that there is such a thing as the American Dream", while Baby Boomers and their Millennial children are more likely to believe in it. According to Public Relations Society of America, the Great Recession has taught Generation Z to be independent, and has led to an entrepreneurial desire, after seeing their parents and older siblings struggle in the workforce.
Business Insider describes Generation Z as more conservative, more money-oriented, more entrepreneurial and pragmatic about money compared to Millennials. A 2013 survey by Ameritrade found that 46% of Generation Z in the United States (considered here to be those between the ages of 14 and 23) were concerned about student debt, while 36% were worried about being able to afford a college education at all. This generation is faced with a growing income gap and a shrinking middle-class, which all have led to increasing stress levels in families.
Both the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Great Recession have greatly influenced the attitudes of this generation in the United States. The oldest members of generation Z were 7 to 8 years-old when the 9/11 attacks occurred. Turner suggests it is likely that both events have resulted in a feeling of unsettlement and insecurity among the people of Generation Z with the environment in which they were being raised.
The economic recession of 2008 is particularly important to historical events that have shaped Generation Z, due to the ways in which their childhoods may have been affected by the recession's shadow; that is, the financial stresses felt by their parents. Although the Millennials experienced these events during their coming of age, Generation Z lived through them as part of their childhood, affecting their realism and world-view. Obama's rise to presidency has also played a fundamental role in providing an identity to Generation Z.
A 2014 study Generation Z Goes to College found that Generation Z students self-identify as being loyal, compassionate, thoughtful, open-minded, responsible, and determined. How they see their Generation Z peers is quite different than their own self-identity. They view their peers as competitive, spontaneous, adventuresome, and curious; all characteristics that they do not see readily in themselves.
Generation Z is generally more risk-adverse in certain activities than the Millennials. In 2013, 66% of teenagers (older members of Generation Z) had tried alcohol, down from 82% in 1991. Also in 2013, 8% of Gen. Z teenagers never or rarely wear a seat belt when riding in a car with someone else, as opposed to 26% in 1991.
A 2016 U.S. study found that church attendance during young adulthood was 41% among Generation Z, compared with 18 percent for millennials at the same ages, 21 percent of Generation X, and 26 percent of baby boomers.
Generation Z is the first to have internet technology so readily available at a very young age. With the web revolution that occurred throughout the 1990s, they have been exposed to an unprecedented amount of technology in their upbringing.
As technology became more compact and affordable, the popularity of smartphones in the United States grew exponentially. With 77% of 12–17 year olds owning a cellphone in 2015, technology has strongly influenced Generation Z in terms of communication and education. Forbes magazine suggested that by the time Generation Z entered the workplace, digital technology would be an aspect of almost all career paths.
Anthony Turner characterizes Generation Z as having a 'digital bond to the internet', and argues that it may help youth to escape from emotional and mental struggles they face offline. According to US consultancy Sparks and Honey in 2014, 41% of Generation Z spend more than three hours per day using computers for purposes other than schoolwork, compared to 22% in 2004.
In 2015, Generation Z comprised the largest portion of the U.S. population, at nearly 26%, edging out Millennials (24.5%), and the generation is estimated to generate $44 billion in annual spending.
About three-quarters of 13–17 years olds use their cellphones daily, more than they watch TV. Over half of surveyed mothers say the demo influences them in purchasing decisions for toys, apparel, dinner choices, entertainment, TV, mobile and computers. Among social media, only Instagram is in popularity in the demo.
In 2015, an estimated 150,000 apps, 10% of those in Apple's app store, were educational and aimed at children up to college level. While researchers and parents agree the change in educational paradigm is significant, the results of the changes are mixed. On one hand, smartphones offer the potential for deeper involvement in learning and more individualized instruction, thereby making this generation potentially better educated and more well-rounded.
On the other hand, some researchers and parents are concerned that the prevalence of smart phones will cause technology dependence and a lack of self-regulation that will hinder child development.
An online newspaper about texting, SMS and MMS writes that teens own cellphones without necessarily needing them. As children become teenagers, receiving a phone is considered a rite of passage in some countries, allowing the owner to be further connected with their peers and it is now a social norm to have one at an early age.
An article from the Pew Research Center stated that "nearly three-quarters of teens have or have access to a smartphone and 30% have a basic phone, while just 12% of teens 13 to 17 say they have no cell phone of any type".
These numbers are only on the rise and the fact that the majority of Gen Z's own a cell phone has become one of this generations defining characteristics. As a result of this "24% of teens go online 'almost constantly'".
Teens are much more likely to share different types of information, as of 2012, compared to in 2006. However, they will take certain steps to protect certain information that they do not want being shared. They are more likely to "follow" others on social media than "share" and use different types of social media for different purposes. Focus group testing found that while teens may be annoyed by many aspects of Facebook, they continue to use it because participation is important in terms of socializing with friends and peers.
Twitter and Instagram are seen to be gaining popularity in member of Generation Z, with 24% (and growing) of teens with access to the Internet having Twitter accounts. This is, in part, due to parents not typically using these social networking sites.
Snapchat is also seen to have gained attraction in Generation Z because videos, pictures, messages send much faster than regular messaging. Speed and reliability are important factors in how members of Generation Z choice of social networking platform. This need for quick communication is presented in popular Generation Z apps like Vine (service) and the prevalent use of emojis.
In a study performed by psychologists it was found that young people use the internet as a way to gain access to information and to interact with others. Mobile technology, social media, and internet usage have become increasingly important to modern adolescents over the past decade.
Very few, however, are changed from what they gain access to online. Youths are using the internet as a tool to gain social skills, that they then apply to real life situations, and learn about things that interest them. Teens spend most of their time online in private communication with people they interact with outside the internet on a regular basis.
While social media is used for keeping up with global news and connections, it is mainly used for developing and maintaining relationships with people with whom they are close in proximity. The use of social media has become integrated into the daily lives of most Gen Z'ers who have access to mobile technology.
They use it on a daily basis to keep in contact with friends and family, particularly those who they see every day. As a result, the increased use of mobile technology has caused Gen Z'ers to spend more time on their smartphones, and social media and has caused online relationship development to become a new generational norm. Gen Z'ers are generally against the idea of photoshopping and they are against changing themselves to be considered perfect.
The parents of the Gen Z'ers fear the overuse of the internet by their children. Parents have a disliking for the access to inappropriate information and images as well as social networking sites where children can gain access to people from all over. Children reversely felt annoyed with their parents and complained about parents being overly controlling when it came to their internet usage. Gen Z uses social media and other sites to strengthen bonds with friends and to develop new ones. They interact with people who they otherwise would not have met in the real world, becoming a tool for identity creation.
Social media is known to be a vehicle to express how members of Generation Z go about their daily lives and also express their beliefs. On the one hand, this understanding of the use of social media makes even more prevalent the issues of racism in society.
On the other hand, when people attend events in support of certain social justice movements, members of Generation Z are much more likely to post on their social media pages about the event. In part, this is to further prove that they stand by their beliefs. Moreover, this also spreads awareness of the movement and leads to the growth of a movement.
Jason Dorsey, a notable Gen Y speaker who runs the Center for Generational Kinetics, stated in a TEDxHouston talk that this generation begins after 1996 to present. He stressed notable differences in the way that they both consume technology, in terms of smartphone usage at an earlier age. 18% of Generation Z thinks that it is okay for a 13 year old to have a smartphone compared to earlier generations which say 4%.
Education:
According to a Northeastern University Survey, 81% of Generation Z believes obtaining a college degree is necessary in achieving career goals. As Generation Z enters high school, and they start preparing for college, a primary concern is paying for a college education without acquiring debt. Students report working hard in high school in hopes of earning scholarships and the hope that parents will pay the college costs not covered by scholarships.
Students also report interest in ROTC programs as a means of covering college costs. According to NeaToday, a publication by the National Education Association, two thirds of Gen Zers entering college are concerned about affording college. One third plan to rely on grants and scholarships and one quarter hope that their parents will cover the bulk of college costs.
While the cost of attending college is incredibly high for most Gen Zers, according to NeaToday, 65% say the benefits of graduating college exceed the costs. Generation Z college students prefer intra-personal and independent learning over group work, yet like to do their solo work alongside others in a social manner when studying. They like their learning to be practical and hands-on and want their professors to help them engage with and apply the content rather than simply share what they could otherwise find on their own online.
"Generation Z" is revolutionizing the educational system in many aspects. Thanks in part to a rise in the popularity of entrepreneurship, high schools and colleges across the globe are including entrepreneurship in their curriculums.
Employment prospects:
According to Hal Brotheim in Introducing Generation Z, they will be better future employees. With the skills needed to take advantage of advanced technologies, they will be significantly more helpful to the typical company in today's high tech world. Brotheim argues that their valuable characteristics are their acceptance of new ideas and different conception of freedom from the previous generations.
Despite the technological proficiency they possess, members of Generation Z actually prefer person to person contact as opposed to online interaction. As a result of the social media and technology they are accustomed to, Generation Z is well prepared for a global business environment.
Another important note to point out is Generation Z no longer wants just a job: they seek more than that. They want a feeling of fulfillment and excitement in their job that helps move the world forward. Generation Z is eager to be involved in their community and their futures.
Before college, Generation Z is already out in their world searching how to take advantage of relevant professional opportunities that will give them experience for the future.
In India, a 2016 survey by India's employee engagement and employer rating platform, JobBuzz.in, showed Generation Z professionals started out better in the job market compared to Generation Y.
Successors:
Mark McCrindle has suggested "Generation Alpha" and "Generation Glass" as names for the generation following Generation Z. McCrindle has predicted that this next generation will be "the most formally educated generation ever, the most technology supplied generation ever, and globally the wealthiest generation ever". He chose the name "Generation Alpha", noting that scientific disciplines often move to the Greek alphabet after exhausting the Roman alphabet.
Author Alexandra Levit has suggested that there may not be a need to name the next generation, as technology has rendered the traditional 15–20 year cohorts obsolete. Levit notes that she "can't imagine my college student babysitter having the same experience as my four-year-old", despite both being in Generation Z.
Matt Carmichael, former director of data strategy at Advertising Age, noted in 2015 that many groups were "competing to come up with the clever name" for the generation following Generation Z.
The generation is most commonly defined with birth years starting in the mid-1990s, although the early or late 1990s and early 2000s have also been used as starting birth years for this generation.
A significant aspect of this generation is its widespread usage of the internet from a young age. Members of Generation Z are typically thought of as being comfortable with technology, and interacting on social media websites for a significant portion of their socializing. Some commentators have suggested that growing up through the Great Recession has given the cohort a feeling of unsettlement and insecurity.
Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote several books on the subject of generations and are widely credited with coining the term Millennials. Howe has said "No one knows who will name the next generation after the Millennials". In 2005, their company sponsored an online contest in which respondents voted overwhelmingly for the name Homeland Generation. That was not long after the September 11th terrorist attacks, and one fallout of the disaster was that Americans may have felt more safe staying at home. Howe has described himself as "not totally wed" to the name and cautioned that "names are being invented by people who have a great press release. Everyone is looking for a hook."
In 2012, USA Today sponsored an online contest for readers to choose the name of the next generation after the Millennials. The name Generation Z was suggested, although journalist Bruce Horovitz thought that some might find the term "off-putting". Some other names that were proposed included: iGeneration, Gen Tech, Gen Wii, Net Gen, Digital Natives, and Plurals.
iGeneration (or iGen) is a name that several individuals claim to have coined. Psychology professor and author Jean Twenge claims that the name iGen "just popped into her head" while she was driving near Silicon Valley, and that she had intended to use it as the title of her 2006 book Generation Me until it was overridden by her publisher. Demographer Cheryl Russell claims to have first used the term in 2009.
Matt Carmichael, a past director of data strategy at Ad Age, said in 2012 "we think iGen is the name that best fits and will best lead to understanding of this generation".
In 2014, an NPR news intern noted that iGeneration "seems to be winning" as the name for the post-Millennials. It has been described as "a wink and nod to Apple's iPod and iPhone", while former Ad Age writer Matt Carmichael notes that the lowercase "i" in iGeneration "leaves room for interpretation" and "could be any number of things: It could be for interactive, it could be for international, it could be for something we haven't thought of yet."
In response to naming a generation after a branded product, Randy Apuzzo, technologist and CEO of Zesty.io, published an article titled "Always Connected: Generation Z, the Digitarians", in which he calls the new generation 'Digitarians' because they are the first generation that has been "always connected to the internet" and were raised with touch devices.
Statistics Canada has noted that the cohort is sometimes referred to as "the Internet generation," as it is the first generation to have been born after the invention of the Internet. Criticism of the term has been that it could "sound like an adapter used to charge your phone on the bus".
Frank N. Magid Associates, an advertising and marketing agency, nicknamed this cohort "The Pluralist Generation" or 'Plurals'. Turner Broadcasting System also advocated calling the post-millennial generation 'Plurals'. The Futures Company has named this cohort "The Centennials".
In Japan, the cohort is described as "Neo-Digital Natives", a step beyond the previous cohort described as "Digital Natives". Digital Natives primarily communicate by text or voice, while neo-digital natives use video or movies. This emphasizes the shift from PC to mobile and text to video among the neo-digital population.
MTV has labeled the generation that follows Millennials "The Founders", based on the results of a survey they conducted in March 2015. MTV President Sean Atkins commented, “they have this self-awareness that systems have been broken, but they can’t be the generation that says we’ll break it even more.”
Author Neil Howe defines the cohort as people born from approximately 2005–2025, but describes the dividing line between Generation Z and Millennials as "tentative" saying, "you can’t be sure where history will someday draw a cohort dividing line until a generation fully comes of age". He noted that the Millennials' range beginning in 1982 would point to the next generation's window starting between 2000 and 2006.
Australia's McCrindle Research Center defines Generation Z as those born between 1995–2009, starting with a recorded rise in birth rates, and fitting their newer definition of a generational span as 15 years. A previous McCrindle report used 2001 as the starting point for this generation.
Adweek defines Generation Z as those born in 1995 or later. Many other researchers also put the starting date for Generation Z at around the mid-1990s, in or after 1995 and 1996.
In Japan, generations are defined by a ten year span with "Neo-Digital natives" beginning after 1996.
Statistics Canada defines Generation Z as starting with the birth year 1993. The Futures Company uses 1997 as the first year of birth for this cohort. Frank N. Magid Associates, an advertising and marketing agency, uses birth years starting from 1997 into the present day.
According to Forbes, in 2015 Generation Z made up 25% of the U.S. population, making them a larger cohort than the Baby Boomers or Millennials. Frank N. Magid Associates estimates that in the United States, 55% of Plurals are Caucasian, 24% are Hispanic, 14% are African-American, 4% are Asian, and 4% are multiracial or other.
The oldest members of Generation Z will be the first to come of age after same-sex marriage was legalized nationally in 2015. Generation Z is the first to overwhelmingly approve of same-sex marriage in their adolescence. According to a Frank N. Magid Associates white paper, generation Z exhibits positive feelings about the increasing ethnic diversity in the U.S., and they are more likely than older generations to have social circles that include people from different ethnic groups, races and religions.
Generation Z are predominantly the children of Generation X. According to marketing firm Frank N. Magid they are "the least likely to believe that there is such a thing as the American Dream", while Baby Boomers and their Millennial children are more likely to believe in it. According to Public Relations Society of America, the Great Recession has taught Generation Z to be independent, and has led to an entrepreneurial desire, after seeing their parents and older siblings struggle in the workforce.
Business Insider describes Generation Z as more conservative, more money-oriented, more entrepreneurial and pragmatic about money compared to Millennials. A 2013 survey by Ameritrade found that 46% of Generation Z in the United States (considered here to be those between the ages of 14 and 23) were concerned about student debt, while 36% were worried about being able to afford a college education at all. This generation is faced with a growing income gap and a shrinking middle-class, which all have led to increasing stress levels in families.
Both the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Great Recession have greatly influenced the attitudes of this generation in the United States. The oldest members of generation Z were 7 to 8 years-old when the 9/11 attacks occurred. Turner suggests it is likely that both events have resulted in a feeling of unsettlement and insecurity among the people of Generation Z with the environment in which they were being raised.
The economic recession of 2008 is particularly important to historical events that have shaped Generation Z, due to the ways in which their childhoods may have been affected by the recession's shadow; that is, the financial stresses felt by their parents. Although the Millennials experienced these events during their coming of age, Generation Z lived through them as part of their childhood, affecting their realism and world-view. Obama's rise to presidency has also played a fundamental role in providing an identity to Generation Z.
A 2014 study Generation Z Goes to College found that Generation Z students self-identify as being loyal, compassionate, thoughtful, open-minded, responsible, and determined. How they see their Generation Z peers is quite different than their own self-identity. They view their peers as competitive, spontaneous, adventuresome, and curious; all characteristics that they do not see readily in themselves.
Generation Z is generally more risk-adverse in certain activities than the Millennials. In 2013, 66% of teenagers (older members of Generation Z) had tried alcohol, down from 82% in 1991. Also in 2013, 8% of Gen. Z teenagers never or rarely wear a seat belt when riding in a car with someone else, as opposed to 26% in 1991.
A 2016 U.S. study found that church attendance during young adulthood was 41% among Generation Z, compared with 18 percent for millennials at the same ages, 21 percent of Generation X, and 26 percent of baby boomers.
Generation Z is the first to have internet technology so readily available at a very young age. With the web revolution that occurred throughout the 1990s, they have been exposed to an unprecedented amount of technology in their upbringing.
As technology became more compact and affordable, the popularity of smartphones in the United States grew exponentially. With 77% of 12–17 year olds owning a cellphone in 2015, technology has strongly influenced Generation Z in terms of communication and education. Forbes magazine suggested that by the time Generation Z entered the workplace, digital technology would be an aspect of almost all career paths.
Anthony Turner characterizes Generation Z as having a 'digital bond to the internet', and argues that it may help youth to escape from emotional and mental struggles they face offline. According to US consultancy Sparks and Honey in 2014, 41% of Generation Z spend more than three hours per day using computers for purposes other than schoolwork, compared to 22% in 2004.
In 2015, Generation Z comprised the largest portion of the U.S. population, at nearly 26%, edging out Millennials (24.5%), and the generation is estimated to generate $44 billion in annual spending.
About three-quarters of 13–17 years olds use their cellphones daily, more than they watch TV. Over half of surveyed mothers say the demo influences them in purchasing decisions for toys, apparel, dinner choices, entertainment, TV, mobile and computers. Among social media, only Instagram is in popularity in the demo.
In 2015, an estimated 150,000 apps, 10% of those in Apple's app store, were educational and aimed at children up to college level. While researchers and parents agree the change in educational paradigm is significant, the results of the changes are mixed. On one hand, smartphones offer the potential for deeper involvement in learning and more individualized instruction, thereby making this generation potentially better educated and more well-rounded.
On the other hand, some researchers and parents are concerned that the prevalence of smart phones will cause technology dependence and a lack of self-regulation that will hinder child development.
An online newspaper about texting, SMS and MMS writes that teens own cellphones without necessarily needing them. As children become teenagers, receiving a phone is considered a rite of passage in some countries, allowing the owner to be further connected with their peers and it is now a social norm to have one at an early age.
An article from the Pew Research Center stated that "nearly three-quarters of teens have or have access to a smartphone and 30% have a basic phone, while just 12% of teens 13 to 17 say they have no cell phone of any type".
These numbers are only on the rise and the fact that the majority of Gen Z's own a cell phone has become one of this generations defining characteristics. As a result of this "24% of teens go online 'almost constantly'".
Teens are much more likely to share different types of information, as of 2012, compared to in 2006. However, they will take certain steps to protect certain information that they do not want being shared. They are more likely to "follow" others on social media than "share" and use different types of social media for different purposes. Focus group testing found that while teens may be annoyed by many aspects of Facebook, they continue to use it because participation is important in terms of socializing with friends and peers.
Twitter and Instagram are seen to be gaining popularity in member of Generation Z, with 24% (and growing) of teens with access to the Internet having Twitter accounts. This is, in part, due to parents not typically using these social networking sites.
Snapchat is also seen to have gained attraction in Generation Z because videos, pictures, messages send much faster than regular messaging. Speed and reliability are important factors in how members of Generation Z choice of social networking platform. This need for quick communication is presented in popular Generation Z apps like Vine (service) and the prevalent use of emojis.
In a study performed by psychologists it was found that young people use the internet as a way to gain access to information and to interact with others. Mobile technology, social media, and internet usage have become increasingly important to modern adolescents over the past decade.
Very few, however, are changed from what they gain access to online. Youths are using the internet as a tool to gain social skills, that they then apply to real life situations, and learn about things that interest them. Teens spend most of their time online in private communication with people they interact with outside the internet on a regular basis.
While social media is used for keeping up with global news and connections, it is mainly used for developing and maintaining relationships with people with whom they are close in proximity. The use of social media has become integrated into the daily lives of most Gen Z'ers who have access to mobile technology.
They use it on a daily basis to keep in contact with friends and family, particularly those who they see every day. As a result, the increased use of mobile technology has caused Gen Z'ers to spend more time on their smartphones, and social media and has caused online relationship development to become a new generational norm. Gen Z'ers are generally against the idea of photoshopping and they are against changing themselves to be considered perfect.
The parents of the Gen Z'ers fear the overuse of the internet by their children. Parents have a disliking for the access to inappropriate information and images as well as social networking sites where children can gain access to people from all over. Children reversely felt annoyed with their parents and complained about parents being overly controlling when it came to their internet usage. Gen Z uses social media and other sites to strengthen bonds with friends and to develop new ones. They interact with people who they otherwise would not have met in the real world, becoming a tool for identity creation.
Social media is known to be a vehicle to express how members of Generation Z go about their daily lives and also express their beliefs. On the one hand, this understanding of the use of social media makes even more prevalent the issues of racism in society.
On the other hand, when people attend events in support of certain social justice movements, members of Generation Z are much more likely to post on their social media pages about the event. In part, this is to further prove that they stand by their beliefs. Moreover, this also spreads awareness of the movement and leads to the growth of a movement.
Jason Dorsey, a notable Gen Y speaker who runs the Center for Generational Kinetics, stated in a TEDxHouston talk that this generation begins after 1996 to present. He stressed notable differences in the way that they both consume technology, in terms of smartphone usage at an earlier age. 18% of Generation Z thinks that it is okay for a 13 year old to have a smartphone compared to earlier generations which say 4%.
Education:
According to a Northeastern University Survey, 81% of Generation Z believes obtaining a college degree is necessary in achieving career goals. As Generation Z enters high school, and they start preparing for college, a primary concern is paying for a college education without acquiring debt. Students report working hard in high school in hopes of earning scholarships and the hope that parents will pay the college costs not covered by scholarships.
Students also report interest in ROTC programs as a means of covering college costs. According to NeaToday, a publication by the National Education Association, two thirds of Gen Zers entering college are concerned about affording college. One third plan to rely on grants and scholarships and one quarter hope that their parents will cover the bulk of college costs.
While the cost of attending college is incredibly high for most Gen Zers, according to NeaToday, 65% say the benefits of graduating college exceed the costs. Generation Z college students prefer intra-personal and independent learning over group work, yet like to do their solo work alongside others in a social manner when studying. They like their learning to be practical and hands-on and want their professors to help them engage with and apply the content rather than simply share what they could otherwise find on their own online.
"Generation Z" is revolutionizing the educational system in many aspects. Thanks in part to a rise in the popularity of entrepreneurship, high schools and colleges across the globe are including entrepreneurship in their curriculums.
Employment prospects:
According to Hal Brotheim in Introducing Generation Z, they will be better future employees. With the skills needed to take advantage of advanced technologies, they will be significantly more helpful to the typical company in today's high tech world. Brotheim argues that their valuable characteristics are their acceptance of new ideas and different conception of freedom from the previous generations.
Despite the technological proficiency they possess, members of Generation Z actually prefer person to person contact as opposed to online interaction. As a result of the social media and technology they are accustomed to, Generation Z is well prepared for a global business environment.
Another important note to point out is Generation Z no longer wants just a job: they seek more than that. They want a feeling of fulfillment and excitement in their job that helps move the world forward. Generation Z is eager to be involved in their community and their futures.
Before college, Generation Z is already out in their world searching how to take advantage of relevant professional opportunities that will give them experience for the future.
In India, a 2016 survey by India's employee engagement and employer rating platform, JobBuzz.in, showed Generation Z professionals started out better in the job market compared to Generation Y.
Successors:
Mark McCrindle has suggested "Generation Alpha" and "Generation Glass" as names for the generation following Generation Z. McCrindle has predicted that this next generation will be "the most formally educated generation ever, the most technology supplied generation ever, and globally the wealthiest generation ever". He chose the name "Generation Alpha", noting that scientific disciplines often move to the Greek alphabet after exhausting the Roman alphabet.
Author Alexandra Levit has suggested that there may not be a need to name the next generation, as technology has rendered the traditional 15–20 year cohorts obsolete. Levit notes that she "can't imagine my college student babysitter having the same experience as my four-year-old", despite both being in Generation Z.
Matt Carmichael, former director of data strategy at Advertising Age, noted in 2015 that many groups were "competing to come up with the clever name" for the generation following Generation Z.
Baby boomers are the demographic group born during the post–World War II baby boom, approximately between the years 1946 and 1964. This includes people who are between 52 and 70 years old in 2016, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The term "baby boomer" is also used in a cultural context, so it is difficult to achieve broad consensus of a precise date definition. Different people, organizations, and scholars have varying opinions on who is a baby boomer, both technically and culturally. Ascribing universal attributes to such a generation is difficult, and some believe it is inherently impossible, but many have attempted to determine their cultural similarities and historical impact, and the term has thus gained widespread popular usage.
Baby boomers are associated with a rejection or redefinition of traditional values. Many commentators, however, have disputed the extent of that rejection, noting the widespread continuity of values with older and younger generations.
In Europe and North America, boomers are widely associated with privilege, as many grew up in a time of widespread government subsidies in post-war housing and education, and increasing affluence.
As a group, baby boomers were the wealthiest, most active, and most physically fit generation up to the era in which they arrived, and were among the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time. They were also the generation that received peak levels of income; they could therefore reap the benefits of abundant levels of food, apparel, retirement programs, and sometimes even "midlife crisis" products.
The increased consumerism for this generation has been regularly criticized as excessive.
One feature of the boomers was that they have tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their statistical cohort, and the changes they were bringing about.
This rhetoric had an important impact in the self perceptions of the boomers, as well as their tendency to define the world in terms of generations, which was a relatively new phenomenon. The baby boom has been described variously as a "shockwave" and as "the pig in the python."
The term "Generation Jones" has sometimes been used to distinguish those born from 1954 to 1964 from the earlier baby boomers.
The term "baby boomer" is also used in a cultural context, so it is difficult to achieve broad consensus of a precise date definition. Different people, organizations, and scholars have varying opinions on who is a baby boomer, both technically and culturally. Ascribing universal attributes to such a generation is difficult, and some believe it is inherently impossible, but many have attempted to determine their cultural similarities and historical impact, and the term has thus gained widespread popular usage.
Baby boomers are associated with a rejection or redefinition of traditional values. Many commentators, however, have disputed the extent of that rejection, noting the widespread continuity of values with older and younger generations.
In Europe and North America, boomers are widely associated with privilege, as many grew up in a time of widespread government subsidies in post-war housing and education, and increasing affluence.
As a group, baby boomers were the wealthiest, most active, and most physically fit generation up to the era in which they arrived, and were among the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time. They were also the generation that received peak levels of income; they could therefore reap the benefits of abundant levels of food, apparel, retirement programs, and sometimes even "midlife crisis" products.
The increased consumerism for this generation has been regularly criticized as excessive.
One feature of the boomers was that they have tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their statistical cohort, and the changes they were bringing about.
This rhetoric had an important impact in the self perceptions of the boomers, as well as their tendency to define the world in terms of generations, which was a relatively new phenomenon. The baby boom has been described variously as a "shockwave" and as "the pig in the python."
The term "Generation Jones" has sometimes been used to distinguish those born from 1954 to 1964 from the earlier baby boomers.
The Greatest Generation:
* - Tom Brokaw
Pictured below: "The Greatest Generation":
- YouTube Video: Tom Brokaw* and Chronicling the Greatest Generation
- YouTube Video: What is it that makes the "Greatest Generation" so great?
- YouTube Video: Dwight D. Eisenhower: Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces | Full Documentary | Biography
* - Tom Brokaw
Pictured below: "The Greatest Generation":
Greatest Generation
The Greatest Generation, also known as the G.I. Generation and the World War II Generation, is the demographic cohort following the Lost Generation and preceding the Silent Generation.
The social generation is generally defined as people born from 1901 to 1927. They were shaped by the Great Depression and were the primary generation composing the enlisted forces in World War II. Most people of the Greatest Generation are the parents of the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers, and they are the children of the Lost Generation.
With the death of 117-year-old Nabi Tajima, on 21 April 2018, the Lost Generation cohort ended, making The Greatest Generation the earliest generation with living members.
Terminology
An early usage of the term The Greatest Generation was in 1953 by U.S. Army General James Van Fleet, who had recently retired after his service in World War II and leading the Eighth Army in the Korean War. He spoke to Congress, saying, "The men of the Eighth Army are a magnificent lot, and I have always said the greatest generation of Americans we have ever produced."
The term was further popularized by the title of a 1998 book by American journalist Tom Brokaw. In the book, Brokaw profiles American members of this generation who came of age during the Great Depression and went on to fight in World War II, as well as those who contributed to the war effort on the home front. Brokaw wrote that these men and women fought not for fame or recognition, but because it was the "right thing to do" This cohort is also referred to as the World War II generation.
The term "G.I. Generation" was first used in 1971 by Alberto M. Camarillo in an article for the academic journal Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, titled "Research note on Chicano community leaders: the GI generation." The initials G.I. refer to American soldiers in World War II. Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe later popularized the G.I. Generation term in their 1991 book Generations: The History of America's Future.
Date and age range definitions:
Pew Research Center defines this cohort as being born from 1901 to 1927. Strauss and Howe use the birth years 1901–1924. The first half of this generation, born between 1901 and 1912, is sometimes referred to as the Interbellum Generation.
The majority of veterans who served in World War II were born during the second half of this generation, from 1913 to 1924. While the oldest members of the Interbellum Generation came of age at the close of the 1910s in 1919, the majority reached maturity in the 1920s and the minority had grown up in the initial years of the Great Depression from 1929 to 1932.
The "WW II Generation Proper" came of age in either the second half of the 1930s or the early years of the 1940s.
Characteristics:
United States:
In the United States, members of this generation came of age as early as 1919 and as late as 1945, were children, or were born during the Progressive Era, World War I, and the Roaring Twenties; a time of economic prosperity with distinctive cultural transformations.
Additionally, many of those alive from 1918 through 1920 experienced the deadly Spanish flu pandemic; and, incredibly, a few rare individuals, such as Anna Del Priore, managed to survive infection from the Spanish flu and the COVID-19 pandemic approximately 100 years later.
They also experienced much of their youth with rapid technological innovation (e.g., radio, telephone, automobile) amidst growing levels of worldwide income inequality and a soaring economy. After the Stock Market crashed, when many had matured in the 1930s, this generation experienced profound economic and social turmoil.
Despite the hardships, historians note that the literature, arts, music, and cinema of the period flourished. This generation experienced what is commonly referred to as the "Golden Age of Hollywood".
The Great Depression also greatly influenced literature and witnessed the advent of comic books, which were popular with members of this generation with such characters as:
Next to jazz, blues, gospel music, and folk music; swing jazz became immensely popular with members of this generation.
The term "Swing Generation" has also been used to describe the cohort due to the popularity of the era's music.
The popularity of the radio also became a major influence in the lives of this generation, as millions tuned in to listen to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "fireside chats" and absorbed the news in a way like never before.
Great Depression and World War II
Main article: Military history of the United States during World War II
Over 16 million Americans served in World War II, the majority being members of this generation. 38.8% were volunteers, 61.2% were draftees, the average length of their service was 33 months, and total approximate casualties were 671,278 (killed and wounded). Tom Brokaw and others extol this generation for supporting and fighting World War II.
Post-war
Main article: Post–World War II economic expansion
Following the war, this generation produced children at an unprecedented level. Over 76 million babies were born between 1946 and 1964. Subsidized by the G.I. Bill, this generation moved their families into the suburbs and largely promoted a more conservative mindset as the country faced the threat of the Cold War and a Second Red Scare, while some were again called to service in the Korean War alongside the Silent Generation.
The first member of their generation and the first person born in the 20th century to be elected U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, began a Space Race against the Soviet Union, and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, further promoted a controversial "Great Society" policy.
Research professor of sociology Glen Holl Elder, Jr., a prominent figure in the development of life course theory, wrote Children of the Great Depression (1974), "the first longitudinal study of a Great Depression cohort." Elder followed 167 individuals born in California between 1920 and 1921 and "traced the impact of Depression and wartime experiences from the early years to middle age.
Most of these 'children of the Great Depression' fared unusually well in their adult years". They came out of the hardships of the Great Depression "with an ability to know how to survive and make do and solve problems.”
Relationship to later generations
This generation faced turmoil with their older baby boomer children upon their maturing in the 1960s in the form of the:
Attitudes shaped during World War II clashed with those of the Vietnam era as many struggled to understand the general distrust of the government by the younger generations, while some supported anti-war protests.
The same applied to a lesser extent in the 1950s between the Interbellum Generation and their Silent Generation children.
Later years and legacy:
According to a 2004 study done by AARP, "There are 26 million people aged 77 or older in the United States. These people are largely conservative on economic (59%) and social (49%) issues, and about one-third of them say they have become more conservative on economic, social, foreign policy, moral, and legal issues as they have aged.
Over 9 in 10 (91%) of this age group are registered to vote and 90% voted in the 2000 presidential election.
The last member of this generation to be elected president was George H. W. Bush (1989–1993), and as of 2024 the last surviving president from this generation is Jimmy Carter (1977–1981). In its latter years, this generation was introduced to continued technological advancements such as mobile phones and the Internet.
As of 2023, approximately 119,550 (under 1%) of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II remain alive. Living members of this generation are either in their late 90s or are centenarians.
The lives of this generation are a common element of popular culture in the western world, and media related to this generation's experiences continues to be produced. The romanticizing of this generation has faced criticism by some.
However, some also praise the traits and actions of this generation and cite their sacrifices as a lesson for current generations.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, living members of this generation have been impacted by the pandemic, such as Major Lee Wooten, who was treated in the hospital for coronavirus and recovered just prior to his 104th birthday in 2020; he passed away aged 105.
Britain:
Main article: Britain in World War II
In Britain, this generation came of age, like most of the western world, during a period of economic hardship as a result of the Great Depression. When the war in Europe began, millions of British citizens joined the war effort at home and abroad. Over 6 million members of this generation served in the war, and there were 384,000 casualties.
At home, the Blitz claimed the lives of thousands and destroyed entire British cities. The men and women of this generation continue to be honored in the U.K., particularly on V-E Day. In 2020, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson compared this generation to current generations and indicated his desire for them to show the "same spirit of national endeavour", in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Germany:
Main article: Germany in World War II
Members of the World War II generation in Germany came of age following World War I and the German Revolution of 1918–1919. They faced economic hardships related to the Great Depression and Treaty of Versailles as unemployment rose to nearly 40%. Adolf Hitler then rose to power, and many of this generation joined organizations such as the Hitler Youth.
In 1935, Hitler instituted military conscription. During the war, nearly 12.5 million members of this generation served in the war and 4.3 million were killed or wounded. By the end of the war, 5 million Germans were dead, including civilians. German cities and towns were devastated by Allied bombing campaigns. 12 million Germans were refugees and many were forced to settle in the Soviet Union.
In addition, the Holocaust claimed the lives of millions of German Jews and others. Following the war, the Allies began the denazification and demilitarization of a post-war Germany. Returning German veterans found their country carved up into four zones of occupation; later becoming West Germany and East Germany.
In the west, the Marshall Plan resulted in the "Wirtschaftswunder", an economic boom that caused 185% growth between 1950 and 1963. Surviving members of the German World War II generation would go on to experience the fall of the Berlin Wall and the creation of the European Union. Unlike the Western allies and the Soviet Union, Germany did not honor its veterans, as the association with Nazism continues in contemporary Germany today.
Soviet Union:
Main article: Soviet Union in World War II
As children, members of this generation came of age during Joseph Stalin's rise to power. They endured the Holodomor famine, which killed millions. The World War II generation of the Soviet Union was further decimated by the war. Stalin's scorched earth policy left its western regions in a state of devastation worsened by the advancing German Army.
The USSR lost 14% of its pre-war population during WWII, a demographic collapse that would have immense long-term consequences. Mass, forced labor was often utilized and there were between 10 and 11 million Soviet men returning to help rebuild along with 2 million Soviet dissidents held prisoner in Stalin's Gulags. Then came the Cold War and the Space Race. Even in the mid-1980s, around 70% of Soviet industrial output was directed towards the military, one of the factors in its eventual economic collapse.
Members of this generation are known as "Great Patriotic War" veterans, such as poet Yuri Levitansky who wrote about the horrors of the war and Vasily Zaitsev, a war hero who would later be detained for two years as a victim of the post-war atmosphere of paranoia.
Today, former Soviet states celebrate an annual Victory Day. The latest survey conducted by Russia's Levada Center suggests Victory Day is still one of the most important public holidays for Russian citizens, with 65% of those surveyed planning to celebrate it.
But for nearly one third of people (31%) it is a "state public event" while for another 31% it is a "memorial day for all former Soviet people". Only 16% of those asked recognize it in its original context as a "veterans' memorial day".
The predominant emotion the holiday provokes among Russians (59% of respondents) is national pride, while 18% said "sorrow" and 21% said "both". For modern Russians, the conflict continues to provide the population with a nationalistic rallying call.
Japan:
Main article: Japan during World War II
The World War II generation of Japan came of age during a time of rapid imperialism. One member of this generation, Hirohito, would become Emperor in 1926, when Japan was already one of the great powers. Nearly 18 million members of this generation would fight in World War II and approximately 3 million, including civilians, would be killed or wounded. Japanese cities, towns, and villages were devastated by Allied bombing campaigns.
In an effort to prepare for the assumed Allied invasion, the Japanese government prepared to submit this generation to "Operation Ketsugo", in which the Japanese population would fight a war of attrition.
Returning veterans found their country occupied and received little support or respect.
Surviving members of this generation would see Japan emerge as the world's second-largest economy by 1989. Surviving veterans visit the Yasukuni Shrine to pay tribute to their fallen comrades.
Even after defeat, Japan would achieve unprecedented prosperity through businesses such as Sony Corporation (founded by Akio Morita) and cultural influence, as in cinema by Akira Kurosawa.
See also:
The Greatest Generation, also known as the G.I. Generation and the World War II Generation, is the demographic cohort following the Lost Generation and preceding the Silent Generation.
The social generation is generally defined as people born from 1901 to 1927. They were shaped by the Great Depression and were the primary generation composing the enlisted forces in World War II. Most people of the Greatest Generation are the parents of the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers, and they are the children of the Lost Generation.
With the death of 117-year-old Nabi Tajima, on 21 April 2018, the Lost Generation cohort ended, making The Greatest Generation the earliest generation with living members.
Terminology
An early usage of the term The Greatest Generation was in 1953 by U.S. Army General James Van Fleet, who had recently retired after his service in World War II and leading the Eighth Army in the Korean War. He spoke to Congress, saying, "The men of the Eighth Army are a magnificent lot, and I have always said the greatest generation of Americans we have ever produced."
The term was further popularized by the title of a 1998 book by American journalist Tom Brokaw. In the book, Brokaw profiles American members of this generation who came of age during the Great Depression and went on to fight in World War II, as well as those who contributed to the war effort on the home front. Brokaw wrote that these men and women fought not for fame or recognition, but because it was the "right thing to do" This cohort is also referred to as the World War II generation.
The term "G.I. Generation" was first used in 1971 by Alberto M. Camarillo in an article for the academic journal Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, titled "Research note on Chicano community leaders: the GI generation." The initials G.I. refer to American soldiers in World War II. Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe later popularized the G.I. Generation term in their 1991 book Generations: The History of America's Future.
Date and age range definitions:
Pew Research Center defines this cohort as being born from 1901 to 1927. Strauss and Howe use the birth years 1901–1924. The first half of this generation, born between 1901 and 1912, is sometimes referred to as the Interbellum Generation.
The majority of veterans who served in World War II were born during the second half of this generation, from 1913 to 1924. While the oldest members of the Interbellum Generation came of age at the close of the 1910s in 1919, the majority reached maturity in the 1920s and the minority had grown up in the initial years of the Great Depression from 1929 to 1932.
The "WW II Generation Proper" came of age in either the second half of the 1930s or the early years of the 1940s.
Characteristics:
United States:
- Adolescence
- Main articles:
In the United States, members of this generation came of age as early as 1919 and as late as 1945, were children, or were born during the Progressive Era, World War I, and the Roaring Twenties; a time of economic prosperity with distinctive cultural transformations.
Additionally, many of those alive from 1918 through 1920 experienced the deadly Spanish flu pandemic; and, incredibly, a few rare individuals, such as Anna Del Priore, managed to survive infection from the Spanish flu and the COVID-19 pandemic approximately 100 years later.
They also experienced much of their youth with rapid technological innovation (e.g., radio, telephone, automobile) amidst growing levels of worldwide income inequality and a soaring economy. After the Stock Market crashed, when many had matured in the 1930s, this generation experienced profound economic and social turmoil.
Despite the hardships, historians note that the literature, arts, music, and cinema of the period flourished. This generation experienced what is commonly referred to as the "Golden Age of Hollywood".
- A number of popular film genres, including:
- gangster films,
- musical films,
- comedy films,
- and monster films
The Great Depression also greatly influenced literature and witnessed the advent of comic books, which were popular with members of this generation with such characters as:
- Doc Savage,
- the Shadow,
- Superman
- and Batman.
Next to jazz, blues, gospel music, and folk music; swing jazz became immensely popular with members of this generation.
The term "Swing Generation" has also been used to describe the cohort due to the popularity of the era's music.
The popularity of the radio also became a major influence in the lives of this generation, as millions tuned in to listen to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "fireside chats" and absorbed the news in a way like never before.
Great Depression and World War II
Main article: Military history of the United States during World War II
Over 16 million Americans served in World War II, the majority being members of this generation. 38.8% were volunteers, 61.2% were draftees, the average length of their service was 33 months, and total approximate casualties were 671,278 (killed and wounded). Tom Brokaw and others extol this generation for supporting and fighting World War II.
Post-war
Main article: Post–World War II economic expansion
Following the war, this generation produced children at an unprecedented level. Over 76 million babies were born between 1946 and 1964. Subsidized by the G.I. Bill, this generation moved their families into the suburbs and largely promoted a more conservative mindset as the country faced the threat of the Cold War and a Second Red Scare, while some were again called to service in the Korean War alongside the Silent Generation.
The first member of their generation and the first person born in the 20th century to be elected U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, began a Space Race against the Soviet Union, and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, further promoted a controversial "Great Society" policy.
Research professor of sociology Glen Holl Elder, Jr., a prominent figure in the development of life course theory, wrote Children of the Great Depression (1974), "the first longitudinal study of a Great Depression cohort." Elder followed 167 individuals born in California between 1920 and 1921 and "traced the impact of Depression and wartime experiences from the early years to middle age.
Most of these 'children of the Great Depression' fared unusually well in their adult years". They came out of the hardships of the Great Depression "with an ability to know how to survive and make do and solve problems.”
Relationship to later generations
This generation faced turmoil with their older baby boomer children upon their maturing in the 1960s in the form of the:
Attitudes shaped during World War II clashed with those of the Vietnam era as many struggled to understand the general distrust of the government by the younger generations, while some supported anti-war protests.
The same applied to a lesser extent in the 1950s between the Interbellum Generation and their Silent Generation children.
Later years and legacy:
According to a 2004 study done by AARP, "There are 26 million people aged 77 or older in the United States. These people are largely conservative on economic (59%) and social (49%) issues, and about one-third of them say they have become more conservative on economic, social, foreign policy, moral, and legal issues as they have aged.
Over 9 in 10 (91%) of this age group are registered to vote and 90% voted in the 2000 presidential election.
The last member of this generation to be elected president was George H. W. Bush (1989–1993), and as of 2024 the last surviving president from this generation is Jimmy Carter (1977–1981). In its latter years, this generation was introduced to continued technological advancements such as mobile phones and the Internet.
As of 2023, approximately 119,550 (under 1%) of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II remain alive. Living members of this generation are either in their late 90s or are centenarians.
The lives of this generation are a common element of popular culture in the western world, and media related to this generation's experiences continues to be produced. The romanticizing of this generation has faced criticism by some.
However, some also praise the traits and actions of this generation and cite their sacrifices as a lesson for current generations.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, living members of this generation have been impacted by the pandemic, such as Major Lee Wooten, who was treated in the hospital for coronavirus and recovered just prior to his 104th birthday in 2020; he passed away aged 105.
Britain:
Main article: Britain in World War II
In Britain, this generation came of age, like most of the western world, during a period of economic hardship as a result of the Great Depression. When the war in Europe began, millions of British citizens joined the war effort at home and abroad. Over 6 million members of this generation served in the war, and there were 384,000 casualties.
At home, the Blitz claimed the lives of thousands and destroyed entire British cities. The men and women of this generation continue to be honored in the U.K., particularly on V-E Day. In 2020, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson compared this generation to current generations and indicated his desire for them to show the "same spirit of national endeavour", in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Germany:
Main article: Germany in World War II
Members of the World War II generation in Germany came of age following World War I and the German Revolution of 1918–1919. They faced economic hardships related to the Great Depression and Treaty of Versailles as unemployment rose to nearly 40%. Adolf Hitler then rose to power, and many of this generation joined organizations such as the Hitler Youth.
In 1935, Hitler instituted military conscription. During the war, nearly 12.5 million members of this generation served in the war and 4.3 million were killed or wounded. By the end of the war, 5 million Germans were dead, including civilians. German cities and towns were devastated by Allied bombing campaigns. 12 million Germans were refugees and many were forced to settle in the Soviet Union.
In addition, the Holocaust claimed the lives of millions of German Jews and others. Following the war, the Allies began the denazification and demilitarization of a post-war Germany. Returning German veterans found their country carved up into four zones of occupation; later becoming West Germany and East Germany.
In the west, the Marshall Plan resulted in the "Wirtschaftswunder", an economic boom that caused 185% growth between 1950 and 1963. Surviving members of the German World War II generation would go on to experience the fall of the Berlin Wall and the creation of the European Union. Unlike the Western allies and the Soviet Union, Germany did not honor its veterans, as the association with Nazism continues in contemporary Germany today.
Soviet Union:
Main article: Soviet Union in World War II
As children, members of this generation came of age during Joseph Stalin's rise to power. They endured the Holodomor famine, which killed millions. The World War II generation of the Soviet Union was further decimated by the war. Stalin's scorched earth policy left its western regions in a state of devastation worsened by the advancing German Army.
The USSR lost 14% of its pre-war population during WWII, a demographic collapse that would have immense long-term consequences. Mass, forced labor was often utilized and there were between 10 and 11 million Soviet men returning to help rebuild along with 2 million Soviet dissidents held prisoner in Stalin's Gulags. Then came the Cold War and the Space Race. Even in the mid-1980s, around 70% of Soviet industrial output was directed towards the military, one of the factors in its eventual economic collapse.
Members of this generation are known as "Great Patriotic War" veterans, such as poet Yuri Levitansky who wrote about the horrors of the war and Vasily Zaitsev, a war hero who would later be detained for two years as a victim of the post-war atmosphere of paranoia.
Today, former Soviet states celebrate an annual Victory Day. The latest survey conducted by Russia's Levada Center suggests Victory Day is still one of the most important public holidays for Russian citizens, with 65% of those surveyed planning to celebrate it.
But for nearly one third of people (31%) it is a "state public event" while for another 31% it is a "memorial day for all former Soviet people". Only 16% of those asked recognize it in its original context as a "veterans' memorial day".
The predominant emotion the holiday provokes among Russians (59% of respondents) is national pride, while 18% said "sorrow" and 21% said "both". For modern Russians, the conflict continues to provide the population with a nationalistic rallying call.
Japan:
Main article: Japan during World War II
The World War II generation of Japan came of age during a time of rapid imperialism. One member of this generation, Hirohito, would become Emperor in 1926, when Japan was already one of the great powers. Nearly 18 million members of this generation would fight in World War II and approximately 3 million, including civilians, would be killed or wounded. Japanese cities, towns, and villages were devastated by Allied bombing campaigns.
In an effort to prepare for the assumed Allied invasion, the Japanese government prepared to submit this generation to "Operation Ketsugo", in which the Japanese population would fight a war of attrition.
Returning veterans found their country occupied and received little support or respect.
Surviving members of this generation would see Japan emerge as the world's second-largest economy by 1989. Surviving veterans visit the Yasukuni Shrine to pay tribute to their fallen comrades.
Even after defeat, Japan would achieve unprecedented prosperity through businesses such as Sony Corporation (founded by Akio Morita) and cultural influence, as in cinema by Akira Kurosawa.
See also:
The Lost Generation* This video was created for the AARP U@50 video contest and placed second
- YouTube Video: Who Were the Lost Generation Writers?
- YouTube Viideo: The Lost Generation and Ernest Hemingway's Inspiration for 'The Sun Also Rises' | PBS
The Lost Generation is the demographic cohort that reached early adulthood during World War I, and preceded the Greatest Generation (above).
The social generation is generally defined as people born from 1883 to 1900, coming of age in either the 1900s or the 1910s, and were the first generation to mature in the 20th century.
The term is also particularly used to refer to a group of American expatriate writers living in Paris during the 1920s. Gertrude Stein is credited with coining the term, and it was subsequently popularised by Ernest Hemingway, who used it in the epigraph for his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises: "You are all a lost generation." "Lost" in this context refers to the "disoriented, wandering, directionless" spirit of many of the war's survivors in the early postwar period.
In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, Western members of the Lost Generation grew up in societies that were more literate, consumerist, and media-saturated than ever before, but which also tended to maintain strictly conservative social values.
Young men of the cohort were mobilized on a mass scale for World War I, a conflict that was often seen as the defining moment of their age group's lifespan. Young women also contributed to and were affected by the war, and in its aftermath gained greater freedoms politically and in other areas of life.
The Lost Generation was also heavily vulnerable to the Spanish flu pandemic and became the driving force behind many cultural changes, particularly in major cities during what became known as the Roaring Twenties.
Later in their midlife, they experienced the economic effects of the Great Depression and often saw their own sons leave for the battlefields of World War II. In the developed world, they tended to reach retirement and average life expectancy during the decades after the conflict, but some significantly outlived the norm.
The last surviving person who was known to have been born during the 19th century was Nabi Tajima, who died in 2018 at age 117, while the last man born during the 19th century was Jiroemon Kimura, who died in 2013 at age 116. Most members were parents of the Greatest Generation and Silent Generation.
Terminology:
The first named generation, the term "Lost Generation" is used for the young people who came of age around the time of World War I.
In Europe, they are mostly known as the "Generation of 1914", for the year World War I began. In France, they were sometimes called the Génération du feu, the "(gun)fire generation". In the United Kingdom, the term was originally used for those who died in the war, and often implicitly referred to upper-class casualties who were perceived to have died disproportionately, robbing the country of a future elite.
Many felt that "the flower of youth and the best manhood of the peoples [had] been mowed down", for example, such notable casualties as:
Date and age range definitions:
Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe define the Lost Generation as the cohort born from 1883 to 1900, who came of age during World War I and the Roaring Twenties (See below).
Characteristics:
As children and adolescents:
Family life and upbringing
When the Lost Generation was growing up, the ideal family arrangement was generally seen as the man of the house being the breadwinner and primary authority figure whilst his wife dedicated herself to caring for the home and children. Most, even less well-off, married couples attempted to conform to this ideal.
It was common for family members of three different generations to share a home. Wealthier households also tended to include domestic servants, though their numbers would have varied from a single maid to a large team depending on how well-off the family was.
Public concern for the welfare of children was intensifying by the later 19th century with laws being passed and societies formed to prevent their abuse. The state increasingly gained the legal right to intervene in private homes and family life to protect minors from harm. However, beating children for misbehaviour was not only common but viewed as the duty of a responsible caregiver.
Health and living conditions
Sewer systems designed to remove human waste from urban areas had become widespread in industrial cities by the late 19th century, helping to reduce the spread of diseases such as cholera.
Legal standards for the quality of drinking water also began to be introduced. However, the introduction of electricity was slower, and during the formative years of the Lost Generation gas lights and candles were still the most common form of lighting.
Though statistics on child mortality dating back to the beginning of the Lost Generation's lifespan are limited, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that in 1900 one in ten American infants died before their first birthday.
Figures for the United Kingdom state that during the final years of the 19th century, mortality in the first five years of childhood was plateauing at a little under one in every four births. At around one in three in 1800, the early childhood mortality rate had declined overall throughout the next hundred years but would fall most sharply during the first half of the 20th century, reaching less than one in twenty by 1950.
This meant that members of the Lost Generation were somewhat less likely to die at a very early age than their parents and grandparents, but were significantly more likely to do so than children born even a few decades later.
Literacy and education
Laws restricting child labour in factories had begun to appear from around 1840 onwards and by the end of the 19th century, compulsory education had been introduced throughout much of the Western world for at least a few years of childhood.
By 1900, levels of illiteracy had fallen to less than 11% in the United States, around 3% in Great Britain, and only 1% in Germany. However, the problems of illiteracy and lack of school provision or attendance were felt more acutely in parts of Eastern and Southern Europe.
Schools of this time period tended to emphasise strict discipline, expecting pupils to memorize information by rote. To help deal with teacher shortages, older students were often used to help supervise and educate their younger peers. Dividing children into classes based on age became more common as schools grew.
However, whilst elementary schooling was becoming increasingly accessible for Western children at the turn of the century, secondary education was still much more of a luxury. Only 11% of American fourteen to seventeen-year-olds were enrolled at High School in 1900, a figure which had only marginally increased by 1910.
Though the school leaving age was officially meant to be 14 by 1900, until the First World War, most British children could leave school through rules put in place by local authorities at 12 or 13 years old. It was not uncommon at the end of the 19th century for Canadian children to leave school at nine or ten years old.
Leisure and play
By the 1890s, children's toys entered into mass production. In 1893, the British toy company William Britain revolutionized the production of toy soldiers by devising the method of hollow casting, making soldiers that were cheaper and lighter than their competitors.
This led to metal toy soldiers, which had previously been the preserve of boys from wealthier families, gaining mass appeal during the late Victorian and Edwardian period. Dolls often sold by street vendors at a low price were popular with girls. Teddy bears appeared for the first time in the early 1900s. Tin plated penny toys were also sold by street sellers for a single penny.
The turn of the 20th century saw a surge in public park building in parts of the west to provide public space in rapidly growing industrial towns. They provided a means for children from different backgrounds to play and interact together, sometimes in specially designed facilities. They held frequent concerts and performances.
Popular culture and mass media
Beginning around the middle of the 19th century, magazines of various types which had previously mainly targeted the few that could afford them found rising popularity among the general public. The latter part of the century not only saw rising popularity for magazines targeted specifically at young boys but the development of a relatively new genre aimed at girls
A significant milestone was reached in the development of cinema when, in 1895, projected moving images were first shown to a paying audience in Paris. Early films were very short (generally taking the form of newsreels, comedic sketches, and short documentaries). They lacked sound but were accompanied by music, lectures, and a lot of audience participation. A notable film industry had developed by the start of the First World War.
As young adults:
Military service in the First World War
The Lost Generation is best known as being the cohort that primarily fought in World War I. More than 70 million people were mobilized during the First World War, around 8.5 million of whom were killed and 21 million wounded in the conflict. About 2 million soldiers are believed to have been killed by disease, while individual battles sometimes caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Around 60 million of the enlisted originated from the European continent, which saw its younger men mobilized on a mass scale. Most of Europe's great powers operated peacetime conscription systems where men were expected to do a brief period of military training in their youth before spending the rest of their lives in the army reserve.
Nations with this system saw a huge portion of their manpower directly invested in the conflict: 55% of male Italians and Bulgarians aged 18 to 50 were called to military service.
Elsewhere the proportions were even higher: 63% of military-aged men in Serbia, 78% in Austro-Hungary, and 81% of military-aged men in France and Germany served. Britain, which traditionally relied primarily on the Royal Navy for its security, was a notable exception to this rule and did not introduce conscription until 1916.
Around 5 million British men fought in the First World War out of a total United Kingdom population of 46 million including women, children, and men too old to bear arms.
Additionally, nations recruited heavily from their colonial empires. Three million men from around the British Empire outside the United Kingdom served in the British Army as soldiers and laborers, whilst France recruited 475,000 soldiers from its colonies. Other nations involved include the United States which enlisted 4 million men during the conflict and the Ottoman Empire which mobilized 2,850,000 soldiers.
Beyond the extent of the deaths, the war had a profound effect on many of its survivors, giving many young men severe mental health problems and crippling physical disabilities. The war also unsettled many soldiers' sense of reality, who had gone into the conflict with a belief that battle and hardship was a path to redemption and greatness.
When years of pain, suffering, and loss seemed to bring about little in the way of a better future, many were left with a profound sense of disillusionment.
Young women in the 1910s and 1920s:
Though soldiers on the frontlines of the First World War were exclusively men, women contributed to the war effort in other ways. Many took the jobs men had left in previously male-dominated sectors such as heavy industry, while some even took on non-combat military roles.
Many, particularly wealthier women, took part in voluntary work to contribute to the war effort or to help those suffering due to it, such as the wounded or refugees. Often they were experiencing manual labor for the first time.
However, this reshaping of the female role led to fears that the sexes having the same responsibilities would disrupt the fabric of society and that more competition for work would leave men unemployed and erode their pay. Most women had to exit the employment they had taken during the war as soon as it concluded.
The war also had a personal impact on the lives of female members of the Lost Generation. Many women lost their husbands in the conflict, which frequently meant losing the main breadwinner of the household. However, war widows often received a pension and financial assistance to support their children.
Even with some economic support, raising a family alone was often financially difficult and emotionally draining, and women faced losing their pensions if they remarried or were accused of engaging in frowned-upon behavior.
In some cases, grief and the other pressures on them drove widows to alcoholism, depression, or suicide. Additionally, the large number of men killed in the First World War made it harder for many young women who were still single at the start of conflict to get married; this accelerated a trend towards them gaining greater independence and embarking on careers.
Women's gaining of political rights sped up in the Western world after the First World War, while employment opportunities for unmarried women widened. This time period saw the development of a new type of young woman in popular culture known as a flapper, who was known for their rebellion against previous social norms.
They had a physically distinctive appearance compared to their predecessors only a few years earlier, cutting their hair into bobs, wearing shorter dresses and more makeup, while taking on a new code of behaviour filled with more recklessness, party-going, and overt sexuality.
Aftermath of the First World War
The aftermath of the First World War saw substantive changes in the political situation, including a trend towards republicanism, the founding of many new relatively small nation-states which had previously been part of larger empires, and greater suffrage for groups such as the working class and women.
France and the United Kingdom both gained territory from their enemies, while the war and the damage it did to the European empires are generally considered major stepping stones in the United States' path to becoming the world's dominant superpower. The German and Italian populations' resentment against what they generally saw as a peace settlement that took too much away from the former or did not give enough to the latter fed into the fascist movements, which would eventually turn those countries into totalitarian dictatorships.
For Russia, the years after its revolution in 1917 were plagued by disease, famine, terror, and civil war eventually concluded in the establishment of the Soviet Union.
The immediate post-World War One period was characterized by continued political violence and economic instability. The late 1910s saw the Spanish flu pandemic, which was unusual in the sense that it killed many younger adults of the same Lost Generation age group that had mainly died in the war.
Later, especially in major cities, much of the 1920s is considered to have been a more prosperous period when the Lost Generation, in particular, escaped the suffering and turmoil they had lived through by rebelling against the social and cultural norms of their elders.
In midlife:
1930s
Politics and economics
This more optimistic period was short-lived, however, as 1929 saw the beginning of the Great Depression, which would continue throughout the 1930s and become the longest and most severe financial downturn ever experienced in Western industrialized history.
Though it had begun in the United States, the crises led to sharp increases in worldwide unemployment, reductions in economic output and deflation. The depression was also a major catalyst for the rise of Nazism in Germany and the beginnings of its quest to establish dominance over the European continent, which would eventually lead to World War II in Europe.
Additionally, the 1930s saw the less badly damaged Imperial Japan engage in its own empire-building, contributing to conflict in the Far East, where some scholars have argued the Second World War began as early as 1931.
Popular media
The 1930s saw rising popularity for radio, with the vast majority of Western households having access to the medium by the end of the decade. Programming included soap operas, music, and sport. Educational broadcasts were frequently available. The airwaves also provided a source of news and, particularly for the era's autocratic regimes, an outlet for political propaganda.
Second World War
When World War II broke out in 1939, the Lost Generation faced a major global conflict for the second time in their lifetime, and now often had to watch their sons go to the battlefield.
The place of the older generation who had been young adults during World War I in the new conflict was a theme in popular media of the time period, with examples including Waterloo Bridge and Old Bill and Son.
Civil defense organizations designed to provide a final line of resistance against invasion and assist in home defense more broadly recruited heavily from the older male population.
Like in the First World War, women helped to make up for labour shortages caused by mass military recruitment by entering more traditionally masculine employment and entering the conflict more directly in female military branches and underground resistance movements.
However, those in middle age were generally less likely to become involved in this kind of work than the young. This was particularly true of any kind of military involvement.
In later life:
In the West, the Lost Generation tended to reach the end of their working lives around the 1950s and 1960s.
For those members of the cohort who had fought in World War I, their military service frequently was viewed as a defining moment in their lives even many years later. Retirement notices of this era often included information on a man's service in the First World War.
Though there were slight differences between individual countries and from one year to the next, the average life expectancy in the developed world during the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s was typically around seventy years old.
However, some members of the Lost Generation outlived the norm by several decades. Nabi Tajima, the last surviving person known to have been born in the 19th century, died in 2018.
The final remaining veteran to have served in World War I in any capacity was Florence Green, who died in 2012, while Claude Choules, the last veteran to have been involved in combat, had died the previous year. However, these individuals were born in 1902 and 1901 respectively, putting them outside the usual birth years for the Lost Generation.
In literature
In his memoir A Moveable Feast (1964), published after Hemingway's and Stein's deaths, Ernest Hemingway writes that Gertrude Stein heard the phrase from a French garage owner who serviced Stein's car.
When a young mechanic failed to repair the car quickly enough, the garage owner shouted at the young man, "You are all a 'génération perdue'." While telling Hemingway the story, Stein added: "That is what you are. That's what you all are ... all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation."
Hemingway thus credits the phrase to Stein, who was then his mentor and patron.
The 1926 publication of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises popularized the term; that novel serves to epitomize the post-war expatriate generation. However, Hemingway later wrote to his editor Max Perkins that the "point of the book" was not so much about a generation being lost, but that "the earth abideth forever". Hemingway believed the characters in The Sun Also Rises may have been "battered" but were not lost.
Consistent with this ambivalence, Hemingway employs "Lost Generation" as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes, "I tried to balance Miss Stein's quotation from the garage owner with one from Ecclesiastes." A few lines later, recalling the risks and losses of the war, he adds: "I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood Anderson and egotism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought 'who is calling who a lost generation?'"
Picctured below: Typewriters entered common use as a writing tool for the Lost Generation:
The social generation is generally defined as people born from 1883 to 1900, coming of age in either the 1900s or the 1910s, and were the first generation to mature in the 20th century.
The term is also particularly used to refer to a group of American expatriate writers living in Paris during the 1920s. Gertrude Stein is credited with coining the term, and it was subsequently popularised by Ernest Hemingway, who used it in the epigraph for his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises: "You are all a lost generation." "Lost" in this context refers to the "disoriented, wandering, directionless" spirit of many of the war's survivors in the early postwar period.
In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, Western members of the Lost Generation grew up in societies that were more literate, consumerist, and media-saturated than ever before, but which also tended to maintain strictly conservative social values.
Young men of the cohort were mobilized on a mass scale for World War I, a conflict that was often seen as the defining moment of their age group's lifespan. Young women also contributed to and were affected by the war, and in its aftermath gained greater freedoms politically and in other areas of life.
The Lost Generation was also heavily vulnerable to the Spanish flu pandemic and became the driving force behind many cultural changes, particularly in major cities during what became known as the Roaring Twenties.
Later in their midlife, they experienced the economic effects of the Great Depression and often saw their own sons leave for the battlefields of World War II. In the developed world, they tended to reach retirement and average life expectancy during the decades after the conflict, but some significantly outlived the norm.
The last surviving person who was known to have been born during the 19th century was Nabi Tajima, who died in 2018 at age 117, while the last man born during the 19th century was Jiroemon Kimura, who died in 2013 at age 116. Most members were parents of the Greatest Generation and Silent Generation.
Terminology:
The first named generation, the term "Lost Generation" is used for the young people who came of age around the time of World War I.
In Europe, they are mostly known as the "Generation of 1914", for the year World War I began. In France, they were sometimes called the Génération du feu, the "(gun)fire generation". In the United Kingdom, the term was originally used for those who died in the war, and often implicitly referred to upper-class casualties who were perceived to have died disproportionately, robbing the country of a future elite.
Many felt that "the flower of youth and the best manhood of the peoples [had] been mowed down", for example, such notable casualties as:
- the poets:
- composer George Butterworth,
- and physicist Henry Moseley.
Date and age range definitions:
Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe define the Lost Generation as the cohort born from 1883 to 1900, who came of age during World War I and the Roaring Twenties (See below).
Characteristics:
As children and adolescents:
Family life and upbringing
When the Lost Generation was growing up, the ideal family arrangement was generally seen as the man of the house being the breadwinner and primary authority figure whilst his wife dedicated herself to caring for the home and children. Most, even less well-off, married couples attempted to conform to this ideal.
It was common for family members of three different generations to share a home. Wealthier households also tended to include domestic servants, though their numbers would have varied from a single maid to a large team depending on how well-off the family was.
Public concern for the welfare of children was intensifying by the later 19th century with laws being passed and societies formed to prevent their abuse. The state increasingly gained the legal right to intervene in private homes and family life to protect minors from harm. However, beating children for misbehaviour was not only common but viewed as the duty of a responsible caregiver.
Health and living conditions
Sewer systems designed to remove human waste from urban areas had become widespread in industrial cities by the late 19th century, helping to reduce the spread of diseases such as cholera.
Legal standards for the quality of drinking water also began to be introduced. However, the introduction of electricity was slower, and during the formative years of the Lost Generation gas lights and candles were still the most common form of lighting.
Though statistics on child mortality dating back to the beginning of the Lost Generation's lifespan are limited, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that in 1900 one in ten American infants died before their first birthday.
Figures for the United Kingdom state that during the final years of the 19th century, mortality in the first five years of childhood was plateauing at a little under one in every four births. At around one in three in 1800, the early childhood mortality rate had declined overall throughout the next hundred years but would fall most sharply during the first half of the 20th century, reaching less than one in twenty by 1950.
This meant that members of the Lost Generation were somewhat less likely to die at a very early age than their parents and grandparents, but were significantly more likely to do so than children born even a few decades later.
Literacy and education
Laws restricting child labour in factories had begun to appear from around 1840 onwards and by the end of the 19th century, compulsory education had been introduced throughout much of the Western world for at least a few years of childhood.
By 1900, levels of illiteracy had fallen to less than 11% in the United States, around 3% in Great Britain, and only 1% in Germany. However, the problems of illiteracy and lack of school provision or attendance were felt more acutely in parts of Eastern and Southern Europe.
Schools of this time period tended to emphasise strict discipline, expecting pupils to memorize information by rote. To help deal with teacher shortages, older students were often used to help supervise and educate their younger peers. Dividing children into classes based on age became more common as schools grew.
However, whilst elementary schooling was becoming increasingly accessible for Western children at the turn of the century, secondary education was still much more of a luxury. Only 11% of American fourteen to seventeen-year-olds were enrolled at High School in 1900, a figure which had only marginally increased by 1910.
Though the school leaving age was officially meant to be 14 by 1900, until the First World War, most British children could leave school through rules put in place by local authorities at 12 or 13 years old. It was not uncommon at the end of the 19th century for Canadian children to leave school at nine or ten years old.
Leisure and play
By the 1890s, children's toys entered into mass production. In 1893, the British toy company William Britain revolutionized the production of toy soldiers by devising the method of hollow casting, making soldiers that were cheaper and lighter than their competitors.
This led to metal toy soldiers, which had previously been the preserve of boys from wealthier families, gaining mass appeal during the late Victorian and Edwardian period. Dolls often sold by street vendors at a low price were popular with girls. Teddy bears appeared for the first time in the early 1900s. Tin plated penny toys were also sold by street sellers for a single penny.
The turn of the 20th century saw a surge in public park building in parts of the west to provide public space in rapidly growing industrial towns. They provided a means for children from different backgrounds to play and interact together, sometimes in specially designed facilities. They held frequent concerts and performances.
Popular culture and mass media
Beginning around the middle of the 19th century, magazines of various types which had previously mainly targeted the few that could afford them found rising popularity among the general public. The latter part of the century not only saw rising popularity for magazines targeted specifically at young boys but the development of a relatively new genre aimed at girls
A significant milestone was reached in the development of cinema when, in 1895, projected moving images were first shown to a paying audience in Paris. Early films were very short (generally taking the form of newsreels, comedic sketches, and short documentaries). They lacked sound but were accompanied by music, lectures, and a lot of audience participation. A notable film industry had developed by the start of the First World War.
As young adults:
Military service in the First World War
The Lost Generation is best known as being the cohort that primarily fought in World War I. More than 70 million people were mobilized during the First World War, around 8.5 million of whom were killed and 21 million wounded in the conflict. About 2 million soldiers are believed to have been killed by disease, while individual battles sometimes caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Around 60 million of the enlisted originated from the European continent, which saw its younger men mobilized on a mass scale. Most of Europe's great powers operated peacetime conscription systems where men were expected to do a brief period of military training in their youth before spending the rest of their lives in the army reserve.
Nations with this system saw a huge portion of their manpower directly invested in the conflict: 55% of male Italians and Bulgarians aged 18 to 50 were called to military service.
Elsewhere the proportions were even higher: 63% of military-aged men in Serbia, 78% in Austro-Hungary, and 81% of military-aged men in France and Germany served. Britain, which traditionally relied primarily on the Royal Navy for its security, was a notable exception to this rule and did not introduce conscription until 1916.
Around 5 million British men fought in the First World War out of a total United Kingdom population of 46 million including women, children, and men too old to bear arms.
Additionally, nations recruited heavily from their colonial empires. Three million men from around the British Empire outside the United Kingdom served in the British Army as soldiers and laborers, whilst France recruited 475,000 soldiers from its colonies. Other nations involved include the United States which enlisted 4 million men during the conflict and the Ottoman Empire which mobilized 2,850,000 soldiers.
Beyond the extent of the deaths, the war had a profound effect on many of its survivors, giving many young men severe mental health problems and crippling physical disabilities. The war also unsettled many soldiers' sense of reality, who had gone into the conflict with a belief that battle and hardship was a path to redemption and greatness.
When years of pain, suffering, and loss seemed to bring about little in the way of a better future, many were left with a profound sense of disillusionment.
Young women in the 1910s and 1920s:
Though soldiers on the frontlines of the First World War were exclusively men, women contributed to the war effort in other ways. Many took the jobs men had left in previously male-dominated sectors such as heavy industry, while some even took on non-combat military roles.
Many, particularly wealthier women, took part in voluntary work to contribute to the war effort or to help those suffering due to it, such as the wounded or refugees. Often they were experiencing manual labor for the first time.
However, this reshaping of the female role led to fears that the sexes having the same responsibilities would disrupt the fabric of society and that more competition for work would leave men unemployed and erode their pay. Most women had to exit the employment they had taken during the war as soon as it concluded.
The war also had a personal impact on the lives of female members of the Lost Generation. Many women lost their husbands in the conflict, which frequently meant losing the main breadwinner of the household. However, war widows often received a pension and financial assistance to support their children.
Even with some economic support, raising a family alone was often financially difficult and emotionally draining, and women faced losing their pensions if they remarried or were accused of engaging in frowned-upon behavior.
In some cases, grief and the other pressures on them drove widows to alcoholism, depression, or suicide. Additionally, the large number of men killed in the First World War made it harder for many young women who were still single at the start of conflict to get married; this accelerated a trend towards them gaining greater independence and embarking on careers.
Women's gaining of political rights sped up in the Western world after the First World War, while employment opportunities for unmarried women widened. This time period saw the development of a new type of young woman in popular culture known as a flapper, who was known for their rebellion against previous social norms.
They had a physically distinctive appearance compared to their predecessors only a few years earlier, cutting their hair into bobs, wearing shorter dresses and more makeup, while taking on a new code of behaviour filled with more recklessness, party-going, and overt sexuality.
Aftermath of the First World War
The aftermath of the First World War saw substantive changes in the political situation, including a trend towards republicanism, the founding of many new relatively small nation-states which had previously been part of larger empires, and greater suffrage for groups such as the working class and women.
France and the United Kingdom both gained territory from their enemies, while the war and the damage it did to the European empires are generally considered major stepping stones in the United States' path to becoming the world's dominant superpower. The German and Italian populations' resentment against what they generally saw as a peace settlement that took too much away from the former or did not give enough to the latter fed into the fascist movements, which would eventually turn those countries into totalitarian dictatorships.
For Russia, the years after its revolution in 1917 were plagued by disease, famine, terror, and civil war eventually concluded in the establishment of the Soviet Union.
The immediate post-World War One period was characterized by continued political violence and economic instability. The late 1910s saw the Spanish flu pandemic, which was unusual in the sense that it killed many younger adults of the same Lost Generation age group that had mainly died in the war.
Later, especially in major cities, much of the 1920s is considered to have been a more prosperous period when the Lost Generation, in particular, escaped the suffering and turmoil they had lived through by rebelling against the social and cultural norms of their elders.
In midlife:
1930s
Politics and economics
This more optimistic period was short-lived, however, as 1929 saw the beginning of the Great Depression, which would continue throughout the 1930s and become the longest and most severe financial downturn ever experienced in Western industrialized history.
Though it had begun in the United States, the crises led to sharp increases in worldwide unemployment, reductions in economic output and deflation. The depression was also a major catalyst for the rise of Nazism in Germany and the beginnings of its quest to establish dominance over the European continent, which would eventually lead to World War II in Europe.
Additionally, the 1930s saw the less badly damaged Imperial Japan engage in its own empire-building, contributing to conflict in the Far East, where some scholars have argued the Second World War began as early as 1931.
Popular media
The 1930s saw rising popularity for radio, with the vast majority of Western households having access to the medium by the end of the decade. Programming included soap operas, music, and sport. Educational broadcasts were frequently available. The airwaves also provided a source of news and, particularly for the era's autocratic regimes, an outlet for political propaganda.
Second World War
When World War II broke out in 1939, the Lost Generation faced a major global conflict for the second time in their lifetime, and now often had to watch their sons go to the battlefield.
The place of the older generation who had been young adults during World War I in the new conflict was a theme in popular media of the time period, with examples including Waterloo Bridge and Old Bill and Son.
Civil defense organizations designed to provide a final line of resistance against invasion and assist in home defense more broadly recruited heavily from the older male population.
Like in the First World War, women helped to make up for labour shortages caused by mass military recruitment by entering more traditionally masculine employment and entering the conflict more directly in female military branches and underground resistance movements.
However, those in middle age were generally less likely to become involved in this kind of work than the young. This was particularly true of any kind of military involvement.
In later life:
In the West, the Lost Generation tended to reach the end of their working lives around the 1950s and 1960s.
For those members of the cohort who had fought in World War I, their military service frequently was viewed as a defining moment in their lives even many years later. Retirement notices of this era often included information on a man's service in the First World War.
Though there were slight differences between individual countries and from one year to the next, the average life expectancy in the developed world during the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s was typically around seventy years old.
However, some members of the Lost Generation outlived the norm by several decades. Nabi Tajima, the last surviving person known to have been born in the 19th century, died in 2018.
The final remaining veteran to have served in World War I in any capacity was Florence Green, who died in 2012, while Claude Choules, the last veteran to have been involved in combat, had died the previous year. However, these individuals were born in 1902 and 1901 respectively, putting them outside the usual birth years for the Lost Generation.
In literature
In his memoir A Moveable Feast (1964), published after Hemingway's and Stein's deaths, Ernest Hemingway writes that Gertrude Stein heard the phrase from a French garage owner who serviced Stein's car.
When a young mechanic failed to repair the car quickly enough, the garage owner shouted at the young man, "You are all a 'génération perdue'." While telling Hemingway the story, Stein added: "That is what you are. That's what you all are ... all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation."
Hemingway thus credits the phrase to Stein, who was then his mentor and patron.
The 1926 publication of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises popularized the term; that novel serves to epitomize the post-war expatriate generation. However, Hemingway later wrote to his editor Max Perkins that the "point of the book" was not so much about a generation being lost, but that "the earth abideth forever". Hemingway believed the characters in The Sun Also Rises may have been "battered" but were not lost.
Consistent with this ambivalence, Hemingway employs "Lost Generation" as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes, "I tried to balance Miss Stein's quotation from the garage owner with one from Ecclesiastes." A few lines later, recalling the risks and losses of the war, he adds: "I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood Anderson and egotism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought 'who is calling who a lost generation?'"
Picctured below: Typewriters entered common use as a writing tool for the Lost Generation:
Themes:
The writings of the Lost Generation literary figures often pertained to the writers' experiences in World War I and the years following it. It is said that the work of these writers was autobiographical based on their use of mythologized versions of their lives.
One of the themes that commonly appear in the authors' works is decadence and the frivolous lifestyle of the wealthy. Both Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald touched on this theme throughout the novels The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby.
Another theme commonly found in the works of these authors was the death of the American Dream, which is exhibited throughout many of their novels. It is particularly prominent in The Great Gatsby, in which the character Nick Carraway comes to realize the corruption that surrounds him.
Notable figures -- Further information:
The writings of the Lost Generation literary figures often pertained to the writers' experiences in World War I and the years following it. It is said that the work of these writers was autobiographical based on their use of mythologized versions of their lives.
One of the themes that commonly appear in the authors' works is decadence and the frivolous lifestyle of the wealthy. Both Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald touched on this theme throughout the novels The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby.
Another theme commonly found in the works of these authors was the death of the American Dream, which is exhibited throughout many of their novels. It is particularly prominent in The Great Gatsby, in which the character Nick Carraway comes to realize the corruption that surrounds him.
Notable figures -- Further information:
- List of writers of the Lost Generation
- e.g., Notable figures of the Lost Generation include:
The Roaring Twenties!Pictured below: Fashions of the Roaring Twenties
The Roaring Twenties, sometimes stylized as Roaring '20s, refers to the 1920s decade in music and fashion, as it happened in Western society and Western culture. It was a period of economic prosperity with a distinctive cultural edge in the United States and Europe, particularly in major cities such as:
In France, the decade was known as the années folles ('crazy years'), emphasizing the era's social, artistic and cultural dynamism. Jazz blossomed, the flapper redefined the modern look for British and American women, and Art Deco peaked.
The social and cultural features known as the Roaring Twenties began in leading metropolitan centers and spread widely in the aftermath of World War I. The spirit of the Roaring Twenties was marked by a general feeling of novelty associated with modernity and a break with tradition, through modern technology such as automobiles, moving pictures, and radio, bringing "modernity" to a large part of the population.
Formal decorative frills were shed in favor of practicality in both daily life and architecture. At the same time, jazz and dancing rose in popularity, in opposition to the mood of World War I. As such, the period often is referred to as the Jazz Age.
The 1920s saw the large-scale development and use of automobiles, telephones, films, radio, and electrical appliances in the lives of millions in the Western world.
Aviation soon became a business due to its rapid growth.
Nations saw rapid industrial and economic growth, accelerated consumer demand, and introduced significant new trends in lifestyle and culture.
The media, funded by the new industry of mass-market advertising driving consumer demand, focused on celebrities, especially sports heroes and movie stars, as cities rooted for their home teams and filled the new palatial cinemas and gigantic sports stadiums. In many countries, women won the right to vote.
Wall Street invested heavily in Germany under the 1924 Dawes Plan, named after banker and later 30th Vice President Charles G. Dawes.
The money was used indirectly to pay reparations to countries that also had to pay off their war debts to Washington. While by the middle of the decade prosperity was widespread, with the second half of the decade known, especially in Germany, as the "Golden Twenties", the decade was coming fast to an end.
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 ended the era, as the Great Depression brought years of hardship worldwide.
Economy
The Roaring Twenties was a decade of economic growth and widespread prosperity, driven by recovery from wartime devastation and deferred spending, a boom in construction, and the rapid growth of consumer goods such as automobiles and electricity in North America and Europe and a few other developed countries such as Australia.
The economy of the United States, successfully transitioned from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy, boomed and provided loans for a European boom as well. Some sectors stagnated, especially farming and coal mining.
The US became the richest country in the world per capita and since the late-19th century had been the largest in total GDP. Its industry was based on mass production, and its society acculturated into consumerism. European economies, by contrast, had a more difficult post-war readjustment and did not begin to flourish until about
At first, the end of wartime production caused a brief but deep recession, the post–World War I recession of 1919–1920 and a sharp deflationary recession or depression in 1920–1921.
Quickly, however, the economies of the U.S. and Canada rebounded as returning soldiers re-entered the labor force and munitions factories were retooled to produce consumer goods.
New products and technologies:
Mass production made technology affordable to the middle class. Taking off during the 1920s included the following:
Automobiles
Further information: Cars in the 1920s
Before World War I, cars were a luxury good. In the 1920s, mass-produced vehicles became commonplace in the U.S. and Canada.
By 1927, the Ford Motor Company discontinued the Ford Model T after selling 15 million units of that model. It had been in continuous production from October 1908 to May 1927.
The company planned to replace the old model with a newer one, the Ford Model A. The decision was a reaction to competition. Due to the commercial success of the Model T, Ford had dominated the automotive market from the mid-1910s to the early-1920s.
In the mid-1920s, Ford's dominance eroded as its competitors had caught up with Ford's mass production system. They began to surpass Ford in some areas, offering models with more powerful engines, new convenience features, and styling.
Only about 300,000 vehicles were registered in 1918 in all of Canada, but by 1929, there were 1.9 million. By 1929, the United States had just under 27,000,000 motor vehicles registered. Automobile parts were being manufactured in Ontario, near Detroit, Michigan.
The automotive industry's influence on other segments of the economy were widespread, jump-starting industries such as steel production, highway building, motels, service stations, car dealerships, and new housing outside the urban core.
Ford opened factories around the world and proved a strong competitor in most markets for its low-cost, easy-maintenance vehicles. General Motors, to a lesser degree, followed. European competitors avoided the low-price market and concentrated on more expensive vehicles for upscale consumers.
Radio
Radio became the first mass broadcasting medium. Radios were expensive, but their mode of entertainment proved revolutionary. Radio advertising became a platform for mass marketing. Its economic importance led to the mass culture that has dominated society since this period.
During the "Golden Age of Radio", radio programming was as varied as the television programming of the 21st century. The 1927 establishment of the Federal Radio Commission introduced a new era of regulation.
In 1925, electrical recording, one of the greater advances in sound recording, became available with commercially issued gramophone records.
Cinema
The cinema boomed, producing a new form of entertainment that virtually ended the old vaudeville theatrical genre. Watching a film was cheap and accessible; crowds surged into new downtown movie palaces and neighborhood theaters. Since the early 1910s, lower-priced cinema successfully competed with vaudeville. Many vaudeville performers and other theatrical personalities were recruited by the film industry, lured by greater salaries and less arduous working conditions.
The introduction of sound film, a.k.a. "the talkies" which did not surge until the end of the decade of the 1920s, eliminated vaudeville's last major advantage and put it into sharp financial decline. The prestigious Orpheum Circuit, a chain of vaudeville and movie theaters, was absorbed by a new film studio.
Sound movies
In 1923, inventor Lee de Forest at Phonofilm released a number of short films with sound. Meanwhile, inventor Theodore Case developed the Movietone sound system and sold the rights to the film studio, Fox Film.
In 1926, the Vitaphone sound system was introduced. The feature film Don Juan (1926) was the first feature-length film to use the Vitaphone sound system with a synchronized musical score and sound effects, though it had no spoken dialogue. The film was released by the film studio Warner Bros.
In October 1927, the sound film The Jazz Singer (1927) turned out to be a smash box-office success. It was innovative for its use of sound. Produced with the Vitaphone system, most of the film does not contain live-recorded audio, relying on a score and effects.
When the movie's star, Al Jolson, sings, however, the film shifts to sound recorded on the set, including both his musical performances and two scenes with ad-libbed speech—one of Jolson's character, Jakie Rabinowitz (Jack Robin), addressing a cabaret audience; the other an exchange between him and his mother. The "natural" sounds of the settings were also audible. The film's profits were proof enough to the film industry that the technology was worth investing in.
In 1928, the film studios Famous Players–Lasky (later known as Paramount Pictures), First National Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Universal Studios signed an agreement with Electrical Research Products Inc. (ERPI) for the conversion of production facilities and theaters for sound film. Initially, all ERPI-wired theaters were made Vitaphone-compatible; most were equipped to project Movietone reels as well.
Also in 1928, Radio Corporation of America (RCA) marketed a new sound system, the RCA Photophone system. RCA offered the rights to its system to the subsidiary RKO Pictures. Warner Bros. continued releasing a few films with live dialogue, though only in a few scenes.
It finally released Lights of New York (1928), the first all-talking full-length feature film. The animated short film Dinner Time (1928) by the Van Beuren Studios was among the first animated sound films.
It was followed a few months later by the animated short film Steamboat Willie (1928), the first sound film by the Walt Disney Animation Studios. It was the first commercially successful animated short film and introduced the character Mickey Mouse.
Steamboat Willie was the first cartoon to feature a fully post-produced soundtrack, which distinguished it from earlier sound cartoons. It became the most popular cartoon of its day.
For much of 1928, Warner Bros. was the only studio to release talking features. It profited from its innovative films at the box office. Other studios quickened the pace of their conversion to the new technology and started producing their own sound films and talking films.
In February 1929, sixteen months after The Jazz Singer, Columbia Pictures became the eighth and last major studio to release a talking feature.
In May 1929, Warner Bros. released On with the Show! (1929), the first all-color, all-talking feature film. Soon silent film production ceased.
The last totally silent feature produced in the US for general distribution was The Poor Millionaire, released by Biltmore Pictures in April 1930. Four other silent features, all low-budget Westerns, were also released in early 1930.
Aviation
The 1920s saw milestones in aviation that seized the world's attention. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh rose to fame with the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight. He took off from Roosevelt Field in New York and landed at Paris–Le Bourget Airport. It took Lindbergh 33.5 hours to cross the Atlantic Ocean. His aircraft, the Spirit of St. Louis, was a custom-built, single engine, single-seat monoplane. It was designed by aeronautical engineer Donald A. Hall.
In Britain, Amy Johnson (1903–1941) was the first woman to fly alone from Britain to Australia. Flying solo or with her husband, Jim Mollison, she set numerous long-distance records during the 1930s.
Television
The 1920s saw several inventors advance work on television, but programs did not reach the public until the eve of World War II, and few people saw any television before the mid 1940s.
In July 1928, John Logie Baird demonstrated the world's first color transmission, using scanning discs at the transmitting and receiving ends with three spirals of apertures, each spiral with a filter of a different primary color; and three light sources at the receiving end, with a commutator to alternate their illumination.
That same year he also demonstrated stereoscopic television.
In 1927:
Medicine
Further information: History of penicillin
For decades biologists had been at work on the medicine that became penicillin. In 1928, Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming discovered a substance that killed a number of disease-causing bacteria. In 1929, he named the new substance penicillin.
His publications were largely ignored at first, but it became a significant antibiotic in the 1930s. In 1930, Cecil George Paine, a pathologist at Sheffield Royal Infirmary, used penicillin to treat sycosis barbae, eruptions in beard follicles, but was unsuccessful.
Moving to ophthalmia neonatorum, a gonococcal infection in infants, he achieved the first recorded cure with penicillin, on November 25, 1930. He then cured four additional patients (one adult and three infants) of eye infections, but failed to cure a fifth.
New infrastructure
The basic pattern of the modern white-collar job was set during the late-19th century, but it now became the norm for life in large and medium-sized cities. Typewriters, filing cabinets, and telephones, brought many unmarried women into clerical jobs.
In Canada, by the end of the decade, one in five workers were women. Interest in finding jobs, in the now ever-growing manufacturing sector of U.S. cities, became widespread among rural Americans.
Society:
Suffrage:
Main article: Women's suffrage in the United States
Many countries expanded women's voting rights, such as the United States, Canada, Great Britain, India, and various European countries in 1917–1921. This influenced many governments and elections by increasing the number of voters (but not doubling it, because many women did not vote during the early years of suffrage, as can be seen by the large drop in voter turnout).
Politicians responded by focusing more on issues of concern to women, especially peace, public health, education, and the status of children. On the whole, women voted much like men, except they were more interested in peace, even when it meant appeasement.
Lost Generation:
Main article: Lost Generation
The Lost Generation was composed of young people who came out of World War I disillusioned and cynical about the world. The term usually refers specifically to American literary notables who lived in Paris at the time.
Famous members included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein who wrote novels and short stories criticizing the materialism they perceived to be rampant during this era.
In the United Kingdom, the bright young things were young aristocrats and socialites who:
Social criticism
As the average American in the 1920s became more enamored of wealth and everyday luxuries, some began satirizing the hypocrisy and greed they observed.
Of these social critics, Sinclair Lewis was the most popular:
Other social critics included Sherwood Anderson, Edith Wharton, and H. L. Mencken. Anderson published a collection of short stories titled Winesburg, Ohio, which studied the dynamics of a small town. Wharton mocked the fads of the new era through her novels, such as Twilight Sleep (1927). Mencken criticized narrow American tastes and culture in essays and articles.
Art Deco:
Main article: Art Deco
Art Deco was the style of design and architecture that marked the era. Originating in Europe, it spread to the rest of western Europe and North America towards the mid-1920s.
In the U.S., one of the more remarkable buildings featuring this style was constructed as the tallest building of the time: the Chrysler Building. The forms of Art Deco were pure and geometric, though the artists often drew inspiration from nature. In the beginning, lines were curved, though rectilinear designs would later become more and more popular.
Expressionism and surrealism:
Painting in North America during the 1920s developed in a different direction from that of Europe. In Europe, the 1920s were the era of expressionism and later surrealism. As Man Ray stated in 1920 after the publication of a unique issue of New York Dada: "Dada cannot live in New York".
Cinema:
Further information:
At the beginning of the decade, films were silent and colorless. In 1922, the first all-color feature, The Toll of the Sea, was released. In 1926, Warner Bros. released Don Juan, the first feature with sound effects and music. In 1927, Warner released The Jazz Singer, the first sound feature to include limited talking sequences.
The public went wild for sound films, and movie studios converted to sound almost overnight. In 1928, Warner released Lights of New York, the first all-talking feature film. In the same year, the first sound cartoon, Dinner Time, was released.
Warner ended the decade by unveiling On with the Show in 1929, the first all-color, all-talking feature film.
Cartoon shorts were popular in movie theaters during this time. In the late 1920s, Walt Disney emerged. Mickey Mouse made his debut in Steamboat Willie on November 18, 1928, at the Colony Theater in New York City. Mickey was featured in more than 120 cartoon shorts, the Mickey Mouse Club, and other specials.
This started Disney and led to creation of other characters going into the 1930s. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a character created by Disney before Mickey in 1927, was contracted by Universal for distribution purposes, and starred in a series of shorts between 1927 and 1928. Disney lost the rights to the character, but in 2006, regained the rights to Oswald. He was the first Disney character to be merchandised.
The period had the emergence of box-office draws such as:
Harlem:
Main article: Harlem Renaissance
African American literary and artistic culture developed rapidly during the 1920s under the banner of the "Harlem Renaissance". In 1921, the Black Swan Corporation was founded. At its height, it issued 10 recordings per month. All-African American musicals also started in 1921.
In 1923, the Harlem Renaissance Basketball Club was founded by Bob Douglas. During the late-1920s, and especially in the 1930s, the basketball team became known as the best in the world.
The first issue of Opportunity was published. The African American playwright Willis Richardson debuted his play The Chip Woman's Fortune at the Frazee Theatre (also known as the Wallacks theatre).
Notable African American authors such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston began to achieve a level of national public recognition during the 1920s.
Jazz Age:
Further information: Jazz and Jazz Age
The 1920s brought new styles of music into the mainstream of culture in avant-garde cities. Jazz became the most popular form of music for youth. Historian Kathy J. Ogren wrote that, by the 1920s, jazz had become the "dominant influence on America's popular music generally".
Scott DeVeaux argues that a standard history of jazz has emerged such that: "After an obligatory nod to African origins and ragtime antecedents, the music is shown to move through a succession of styles or periods:
There is substantial agreement on the defining features of each style, the pantheon of great innovators, and the canon of recorded masterpieces.
The pantheon of performers and singers from the 1920s include:
The development of urban and city blues also began in the 1920s with performers such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. In the latter part of the decade, early forms of country music were pioneered by:
Dance:
Dance clubs became enormously popular in the 1920s. Their popularity peaked in the late 1920s and reached into the early 1930s. Dance music came to dominate all forms of popular music by the late 1920s. Classical pieces, operettas, folk music, etc., were all transformed into popular dancing melodies to satiate the public craze for dancing.
For example, many of the songs from the 1929 Technicolor musical operetta "The Rogue Song" (starring the Metropolitan Opera star Lawrence Tibbett) were rearranged and released as dancing music and became popular dance club hits in 1929.
Dance clubs across the U.S.-sponsored dancing contests, where dancers invented, tried and competed with new moves.
Professionals began to hone their skills in tap dance and other dances of the era throughout the stage circuit across the United States.
With the advent of talking pictures (sound film), musicals became all the rage and film studios flooded the box office with extravagant and lavish musical films. The representative was the musical Gold Diggers of Broadway, which became the highest-grossing film of the decade.
Harlem played a key role in the development of dance styles. Several entertainment venues attracted people of all races. The Cotton Club featured black performers and catered to a white clientele, while the Savoy Ballroom catered to a mostly black clientele. Some religious moralists preached against "Satan in the dance hall" but had little impact.
The most popular dances throughout the decade were the foxtrot, waltz, and American tango.
From the early 1920s, however, a variety of eccentric novelty dances were developed. The first of these were the Breakaway and Charleston. Both were based on African American musical styles and beats, including the widely popular blues. The Charleston's popularity exploded after its feature in two 1922 Broadway shows.
A brief Black Bottom craze, originating from the Apollo Theater, swept dance halls from 1926 to 1927, replacing the Charleston in popularity. By 1927, the Lindy Hop, a dance based on Breakaway and Charleston and integrating elements of tap, became the dominant social dance. Developed in the Savoy Ballroom, it was set to stride piano ragtime jazz.
The Lindy Hop later evolved into other Swing dances. These dances, nonetheless, never became mainstream, and the overwhelming majority of people in Western Europe and the U.S. continued to dance the foxtrot, waltz, and tango throughout the decade.
The dance craze had a large influence on popular music. Large numbers of recordings labeled as foxtrot, tango, and waltz were produced and gave rise to a generation of performers who became famous as recording artists or radio artists.
Top vocalists included:
Leading dance orchestra leaders included:
Fashion:
Main article: Flapper
Further information: 1920s in Western fashion
Attire
Paris set the fashion trends for Europe and North America. The fashion for women was all about getting loose. Women wore dresses all day, every day. Day dresses had a drop waist, which was a sash or belt around the low waist or hip and a skirt that hung anywhere from the ankle on up to the knee, never above. Daywear had sleeves (long to mid-bicep) and a skirt that was straight, pleated, hank hem, or tired. Jewelry was less conspicuous. Hair was often bobbed, giving a boyish look.
For men in white collar jobs, business suits were the day to day attire. Striped, plaid, or windowpane suits came in dark gray, blue, and brown in the winter and ivory, white, tan, and pastels in the summer. Shirts were white and neckties were essential.
Immortalized in movies and magazine covers, young women's fashions of the 1920s set both a trend and social statement, a breaking-off from the rigid Victorian way of life. These young, rebellious, middle-class women, labeled 'flappers' by older generations, did away with the corset and donned slinky knee-length dresses, which exposed their legs and arms.
The hairstyle of the decade was a chin-length bob, which had several popular variations.
Cosmetics, which until the 1920s were not typically accepted in American society because of their association with prostitution, became extremely popular.
In the 1920s, new magazines appealed to young German women with a sensuous image and advertisements for the appropriate clothes and accessories they would want to purchase. The glossy pages of Die Dame and Das Blatt der Hausfrau displayed the "Neue Frauen", "New Girl" – what Americans called the flapper. She was young and fashionable, financially independent, and was an eager consumer of the latest fashions. The magazines kept her up to date on styles, clothes, designers, arts, sports, and modern technology such as automobiles and telephones.
Sexuality of women during the 1920s:
The 1920s was a period of social revolution, coming out of World War I, society changed as inhibitions faded and youth demanded new experiences and more freedom from old controls.
Chaperones faded in importance as "anything goes" became a slogan for youth taking control of their subculture. A new woman was born—a "flapper" who danced, drank, smoked and voted.
This new woman cut her hair, wore make-up, and partied. She was known for being giddy and taking risks.
Women gained the right to vote in most countries. New careers opened for single women in offices and schools, with salaries that helped them to be more independent.
With their desire for freedom and independence came change in fashion. One of the more dramatic post-war changes in fashion was the woman's silhouette; the dress length went from floor length to ankle and knee length, becoming more bold and seductive.
The new dress code emphasized youth: Corsets were left behind and clothing was looser, with more natural lines. The hourglass figure was not popular anymore, and a slimmer, boyish body type was considered appealing. The flappers were known for this and for their high spirits, flirtation, and recklessness when it came to the search for fun and thrills.
Coco Chanel was one of the more enigmatic fashion figures of the 1920s. She was recognized for her avant-garde designs; her clothing was a mixture of wearable, comfortable, and elegant. She was the one to introduce a different aesthetic into fashion, especially a different sense for what was feminine, and based her design on new ethics; she designed for an active woman, one that could feel at ease in her dress.
Chanel's primary goal was to empower freedom. She was the pioneer for women wearing pants and for the little black dress, which were signs of a more independent lifestyle.
Changing role of women
- Berlin,
- Buenos Aires,
- Chicago,
- London,
- Los Angeles,
- Mexico City,
- New York City,
- Paris,
- and Sydney
In France, the decade was known as the années folles ('crazy years'), emphasizing the era's social, artistic and cultural dynamism. Jazz blossomed, the flapper redefined the modern look for British and American women, and Art Deco peaked.
The social and cultural features known as the Roaring Twenties began in leading metropolitan centers and spread widely in the aftermath of World War I. The spirit of the Roaring Twenties was marked by a general feeling of novelty associated with modernity and a break with tradition, through modern technology such as automobiles, moving pictures, and radio, bringing "modernity" to a large part of the population.
Formal decorative frills were shed in favor of practicality in both daily life and architecture. At the same time, jazz and dancing rose in popularity, in opposition to the mood of World War I. As such, the period often is referred to as the Jazz Age.
The 1920s saw the large-scale development and use of automobiles, telephones, films, radio, and electrical appliances in the lives of millions in the Western world.
Aviation soon became a business due to its rapid growth.
Nations saw rapid industrial and economic growth, accelerated consumer demand, and introduced significant new trends in lifestyle and culture.
The media, funded by the new industry of mass-market advertising driving consumer demand, focused on celebrities, especially sports heroes and movie stars, as cities rooted for their home teams and filled the new palatial cinemas and gigantic sports stadiums. In many countries, women won the right to vote.
Wall Street invested heavily in Germany under the 1924 Dawes Plan, named after banker and later 30th Vice President Charles G. Dawes.
The money was used indirectly to pay reparations to countries that also had to pay off their war debts to Washington. While by the middle of the decade prosperity was widespread, with the second half of the decade known, especially in Germany, as the "Golden Twenties", the decade was coming fast to an end.
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 ended the era, as the Great Depression brought years of hardship worldwide.
Economy
The Roaring Twenties was a decade of economic growth and widespread prosperity, driven by recovery from wartime devastation and deferred spending, a boom in construction, and the rapid growth of consumer goods such as automobiles and electricity in North America and Europe and a few other developed countries such as Australia.
The economy of the United States, successfully transitioned from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy, boomed and provided loans for a European boom as well. Some sectors stagnated, especially farming and coal mining.
The US became the richest country in the world per capita and since the late-19th century had been the largest in total GDP. Its industry was based on mass production, and its society acculturated into consumerism. European economies, by contrast, had a more difficult post-war readjustment and did not begin to flourish until about
At first, the end of wartime production caused a brief but deep recession, the post–World War I recession of 1919–1920 and a sharp deflationary recession or depression in 1920–1921.
Quickly, however, the economies of the U.S. and Canada rebounded as returning soldiers re-entered the labor force and munitions factories were retooled to produce consumer goods.
New products and technologies:
Mass production made technology affordable to the middle class. Taking off during the 1920s included the following:
Automobiles
Further information: Cars in the 1920s
Before World War I, cars were a luxury good. In the 1920s, mass-produced vehicles became commonplace in the U.S. and Canada.
By 1927, the Ford Motor Company discontinued the Ford Model T after selling 15 million units of that model. It had been in continuous production from October 1908 to May 1927.
The company planned to replace the old model with a newer one, the Ford Model A. The decision was a reaction to competition. Due to the commercial success of the Model T, Ford had dominated the automotive market from the mid-1910s to the early-1920s.
In the mid-1920s, Ford's dominance eroded as its competitors had caught up with Ford's mass production system. They began to surpass Ford in some areas, offering models with more powerful engines, new convenience features, and styling.
Only about 300,000 vehicles were registered in 1918 in all of Canada, but by 1929, there were 1.9 million. By 1929, the United States had just under 27,000,000 motor vehicles registered. Automobile parts were being manufactured in Ontario, near Detroit, Michigan.
The automotive industry's influence on other segments of the economy were widespread, jump-starting industries such as steel production, highway building, motels, service stations, car dealerships, and new housing outside the urban core.
Ford opened factories around the world and proved a strong competitor in most markets for its low-cost, easy-maintenance vehicles. General Motors, to a lesser degree, followed. European competitors avoided the low-price market and concentrated on more expensive vehicles for upscale consumers.
Radio
Radio became the first mass broadcasting medium. Radios were expensive, but their mode of entertainment proved revolutionary. Radio advertising became a platform for mass marketing. Its economic importance led to the mass culture that has dominated society since this period.
During the "Golden Age of Radio", radio programming was as varied as the television programming of the 21st century. The 1927 establishment of the Federal Radio Commission introduced a new era of regulation.
In 1925, electrical recording, one of the greater advances in sound recording, became available with commercially issued gramophone records.
Cinema
The cinema boomed, producing a new form of entertainment that virtually ended the old vaudeville theatrical genre. Watching a film was cheap and accessible; crowds surged into new downtown movie palaces and neighborhood theaters. Since the early 1910s, lower-priced cinema successfully competed with vaudeville. Many vaudeville performers and other theatrical personalities were recruited by the film industry, lured by greater salaries and less arduous working conditions.
The introduction of sound film, a.k.a. "the talkies" which did not surge until the end of the decade of the 1920s, eliminated vaudeville's last major advantage and put it into sharp financial decline. The prestigious Orpheum Circuit, a chain of vaudeville and movie theaters, was absorbed by a new film studio.
Sound movies
In 1923, inventor Lee de Forest at Phonofilm released a number of short films with sound. Meanwhile, inventor Theodore Case developed the Movietone sound system and sold the rights to the film studio, Fox Film.
In 1926, the Vitaphone sound system was introduced. The feature film Don Juan (1926) was the first feature-length film to use the Vitaphone sound system with a synchronized musical score and sound effects, though it had no spoken dialogue. The film was released by the film studio Warner Bros.
In October 1927, the sound film The Jazz Singer (1927) turned out to be a smash box-office success. It was innovative for its use of sound. Produced with the Vitaphone system, most of the film does not contain live-recorded audio, relying on a score and effects.
When the movie's star, Al Jolson, sings, however, the film shifts to sound recorded on the set, including both his musical performances and two scenes with ad-libbed speech—one of Jolson's character, Jakie Rabinowitz (Jack Robin), addressing a cabaret audience; the other an exchange between him and his mother. The "natural" sounds of the settings were also audible. The film's profits were proof enough to the film industry that the technology was worth investing in.
In 1928, the film studios Famous Players–Lasky (later known as Paramount Pictures), First National Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Universal Studios signed an agreement with Electrical Research Products Inc. (ERPI) for the conversion of production facilities and theaters for sound film. Initially, all ERPI-wired theaters were made Vitaphone-compatible; most were equipped to project Movietone reels as well.
Also in 1928, Radio Corporation of America (RCA) marketed a new sound system, the RCA Photophone system. RCA offered the rights to its system to the subsidiary RKO Pictures. Warner Bros. continued releasing a few films with live dialogue, though only in a few scenes.
It finally released Lights of New York (1928), the first all-talking full-length feature film. The animated short film Dinner Time (1928) by the Van Beuren Studios was among the first animated sound films.
It was followed a few months later by the animated short film Steamboat Willie (1928), the first sound film by the Walt Disney Animation Studios. It was the first commercially successful animated short film and introduced the character Mickey Mouse.
Steamboat Willie was the first cartoon to feature a fully post-produced soundtrack, which distinguished it from earlier sound cartoons. It became the most popular cartoon of its day.
For much of 1928, Warner Bros. was the only studio to release talking features. It profited from its innovative films at the box office. Other studios quickened the pace of their conversion to the new technology and started producing their own sound films and talking films.
In February 1929, sixteen months after The Jazz Singer, Columbia Pictures became the eighth and last major studio to release a talking feature.
In May 1929, Warner Bros. released On with the Show! (1929), the first all-color, all-talking feature film. Soon silent film production ceased.
The last totally silent feature produced in the US for general distribution was The Poor Millionaire, released by Biltmore Pictures in April 1930. Four other silent features, all low-budget Westerns, were also released in early 1930.
Aviation
The 1920s saw milestones in aviation that seized the world's attention. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh rose to fame with the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight. He took off from Roosevelt Field in New York and landed at Paris–Le Bourget Airport. It took Lindbergh 33.5 hours to cross the Atlantic Ocean. His aircraft, the Spirit of St. Louis, was a custom-built, single engine, single-seat monoplane. It was designed by aeronautical engineer Donald A. Hall.
In Britain, Amy Johnson (1903–1941) was the first woman to fly alone from Britain to Australia. Flying solo or with her husband, Jim Mollison, she set numerous long-distance records during the 1930s.
Television
The 1920s saw several inventors advance work on television, but programs did not reach the public until the eve of World War II, and few people saw any television before the mid 1940s.
In July 1928, John Logie Baird demonstrated the world's first color transmission, using scanning discs at the transmitting and receiving ends with three spirals of apertures, each spiral with a filter of a different primary color; and three light sources at the receiving end, with a commutator to alternate their illumination.
That same year he also demonstrated stereoscopic television.
In 1927:
- Baird transmitted a long-distance television signal over 438 miles (705 km) of telephone line between London and Glasgow;
- Baird transmitted the world's first long-distance television pictures to the Central Hotel at Glasgow Central Station.
- Baird then set up the Baird Television Development Company Ltd
- and in 1928 made the first transatlantic television transmission,
- from London to Hartsdale, New York
- and the first television programme for the BBC.
Medicine
Further information: History of penicillin
For decades biologists had been at work on the medicine that became penicillin. In 1928, Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming discovered a substance that killed a number of disease-causing bacteria. In 1929, he named the new substance penicillin.
His publications were largely ignored at first, but it became a significant antibiotic in the 1930s. In 1930, Cecil George Paine, a pathologist at Sheffield Royal Infirmary, used penicillin to treat sycosis barbae, eruptions in beard follicles, but was unsuccessful.
Moving to ophthalmia neonatorum, a gonococcal infection in infants, he achieved the first recorded cure with penicillin, on November 25, 1930. He then cured four additional patients (one adult and three infants) of eye infections, but failed to cure a fifth.
New infrastructure
- The automobile's dominance led to a new psychology celebrating mobility. Cars and trucks needed road construction, new bridges, and regular highway maintenance, largely funded by local and state government through taxes on gasoline.
- Farmers were early adopters as they used their pickups to haul people, supplies and animals. New industries were spun off—to make tires and glass and refine fuel, and to service and repair cars and trucks by the millions.
- New car dealers were franchised by the car makers and became prime movers in the local business community. Tourism gained an enormous boost, with hotels, restaurants and curio shops proliferating.
- Electrification, having slowed during the war, progressed greatly as more of the US and Canada was added to the electrical grid. Industries switched from coal power to electricity. At the same time, new power plants were constructed. In America, electricity production almost quadrupled.
- Telephone lines also were being strung across the continent. Indoor plumbing was installed for the first time in many homes, made possible due to modern sewer systems.
- Urbanization reached a milestone in the 1920 census, the results of which showed that slightly more Americans lived in urban areas, towns, and cities, populated by 2,500 or more people, than in small towns or rural areas.
- However, the nation was fascinated with its great metropolitan centers that contained about 15% of the population. The cities of New York and Chicago vied in building skyscrapers, and New York pulled ahead with its Empire State Building.
The basic pattern of the modern white-collar job was set during the late-19th century, but it now became the norm for life in large and medium-sized cities. Typewriters, filing cabinets, and telephones, brought many unmarried women into clerical jobs.
In Canada, by the end of the decade, one in five workers were women. Interest in finding jobs, in the now ever-growing manufacturing sector of U.S. cities, became widespread among rural Americans.
Society:
Suffrage:
Main article: Women's suffrage in the United States
Many countries expanded women's voting rights, such as the United States, Canada, Great Britain, India, and various European countries in 1917–1921. This influenced many governments and elections by increasing the number of voters (but not doubling it, because many women did not vote during the early years of suffrage, as can be seen by the large drop in voter turnout).
Politicians responded by focusing more on issues of concern to women, especially peace, public health, education, and the status of children. On the whole, women voted much like men, except they were more interested in peace, even when it meant appeasement.
Lost Generation:
Main article: Lost Generation
The Lost Generation was composed of young people who came out of World War I disillusioned and cynical about the world. The term usually refers specifically to American literary notables who lived in Paris at the time.
Famous members included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein who wrote novels and short stories criticizing the materialism they perceived to be rampant during this era.
In the United Kingdom, the bright young things were young aristocrats and socialites who:
- threw fancy dress parties,
- went on elaborate treasure hunts,
- were seen in all the trendy venues,
- and were well covered by the gossip columns of the London tabloids.
Social criticism
As the average American in the 1920s became more enamored of wealth and everyday luxuries, some began satirizing the hypocrisy and greed they observed.
Of these social critics, Sinclair Lewis was the most popular:
- His popular 1920 novel Main Street satirized the dull and ignorant lives of the residents of a Midwestern town.
- He followed with Babbitt, about a middle-aged businessman who rebels against his dull life and family, only to realize that the younger generation is as hypocritical as his own.
- Lewis satirized religion with Elmer Gantry, which followed a con man who teams with an evangelist to sell religion to a small town.
Other social critics included Sherwood Anderson, Edith Wharton, and H. L. Mencken. Anderson published a collection of short stories titled Winesburg, Ohio, which studied the dynamics of a small town. Wharton mocked the fads of the new era through her novels, such as Twilight Sleep (1927). Mencken criticized narrow American tastes and culture in essays and articles.
Art Deco:
Main article: Art Deco
Art Deco was the style of design and architecture that marked the era. Originating in Europe, it spread to the rest of western Europe and North America towards the mid-1920s.
In the U.S., one of the more remarkable buildings featuring this style was constructed as the tallest building of the time: the Chrysler Building. The forms of Art Deco were pure and geometric, though the artists often drew inspiration from nature. In the beginning, lines were curved, though rectilinear designs would later become more and more popular.
Expressionism and surrealism:
Painting in North America during the 1920s developed in a different direction from that of Europe. In Europe, the 1920s were the era of expressionism and later surrealism. As Man Ray stated in 1920 after the publication of a unique issue of New York Dada: "Dada cannot live in New York".
Cinema:
Further information:
At the beginning of the decade, films were silent and colorless. In 1922, the first all-color feature, The Toll of the Sea, was released. In 1926, Warner Bros. released Don Juan, the first feature with sound effects and music. In 1927, Warner released The Jazz Singer, the first sound feature to include limited talking sequences.
The public went wild for sound films, and movie studios converted to sound almost overnight. In 1928, Warner released Lights of New York, the first all-talking feature film. In the same year, the first sound cartoon, Dinner Time, was released.
Warner ended the decade by unveiling On with the Show in 1929, the first all-color, all-talking feature film.
Cartoon shorts were popular in movie theaters during this time. In the late 1920s, Walt Disney emerged. Mickey Mouse made his debut in Steamboat Willie on November 18, 1928, at the Colony Theater in New York City. Mickey was featured in more than 120 cartoon shorts, the Mickey Mouse Club, and other specials.
This started Disney and led to creation of other characters going into the 1930s. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a character created by Disney before Mickey in 1927, was contracted by Universal for distribution purposes, and starred in a series of shorts between 1927 and 1928. Disney lost the rights to the character, but in 2006, regained the rights to Oswald. He was the first Disney character to be merchandised.
The period had the emergence of box-office draws such as:
- Mae Murray,
- Ramón Novarro,
- Rudolph Valentino,
- Buster Keaton,
- Harold Lloyd,
- Warner Baxter,
- Clara Bow,
- Louise Brooks,
- Baby Peggy,
- Bebe Daniels,
- Billie Dove,
- Dorothy Mackaill,
- Mary Astor,
- Nancy Carroll,
- Janet Gaynor,
- Charles Farrell,
- William Haines,
- Conrad Nagel,
- John Gilbert,
- Greta Garbo,
- Dolores del Río,
- Norma Talmadge,
- Colleen Moore,
- Nita Naldi,
- Leatrice Joy,
- John Barrymore,
- Norma Shearer,
- Joan Crawford,
- Anna May Wong,
- and Al Jolson.
Harlem:
Main article: Harlem Renaissance
African American literary and artistic culture developed rapidly during the 1920s under the banner of the "Harlem Renaissance". In 1921, the Black Swan Corporation was founded. At its height, it issued 10 recordings per month. All-African American musicals also started in 1921.
In 1923, the Harlem Renaissance Basketball Club was founded by Bob Douglas. During the late-1920s, and especially in the 1930s, the basketball team became known as the best in the world.
The first issue of Opportunity was published. The African American playwright Willis Richardson debuted his play The Chip Woman's Fortune at the Frazee Theatre (also known as the Wallacks theatre).
Notable African American authors such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston began to achieve a level of national public recognition during the 1920s.
Jazz Age:
Further information: Jazz and Jazz Age
The 1920s brought new styles of music into the mainstream of culture in avant-garde cities. Jazz became the most popular form of music for youth. Historian Kathy J. Ogren wrote that, by the 1920s, jazz had become the "dominant influence on America's popular music generally".
Scott DeVeaux argues that a standard history of jazz has emerged such that: "After an obligatory nod to African origins and ragtime antecedents, the music is shown to move through a succession of styles or periods:
- New Orleans jazz up through the 1920s,
- swing in the 1930s,
- bebop in the 1940s,
- cool jazz and hard bop in the 1950s,
- free jazz and fusion in the 1960s.
There is substantial agreement on the defining features of each style, the pantheon of great innovators, and the canon of recorded masterpieces.
The pantheon of performers and singers from the 1920s include:
- Louis Armstrong,
- Duke Ellington,
- Sidney Bechet,
- Jelly Roll Morton,
- Joe "King" Oliver,
- James P. Johnson,
- Fletcher Henderson,
- Frankie Trumbauer,
- Paul Whiteman,
- Roger Wolfe Kahn,
- Bix Beiderbecke,
- Adelaide Hall,
- and Bing Crosby.
The development of urban and city blues also began in the 1920s with performers such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. In the latter part of the decade, early forms of country music were pioneered by:
Dance:
Dance clubs became enormously popular in the 1920s. Their popularity peaked in the late 1920s and reached into the early 1930s. Dance music came to dominate all forms of popular music by the late 1920s. Classical pieces, operettas, folk music, etc., were all transformed into popular dancing melodies to satiate the public craze for dancing.
For example, many of the songs from the 1929 Technicolor musical operetta "The Rogue Song" (starring the Metropolitan Opera star Lawrence Tibbett) were rearranged and released as dancing music and became popular dance club hits in 1929.
Dance clubs across the U.S.-sponsored dancing contests, where dancers invented, tried and competed with new moves.
Professionals began to hone their skills in tap dance and other dances of the era throughout the stage circuit across the United States.
With the advent of talking pictures (sound film), musicals became all the rage and film studios flooded the box office with extravagant and lavish musical films. The representative was the musical Gold Diggers of Broadway, which became the highest-grossing film of the decade.
Harlem played a key role in the development of dance styles. Several entertainment venues attracted people of all races. The Cotton Club featured black performers and catered to a white clientele, while the Savoy Ballroom catered to a mostly black clientele. Some religious moralists preached against "Satan in the dance hall" but had little impact.
The most popular dances throughout the decade were the foxtrot, waltz, and American tango.
From the early 1920s, however, a variety of eccentric novelty dances were developed. The first of these were the Breakaway and Charleston. Both were based on African American musical styles and beats, including the widely popular blues. The Charleston's popularity exploded after its feature in two 1922 Broadway shows.
A brief Black Bottom craze, originating from the Apollo Theater, swept dance halls from 1926 to 1927, replacing the Charleston in popularity. By 1927, the Lindy Hop, a dance based on Breakaway and Charleston and integrating elements of tap, became the dominant social dance. Developed in the Savoy Ballroom, it was set to stride piano ragtime jazz.
The Lindy Hop later evolved into other Swing dances. These dances, nonetheless, never became mainstream, and the overwhelming majority of people in Western Europe and the U.S. continued to dance the foxtrot, waltz, and tango throughout the decade.
The dance craze had a large influence on popular music. Large numbers of recordings labeled as foxtrot, tango, and waltz were produced and gave rise to a generation of performers who became famous as recording artists or radio artists.
Top vocalists included:
- Nick Lucas,
- Adelaide Hall,
- Scrappy Lambert,
- Frank Munn,
- Lewis James,
- Chester Gaylord,
- Gene Austin,
- James Melton,
- Franklyn Baur,
- Johnny Marvin,
- Annette Hanshaw,
- Helen Kane,
- Vaughn De Leath,
- and Ruth Etting.
Leading dance orchestra leaders included:
- Bob Haring,
- Harry Horlick,
- Louis Katzman,
- Leo Reisman,
- Victor Arden,
- Phil Ohman,
- George Olsen,
- Ted Lewis,
- Abe Lyman,
- Ben Selvin,
- Nat Shilkret,
- Fred Waring,
- and Paul Whiteman.
Fashion:
Main article: Flapper
Further information: 1920s in Western fashion
Attire
Paris set the fashion trends for Europe and North America. The fashion for women was all about getting loose. Women wore dresses all day, every day. Day dresses had a drop waist, which was a sash or belt around the low waist or hip and a skirt that hung anywhere from the ankle on up to the knee, never above. Daywear had sleeves (long to mid-bicep) and a skirt that was straight, pleated, hank hem, or tired. Jewelry was less conspicuous. Hair was often bobbed, giving a boyish look.
For men in white collar jobs, business suits were the day to day attire. Striped, plaid, or windowpane suits came in dark gray, blue, and brown in the winter and ivory, white, tan, and pastels in the summer. Shirts were white and neckties were essential.
Immortalized in movies and magazine covers, young women's fashions of the 1920s set both a trend and social statement, a breaking-off from the rigid Victorian way of life. These young, rebellious, middle-class women, labeled 'flappers' by older generations, did away with the corset and donned slinky knee-length dresses, which exposed their legs and arms.
The hairstyle of the decade was a chin-length bob, which had several popular variations.
Cosmetics, which until the 1920s were not typically accepted in American society because of their association with prostitution, became extremely popular.
In the 1920s, new magazines appealed to young German women with a sensuous image and advertisements for the appropriate clothes and accessories they would want to purchase. The glossy pages of Die Dame and Das Blatt der Hausfrau displayed the "Neue Frauen", "New Girl" – what Americans called the flapper. She was young and fashionable, financially independent, and was an eager consumer of the latest fashions. The magazines kept her up to date on styles, clothes, designers, arts, sports, and modern technology such as automobiles and telephones.
Sexuality of women during the 1920s:
The 1920s was a period of social revolution, coming out of World War I, society changed as inhibitions faded and youth demanded new experiences and more freedom from old controls.
Chaperones faded in importance as "anything goes" became a slogan for youth taking control of their subculture. A new woman was born—a "flapper" who danced, drank, smoked and voted.
This new woman cut her hair, wore make-up, and partied. She was known for being giddy and taking risks.
Women gained the right to vote in most countries. New careers opened for single women in offices and schools, with salaries that helped them to be more independent.
With their desire for freedom and independence came change in fashion. One of the more dramatic post-war changes in fashion was the woman's silhouette; the dress length went from floor length to ankle and knee length, becoming more bold and seductive.
The new dress code emphasized youth: Corsets were left behind and clothing was looser, with more natural lines. The hourglass figure was not popular anymore, and a slimmer, boyish body type was considered appealing. The flappers were known for this and for their high spirits, flirtation, and recklessness when it came to the search for fun and thrills.
Coco Chanel was one of the more enigmatic fashion figures of the 1920s. She was recognized for her avant-garde designs; her clothing was a mixture of wearable, comfortable, and elegant. She was the one to introduce a different aesthetic into fashion, especially a different sense for what was feminine, and based her design on new ethics; she designed for an active woman, one that could feel at ease in her dress.
Chanel's primary goal was to empower freedom. She was the pioneer for women wearing pants and for the little black dress, which were signs of a more independent lifestyle.
Changing role of women
Most British historians depict the 1920s as an era of domesticity for women with little feminist progress, apart from full suffrage which came in 1928.
On the contrary, argues Alison Light, literary sources reveal that many British women enjoyed:
With the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, that gave women the right to vote, American feminists attained the political equality they had been waiting for. A generational gap began to form between the "new" women of the 1920s and the previous generation.
Prior to the 19th Amendment, feminists commonly thought women could not pursue both a career and a family successfully, believing one would inherently inhibit the development of the other.
This mentality began to change in the 1920s, as more women began to desire not only successful careers of their own, but also families. The "new" woman was less invested in social service than the progressive generations, and in tune with the consumerist spirit of the era, she was eager to compete and to find personal fulfillment.
Higher education was rapidly expanding for women. Linda Eisenmann claims, "New collegiate opportunities for women profoundly redefined womanhood by challenging the Victorian belief that men's and women's social roles were rooted in biology."
Advertising agencies exploited the new status of women, for example in publishing automobile ads in women's magazines, at a time when the vast majority of purchasers and drivers were men. The new ads promoted new freedoms for affluent women while also suggesting the outer limits of the new freedoms.
Automobiles were more than practical devices. They were also highly visible symbols of affluence, mobility, and modernity. The advertisements, wrote Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, "offered women a visual vocabulary to imagine their new social and political roles as citizens and to play an active role in shaping their identity as modern women".
Significant changes in the lives of working women occurred in the 1920s. World War I had temporarily allowed women to enter into industries such as chemical, automobile, and iron and steel manufacturing, which were once deemed inappropriate work for women.
Black women, who had been historically closed out of factory jobs, began to find a place in industry during World War I by accepting lower wages and replacing the lost immigrant labor and in heavy work. Yet, like other women during World War I, their success was only temporary; most black women were also pushed out of their factory jobs after the war.
In 1920, 75% of the black female labor force consisted of agricultural laborers, domestic servants, and laundry workers.
Legislation passed at the beginning of the 20th century mandated a minimum wage and forced many factories to shorten their workdays. This shifted the focus in the 1920s to job performance to meet demand.
Factories encouraged workers to produce more quickly and efficiently with speedups and bonus systems, increasing the pressure on factory workers. Despite the strain on women in the factories, the booming economy of the 1920s meant more opportunities even for the lower classes.
Many young girls from working-class backgrounds did not need to help support their families as prior generations did and were often encouraged to seek work or receive vocational training which would result in social mobility.
The achievement of suffrage led to feminists refocusing their efforts towards other goals. Groups such as the National Women's Party continued the political fight, proposing the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923 and working to remove laws that used sex to discriminate against women, but many women shifted their focus from politics to challenge traditional definitions of womanhood.
Young women, especially, began staking claim to their own bodies and took part in a sexual liberation of their generation. Many of the ideas that fueled this change in sexual thought were already floating around New York intellectual circles prior to World War I, with the writings of Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis, and Ellen Key.
There, thinkers claimed that sex was not only central to the human experience, but also that women were sexual beings with human impulses and desires, and restraining these impulses was self-destructive. By the 1920s, these ideas had permeated the mainstream.
In the 1920s, the co-ed emerged, as women began attending large state colleges and universities. Women entered into the mainstream middle class experience but took on a gendered role within society. Women typically took classes such as home economics, "Husband and Wife", "Motherhood" and "The Family as an Economic Unit".
In an increasingly conservative postwar era, a young woman commonly would attend college with the intention of finding a suitable husband. Fueled by ideas of sexual liberation, dating underwent major changes on college campuses.
With the advent of the automobile, courtship occurred in a much more private setting. "Petting", sexual relations without intercourse, became the social norm for a portion of college students.
Despite women's increased knowledge of pleasure and sex, the decade of unfettered capitalism that was the 1920s gave birth to the "feminine mystique". With this formulation, all women wanted to marry, all good women stayed at home with their children, cooking and cleaning, and the best women did the aforementioned and in addition, exercised their purchasing power freely and as frequently as possible to better their families and their homes.
Liberalism in Europe:
The Allied victory in World War I seems to mark the triumph of liberalism, not just in the Allied countries themselves, but also in Germany and in the new states of Eastern Europe, as well as Japan. Authoritarian militarism as typified by Germany had been defeated and discredited.
Historian Martin Blinkhorn argues that the liberal themes were ascendant in terms of
However, as early as 1917, the emerging liberal order was being challenged by the new communist movement taking inspiration from the Russian Revolution. Communist revolts were beaten back everywhere else, but they did succeed in Russia.
Homosexuality
Further information:
Homosexuality became much more visible and somewhat more acceptable. London, New York, Paris, Rome, and Berlin were important centers of the new ethic.
Historian Jason Crouthamel argues that in Germany, the First World War promoted homosexual emancipation because it provided an ideal of comradeship which redefined homosexuality and masculinity.
The many gay rights groups in Weimar Germany favored a militarised rhetoric with a vision of a spiritually and politically emancipated hypermasculine gay man who fought to legitimize "friendship" and secure civil rights.
Ramsey explores several variations. On the left, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee; WhK) reasserted the traditional view that homosexuals were an effeminate "third sex" whose sexual ambiguity and nonconformity was biologically determined.
The radical nationalist Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of the Self-Owned) proudly proclaimed homosexuality as heir to the manly German and classical Greek traditions of homoerotic male bonding, which enhanced the arts and glorified relationships with young men.
The politically centrist Bund für Menschenrecht (League for Human Rights) engaged in a struggle for human rights, advising gays to live in accordance with the mores of middle-class German respectability.
Humor was used to assist in acceptability. One popular American song, "Masculine Women, Feminine Men", was released in 1926 and recorded by numerous artists of the day; it included these lyrics
Masculine women, Feminine men
Which is the rooster, which is the hen?
It's hard to tell 'em apart today! And, say!
Sister is busy learning to shave,
Brother just loves his permanent wave,
It's hard to tell 'em apart today! Hey, hey!
Girls were girls and boys were boys when I was a tot,
Now we don't know who is who, or even what's what!
Knickers and trousers, baggy and wide,
Nobody knows who's walking inside,
Those masculine women and feminine men!
The relative liberalism of the decade is demonstrated by the fact that the actor William Haines, regularly named in newspapers and magazines as the No. 1 male box-office draw, openly lived in a gay relationship with his partner, Jimmie Shields.
Other popular gay actors/actresses of the decade included Alla Nazimova and Ramón Novarro.
In 1927, Mae West wrote a play about homosexuality called The Drag, and alluded to the work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. It was a box-office success. West regarded talking about sex as a basic human rights issue, and was also an early advocate of gay rights.
Profound hostility did not abate in more remote areas such as western Canada. With the return of a conservative mood in the 1930s, the public grew intolerant of homosexuality, and gay actors were forced to choose between retiring or agreeing to hide their sexuality even in Hollywood.
Psychoanalysis:
Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) played a major role in psychoanalysis, which impacted avant-garde thinking, especially in the humanities and artistic fields.
Historian Roy Porter wrote:
"He advanced challenging theoretical concepts such as unconscious mental states and their repression, infantile sexuality and the symbolic meaning of dreams and hysterical symptoms, and he prized the investigative techniques of free association and dream interpretation, to methods for overcoming resistance and uncovering hidden unconscious wishes."
Other influential proponents of psychoanalysis included:
Adler argued that a neurotic individual would overcompensate by manifesting aggression.
Porter notes that Adler's views became part of "an American commitment to social stability based on individual adjustment and adaptation to healthy, social forms"
Culture:
Immigration restrictions:
The United States became more anti-immigration in policy. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921, intended to be a temporary measure, set numerical limitations on immigration from countries outside the Western Hemisphere, capped at approximately 357,000 total annually.
The Immigration Act of 1924 made permanent a more restrictive total cap of around 150,000 per annum, based on the National Origins Formula system of quotas limiting immigration to a fraction proportionate to an ethnic group's existing share of the United States population in 1920. The goal was to freeze the pattern of European ethnic composition, and to exclude almost all Asians. Hispanics were not restricted.
Australia, New Zealand, and Canada also sharply restricted or ended Asian immigration. In Canada, the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 prevented almost all immigration from Asia. Other laws curbed immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.
Prohibition:
Main article: Prohibition in the United States
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the progressive movement gradually caused local communities in many parts of Western Europe and North America to tighten restrictions of vice activities, particularly gambling, alcohol, and narcotics (though splinters of this same movement were also involved in racial segregation in the U.S.).
This movement gained its strongest traction in the U.S. leading to the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the associated Volstead Act which made illegal the manufacture, import and sale of beer, wine and hard liquor (though drinking was technically not illegal).
The laws were specifically promoted by evangelical Protestant churches and the Anti-Saloon League to reduce drunkenness, petty crime, domestic abuse, corrupt saloon-politics, and (in 1918), Germanic influences.
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was an active supporter in rural areas, but cities generally left enforcement to a small number of federal officials.
The various restrictions on alcohol and gambling were widely unpopular leading to rampant and flagrant violations of the law, and consequently to a rapid rise of organized crime around the nation (as typified by Chicago's Al Capone).
In Canada, prohibition ended much earlier than in the U.S., and barely took effect at all in the province of Quebec, which led to Montreal's becoming a tourist destination for legal alcohol consumption. The continuation of legal alcohol production in Canada soon led to a new industry in smuggling liquor into the U.S.
Rise of the speakeasy:
Speakeasies were illegal bars selling beer and liquor after paying off local police and government officials. They became popular in major cities and helped fund large-scale gangsters operations such as those of:
They operated with connections to organized crime and liquor smuggling. While the U.S. Federal Government agents raided such establishments and arrested many of the small figures and smugglers, they rarely managed to get the big bosses; the business of running speakeasies was so lucrative that such establishments continued to flourish throughout the nation.
In major cities, speakeasies could often be elaborate, offering food, live bands, and floor shows. Many shows in cities such as New York, Paris, London, Berlin, and San Francisco featured female impersonators or drag performers in a wave of popularity known as the Pansy Craze.
Police were notoriously bribed by speakeasy operators to either leave them alone or at least give them advance notice of any planned raid.
Literature:
Further information: 1920s § Literature
The Roaring Twenties was a period of literary creativity, and works of several notable authors appeared during the period. D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was a scandal at the time because of its explicit descriptions of sex.
After an initially mixed response, T. S. Eliot's multi-part poem The Waste Land came to be regarded as a seminal Modernist work, and its experimentation with intertextuality would heavily influence the evolution of 20th Century poetry. Books that take the 1920s as their subject include:
The 1920s also saw the widespread popularity of the pulp magazine. Printed on cheap pulp paper, these magazines provided affordable entertainment to the masses and quickly became one of the most popular forms of media during the decade.
Many prominent writers of the 20th century would get their start writing for pulps, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett, and H. P. Lovecraft. Pulp fiction magazines would last in popularity until the 1950s.
Solo flight across the Atlantic:
Charles Lindbergh gained sudden great international fame as the first pilot to fly solo and non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean, flying from Roosevelt Airfield (Nassau County, Long Island), New York to Paris on May 20–21, 1927. He had a single-engine airplane, the "Spirit of St. Louis", which had been designed by Donald A. Hall and custom built by Ryan Airlines of San Diego, California. His flight took 33.5 hours.
The president of France bestowed on him the French Legion of Honor and, on his arrival back in the United States, a fleet of warships and aircraft escorted him to Washington, D.C., where President Calvin Coolidge awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Sports:
The Roaring Twenties was the breakout decade for sports across the modern world. Citizens from all parts of the country flocked to see the top athletes of the day compete in arenas and stadiums.
Their exploits were loudly and highly praised in the new "gee whiz" style of sports journalism that was emerging; champions of this style of writing included the legendary writers Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon in American sports literature presented a new form of heroism departing from the traditional models of masculinity.
High school and junior high school students were offered to play sports that they had not been able to play in the past. Several sports, such as golf, that had previously been unavailable to the middle-class finally became available.
In 1929, driver Henry Segrave reached a record land speed of 231.44 mph in his car, the Golden Arrow.
Olympics
Following the 1922 Latin American Games in Rio de Janeiro, IOC officials toured the region, helping countries establish national Olympic committees and prepare for future competition.
In some countries, such as Brazil, sporting and political rivalries hindered progress as opposing factions battled for control of the international sport. The 1924 Olympic Games in Paris and the 1928 games in Amsterdam saw greatly increased participation from Latin American athletes.
Sports journalism, modernity, and nationalism excited Egypt. Egyptians of all classes were captivated by news of the Egyptian national soccer team's performance in international competitions. Success or failure in the Olympics of 1924 and 1928 was more than a betting opportunity but became an index of Egyptian independence and a desire to be seen as modern by Europe.
Egyptians also saw these competitions as a way to distinguish themselves from the traditionalism of the rest of Africa.
Balkans
The Greek government of Eleftherios Venizelos initiated a number of programs involving physical education in the public schools and raised the profile of sports competition. Other Balkan nations also became more involved in sports and participated in several precursors of the Balkan Games, competing sometimes with Western European teams.
The Balkan Games, first held in Athens in 1929 as an experiment, proved a sporting and a diplomatic success. From the beginning, the games, held in Greece through 1933, sought to improve relations among Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Albania.
As a political and diplomatic event, the games worked in conjunction with an annual Balkan Conference, which resolved issues between these often-feuding nations. The results were quite successful; officials from all countries routinely praised the games' athletes and organizers. During a period of persistent and systematic efforts to create rapprochement and unity in the region, this series of athletic meetings played a key role.
United States
The most popular American athlete of the 1920s was baseball player Babe Ruth. His characteristic home-run hitting heralded a new epoch in the history of the sport (the "live-ball era"), and his high style of living fascinated the nation and made him one of the highest-profile figures of the decade.
Fans were enthralled in 1927 when Ruth hit 60 home runs, setting a new single-season home run record that was not broken until 1961. Together with another up-and-coming star named Lou Gehrig, Ruth laid the foundation of future New York Yankees dynasties.
A former bar room brawler named Jack Dempsey, also known as The Manassa Mauler, won the world heavyweight boxing title and became the most celebrated pugilist of his time.
Enrique Chaffardet the Venezuelan Featherweight World Champion was the most sought-after boxer in 1920s Brooklyn, New York City. College football captivated fans, with notables such as Red Grange, running back of the University of Illinois, and Knute Rockne who coached Notre Dame's football program to great success on the field and nationwide notoriety.
Grange also played a role in the development of professional football in the mid-1920s by signing on with the NFL's Chicago Bears. Bill Tilden thoroughly dominated his competition in tennis, cementing his reputation as one of the greatest tennis players of all time. Bobby Jones also popularized golf with his spectacular successes on the links.
Ruth, Dempsey, Grange, Tilden, and Jones are collectively referred to as the "Big Five" sporting icons of the Roaring Twenties.
Organized crime:
See also: American Mafia
During the 19th century, vices such as gambling, alcohol, and narcotics had been popular throughout the United States in spite of not always being technically legal. Enforcement against these vices had always been spotty.
Indeed, most major cities established red-light districts to regulate gambling and prostitution despite the fact that these vices were typically illegal.
However, with the rise of the progressive movement in the early 20th century, laws gradually became tighter with most gambling, alcohol, and narcotics outlawed by the 1920s. Because of widespread public opposition to these prohibitions, especially alcohol, a great economic opportunity was created for criminal enterprises.
Organized crime blossomed during this era, particularly the American Mafia. After the 18th Amendment went into effect, bootlegging became widespread. So lucrative were these vices that some entire cities in the U.S. became illegal gaming centers with vice actually supported by the local governments.
Notable examples include Miami, Florida, and Galveston, Texas. Many of these criminal enterprises would long outlast the Roaring Twenties and ultimately were instrumental in establishing Las Vegas as a gambling center.
Culture of Weimar Germany
Main article: Weimar culture
Weimar culture was the flourishing of the arts and sciences in Germany during the Weimar Republic, from 1918 until Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933. 1920s Berlin was at the hectic center of the Weimar culture.
Although not part of Germany, German-speaking Austria, and particularly Vienna, is often included as part of Weimar culture. Bauhaus was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts. Its goal of unifying art, craft, and technology became influential worldwide, especially in architecture.
Germany, and Berlin in particular, was fertile ground for intellectuals, artists, and innovators from many fields. The social environment was chaotic, and politics were passionate. German university faculties became universally open to Jewish scholars in 1918.
Leading Jewish intellectuals on university faculties included:
Nine German citizens were awarded Nobel Prizes during the Weimar Republic, five of whom were Jewish scientists, including two in medicine.
Sport took on a new importance as the human body became a focus that pointed away from the heated rhetoric of standard politics. The new emphasis reflected the search for freedom by young Germans alienated from rationalized work routines.
American politics:
See also: 1920 United States presidential election
The 1920s saw dramatic innovations in American political campaign techniques, based especially on new advertising methods that had worked so well selling war bonds during World War I.
Governor James M. Cox of Ohio, the Democratic Party candidate, made a whirlwind campaign that took him to rallies, train station speeches, and formal addresses, reaching audiences totaling perhaps 2,000,000 people. It resembled the William Jennings Bryan campaign of 1896.
By contrast, the Republican Party candidate Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio relied upon a "front porch campaign". It brought 600,000 voters to Marion, Ohio, where Harding spoke from his home.
Republican campaign manager Will Hays spent some $8,100,000; nearly four times the money Cox's campaign spent. Hays used national advertising in a major way (with advice from adman Albert Lasker). The theme was Harding's own slogan "America First". Thus the Republican advertisement in Collier's Magazine for October 30, 1920, demanded, "Let's be done with wiggle and wobble."
The image presented in the ads was nationalistic, using catchphrases like:
1920 was the first presidential campaign to be heavily covered by the press and to receive widespread newsreel coverage, and it was also the first modern campaign to use the power of Hollywood and Broadway stars who traveled to Marion for photo opportunities with Harding and his wife.
Among the celebrities to make the pilgrimage were:
Business icons Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone also lent their cachet to the Front Porch Campaign. On election night, November 2, 1920, commercial radio broadcast coverage of election returns for the first time.
Announcers at KDKA-AM in Pittsburgh, PA read telegraph ticker results over the air as they came in. This single station could be heard over most of the Eastern United States by the small percentage of the population that had radio receivers.
Calvin Coolidge was inaugurated as president after the sudden death of President Warren G. Harding in 1923; he was re-elected in 1924 in a landslide against a divided opposition.
Coolidge made use of the new medium of radio and made radio history several times while president:
Herbert Hoover was elected president in 1928.
Decline of labor unions:
Main article: Labor history of the United States § Weakness of organized labor 1920–1929
Unions grew very rapidly during the war but after a series of failed major strikes in steel, meatpacking and other industries, a long decade of decline weakened most unions and membership fell even as employment grew rapidly.
Radical unionism virtually collapsed, in large part because of Federal repression during World War I by means of the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918.
The 1920s marked a period of sharp decline for the labor movement. Union membership and activities fell sharply in the face of economic prosperity, a lack of leadership within the movement, and anti-union sentiments from both employers and the government.
The unions were much less able to organize strikes. In 1919, more than 4,000,000 workers (or 21% of the labor force) participated in about 3,600 strikes. In contrast, 1929 witnessed about 289,000 workers (or 1.2% of the workforce) stage only 900 strikes.
Unemployment rarely dipped below 5% in the 1920s and few workers faced real wage losses.
Progressivism in 1920s:
Main article: Progressive Era
The Progressive Era in the United States was a period of social activism and political reform that flourished from the 1890s to the 1920s. The politics of the 1920s was unfriendly toward the labor unions and liberal crusaders against business and so many, if not all, historians who emphasize those themes write off the decade.
Urban cosmopolitan scholars recoiled at the moralism of prohibition and the intolerance of the nativists of the KKK and denounced the era. Historian Richard Hofstadter, for example, wrote in 1955 that prohibition "was a pseudo-reform, a pinched, parochial substitute for reform" that "was carried about America by the rural-evangelical virus."
However, as Arthur S. Link emphasized, the progressives did not simply roll over and play dead. Link's argument for continuity through the 1920s stimulated a historiography that found Progressivism to be a potent force.
Palmer, pointing to people like George Norris, wrote, "It is worth noting that progressivism, whilst temporarily losing the political initiative, remained popular in many western states and made its presence felt in Washington during both the Harding and Coolidge presidencies."
Gerster and Cords argued, "Since progressivism was a 'spirit' or an 'enthusiasm' rather than an easily definable force with common goals, it seems more accurate to argue that it produced a climate for reform which lasted well into the 1920s, if not beyond."
Even the Klan has been seen in a new light as numerous social historians reported that Klansmen were "ordinary white Protestants" primarily interested in purification of the system, which had long been a core progressive goal. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan experienced a resurgence, spread all over the country, and found a significant popularity that has lingered to this day in the Midwest.
It was claimed at the height of the second incarnation of the KKK, its membership exceeded 4 million people nationwide. The Klan did not shy away from using burning crosses and other intimidation tools to strike fear into their opponents, who included not just blacks but also Catholics, Jews, and anyone else who was not a white Protestant.
Massacres of black people were common in the 1920s. Tulsa, 1921: On May 31, 1921, a White mob descended on "Black Wall Street", a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa. Over the next two days, they murdered more than 300 people, burned down 40 city blocks and left 10,000 Black residents homeless.
Business progressivism:
What historians have identified as "business progressivism," with its emphasis on efficiency and typified by Henry Ford and Herbert Hoover reached an apogee in the 1920s.
Reynold M. Wik, for example, argues that Ford's "views on technology and the mechanization of rural America were generally enlightened, progressive, and often far ahead of his times."
Tindall stresses the continuing importance of the progressive movement in the South in the 1920s involving increased democracy, efficient government, corporate regulation, social justice, and governmental public service.
William Link finds political progressivism dominant in most of the South in the 1920s. Likewise, it was influential in Midwest.
In Birmingham, Alabama, the Klan violently repressed mixed-race unions but joined with white Protestant workers in a political movement that enacted reforms beneficial to the white working class. But Klan attention to working-class interests was circumstantial and rigidly restricted by race, religion, and ethnicity.
Historians of women and of youth emphasize the strength of the progressive impulse in the 1920s. Women consolidated their gains after the success of the suffrage movement, and moved into causes such as:
The work was not nearly as dramatic as the suffrage crusade, but women voted and operated quietly and effectively.
Paul Fass, speaking of youth, wrote "Progressivism as an angle of vision, as an optimistic approach to social problems, was very much alive." The international influences which had sparked a great many reform ideas likewise continued into the 1920s, as American ideas of modernity began to influence Europe.
There is general agreement that the Progressive Era was over by 1932, especially since a majority of the remaining progressives opposed the New Deal.
Canadian politics:
Canadian politics were dominated federally by the Liberal Party of Canada under William Lyon Mackenzie King. The federal government spent most of the decade disengaged from the economy and focused on paying off the large debts amassed during the war and during the era of railway over expansion.
After the booming wheat economy of the early part of the century, the prairie provinces were troubled by low wheat prices. This played an important role in the development of Canada's first highly successful third political party, the Progressive Party of Canada that won the second most seats in the 1921 national election. As well with the creation of the Balfour Declaration of 1926, Canada achieved with other British former colonies autonomy, forming the British Commonwealth.
End of an era:
Black Tuesday:
Main article: Wall Street Crash of 1929
The Dow Jones Industrial Stock Index had continued its upward move for weeks, and coupled with heightened speculative activities, it gave an illusion that the bull market of 1928 to 1929 would last forever. On October 29, 1929, also known as Black Tuesday, stock prices on Wall Street collapsed.
The events in the United States added to a worldwide depression, later called the Great Depression, that put millions of people out of work around the world throughout the 1930s.
Repeal of Prohibition:
The 21st Amendment, which repealed the 18th Amendment, was proposed on February 20, 1933.
The choice to legalize alcohol was left up to the states, and many states quickly took this opportunity to allow alcohol. Prohibition was officially ended with the ratification of the amendment on December 5, 1933.
In popular culture;
Television and film:
The television show Boardwalk Empire is set chiefly in Atlantic City, New Jersey, during the Prohibition era of the 1920s.
The film The Great Gatsby is a 2013 historical romantic drama film based on the 1925 novel of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Music:
For the 1987 album Bad, singer Michael Jackson's single "Smooth Criminal" featured an iconic video that took place during Prohibition in a speak-easy setting. This is also where his iconic anti-gravity lean was debuted.
For the classic album Rebel of the Underground released June 21, 2013, by recording artist Marcus Orelias, the album featured the song titled "Roaring 20s".
On September 2, 2013, musical duo Rizzle Kicks released their second album titled Roaring 20s under Universal Island.
On July 20, 2022, rap artist Flo Milli released her commercial debut album, You Still Here, Ho? which featured a bonus track called "Roaring 20s". The song was accompanied with a 1920s themed video.
Pray for the Wicked, the sixth studio album by American pop rock solo project Panic! at the Disco, released on June 22, 2018, features a song titled "Roaring 20s".
My Roaring 20s is the second studio album by American rock group Cheap Girls; it was released on October 9, 2009, and the title is a reference to the era.
See also:
On the contrary, argues Alison Light, literary sources reveal that many British women enjoyed:
- the buoyant sense of excitement and release which animates so many of the more broadly cultural activities which different groups of women enjoyed in this period.
- What new kinds of social and personal opportunity, for example, were offered by the changing cultures of sport and entertainment ... by new patterns of domestic life ... new forms of a household appliance, new attitudes to housework?
With the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, that gave women the right to vote, American feminists attained the political equality they had been waiting for. A generational gap began to form between the "new" women of the 1920s and the previous generation.
Prior to the 19th Amendment, feminists commonly thought women could not pursue both a career and a family successfully, believing one would inherently inhibit the development of the other.
This mentality began to change in the 1920s, as more women began to desire not only successful careers of their own, but also families. The "new" woman was less invested in social service than the progressive generations, and in tune with the consumerist spirit of the era, she was eager to compete and to find personal fulfillment.
Higher education was rapidly expanding for women. Linda Eisenmann claims, "New collegiate opportunities for women profoundly redefined womanhood by challenging the Victorian belief that men's and women's social roles were rooted in biology."
Advertising agencies exploited the new status of women, for example in publishing automobile ads in women's magazines, at a time when the vast majority of purchasers and drivers were men. The new ads promoted new freedoms for affluent women while also suggesting the outer limits of the new freedoms.
Automobiles were more than practical devices. They were also highly visible symbols of affluence, mobility, and modernity. The advertisements, wrote Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, "offered women a visual vocabulary to imagine their new social and political roles as citizens and to play an active role in shaping their identity as modern women".
Significant changes in the lives of working women occurred in the 1920s. World War I had temporarily allowed women to enter into industries such as chemical, automobile, and iron and steel manufacturing, which were once deemed inappropriate work for women.
Black women, who had been historically closed out of factory jobs, began to find a place in industry during World War I by accepting lower wages and replacing the lost immigrant labor and in heavy work. Yet, like other women during World War I, their success was only temporary; most black women were also pushed out of their factory jobs after the war.
In 1920, 75% of the black female labor force consisted of agricultural laborers, domestic servants, and laundry workers.
Legislation passed at the beginning of the 20th century mandated a minimum wage and forced many factories to shorten their workdays. This shifted the focus in the 1920s to job performance to meet demand.
Factories encouraged workers to produce more quickly and efficiently with speedups and bonus systems, increasing the pressure on factory workers. Despite the strain on women in the factories, the booming economy of the 1920s meant more opportunities even for the lower classes.
Many young girls from working-class backgrounds did not need to help support their families as prior generations did and were often encouraged to seek work or receive vocational training which would result in social mobility.
The achievement of suffrage led to feminists refocusing their efforts towards other goals. Groups such as the National Women's Party continued the political fight, proposing the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923 and working to remove laws that used sex to discriminate against women, but many women shifted their focus from politics to challenge traditional definitions of womanhood.
Young women, especially, began staking claim to their own bodies and took part in a sexual liberation of their generation. Many of the ideas that fueled this change in sexual thought were already floating around New York intellectual circles prior to World War I, with the writings of Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis, and Ellen Key.
There, thinkers claimed that sex was not only central to the human experience, but also that women were sexual beings with human impulses and desires, and restraining these impulses was self-destructive. By the 1920s, these ideas had permeated the mainstream.
In the 1920s, the co-ed emerged, as women began attending large state colleges and universities. Women entered into the mainstream middle class experience but took on a gendered role within society. Women typically took classes such as home economics, "Husband and Wife", "Motherhood" and "The Family as an Economic Unit".
In an increasingly conservative postwar era, a young woman commonly would attend college with the intention of finding a suitable husband. Fueled by ideas of sexual liberation, dating underwent major changes on college campuses.
With the advent of the automobile, courtship occurred in a much more private setting. "Petting", sexual relations without intercourse, became the social norm for a portion of college students.
Despite women's increased knowledge of pleasure and sex, the decade of unfettered capitalism that was the 1920s gave birth to the "feminine mystique". With this formulation, all women wanted to marry, all good women stayed at home with their children, cooking and cleaning, and the best women did the aforementioned and in addition, exercised their purchasing power freely and as frequently as possible to better their families and their homes.
Liberalism in Europe:
The Allied victory in World War I seems to mark the triumph of liberalism, not just in the Allied countries themselves, but also in Germany and in the new states of Eastern Europe, as well as Japan. Authoritarian militarism as typified by Germany had been defeated and discredited.
Historian Martin Blinkhorn argues that the liberal themes were ascendant in terms of
- "cultural pluralism,
- religious and ethnic toleration,
- national self-determination,
- free-market economics,
- representative and responsible government,
- free trade,
- unionism,
- and the peaceful settlement of international disputes through a new body, the League of Nations".
However, as early as 1917, the emerging liberal order was being challenged by the new communist movement taking inspiration from the Russian Revolution. Communist revolts were beaten back everywhere else, but they did succeed in Russia.
Homosexuality
Further information:
- LGBT history in the United States
- and List of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender-related films of the 1920s
Homosexuality became much more visible and somewhat more acceptable. London, New York, Paris, Rome, and Berlin were important centers of the new ethic.
Historian Jason Crouthamel argues that in Germany, the First World War promoted homosexual emancipation because it provided an ideal of comradeship which redefined homosexuality and masculinity.
The many gay rights groups in Weimar Germany favored a militarised rhetoric with a vision of a spiritually and politically emancipated hypermasculine gay man who fought to legitimize "friendship" and secure civil rights.
Ramsey explores several variations. On the left, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee; WhK) reasserted the traditional view that homosexuals were an effeminate "third sex" whose sexual ambiguity and nonconformity was biologically determined.
The radical nationalist Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of the Self-Owned) proudly proclaimed homosexuality as heir to the manly German and classical Greek traditions of homoerotic male bonding, which enhanced the arts and glorified relationships with young men.
The politically centrist Bund für Menschenrecht (League for Human Rights) engaged in a struggle for human rights, advising gays to live in accordance with the mores of middle-class German respectability.
Humor was used to assist in acceptability. One popular American song, "Masculine Women, Feminine Men", was released in 1926 and recorded by numerous artists of the day; it included these lyrics
Masculine women, Feminine men
Which is the rooster, which is the hen?
It's hard to tell 'em apart today! And, say!
Sister is busy learning to shave,
Brother just loves his permanent wave,
It's hard to tell 'em apart today! Hey, hey!
Girls were girls and boys were boys when I was a tot,
Now we don't know who is who, or even what's what!
Knickers and trousers, baggy and wide,
Nobody knows who's walking inside,
Those masculine women and feminine men!
The relative liberalism of the decade is demonstrated by the fact that the actor William Haines, regularly named in newspapers and magazines as the No. 1 male box-office draw, openly lived in a gay relationship with his partner, Jimmie Shields.
Other popular gay actors/actresses of the decade included Alla Nazimova and Ramón Novarro.
In 1927, Mae West wrote a play about homosexuality called The Drag, and alluded to the work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. It was a box-office success. West regarded talking about sex as a basic human rights issue, and was also an early advocate of gay rights.
Profound hostility did not abate in more remote areas such as western Canada. With the return of a conservative mood in the 1930s, the public grew intolerant of homosexuality, and gay actors were forced to choose between retiring or agreeing to hide their sexuality even in Hollywood.
Psychoanalysis:
Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) played a major role in psychoanalysis, which impacted avant-garde thinking, especially in the humanities and artistic fields.
Historian Roy Porter wrote:
"He advanced challenging theoretical concepts such as unconscious mental states and their repression, infantile sexuality and the symbolic meaning of dreams and hysterical symptoms, and he prized the investigative techniques of free association and dream interpretation, to methods for overcoming resistance and uncovering hidden unconscious wishes."
Other influential proponents of psychoanalysis included:
- Alfred Adler (1870–1937),
- Karen Horney (1885–1952),
- Carl Jung (1875–1961),
- Otto Rank (1884–1939),
- Helene Deutsch (1884–1982),
- and Freud's daughter Anna (1895–1982).
Adler argued that a neurotic individual would overcompensate by manifesting aggression.
Porter notes that Adler's views became part of "an American commitment to social stability based on individual adjustment and adaptation to healthy, social forms"
Culture:
Immigration restrictions:
The United States became more anti-immigration in policy. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921, intended to be a temporary measure, set numerical limitations on immigration from countries outside the Western Hemisphere, capped at approximately 357,000 total annually.
The Immigration Act of 1924 made permanent a more restrictive total cap of around 150,000 per annum, based on the National Origins Formula system of quotas limiting immigration to a fraction proportionate to an ethnic group's existing share of the United States population in 1920. The goal was to freeze the pattern of European ethnic composition, and to exclude almost all Asians. Hispanics were not restricted.
Australia, New Zealand, and Canada also sharply restricted or ended Asian immigration. In Canada, the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 prevented almost all immigration from Asia. Other laws curbed immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.
Prohibition:
Main article: Prohibition in the United States
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the progressive movement gradually caused local communities in many parts of Western Europe and North America to tighten restrictions of vice activities, particularly gambling, alcohol, and narcotics (though splinters of this same movement were also involved in racial segregation in the U.S.).
This movement gained its strongest traction in the U.S. leading to the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the associated Volstead Act which made illegal the manufacture, import and sale of beer, wine and hard liquor (though drinking was technically not illegal).
The laws were specifically promoted by evangelical Protestant churches and the Anti-Saloon League to reduce drunkenness, petty crime, domestic abuse, corrupt saloon-politics, and (in 1918), Germanic influences.
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was an active supporter in rural areas, but cities generally left enforcement to a small number of federal officials.
The various restrictions on alcohol and gambling were widely unpopular leading to rampant and flagrant violations of the law, and consequently to a rapid rise of organized crime around the nation (as typified by Chicago's Al Capone).
In Canada, prohibition ended much earlier than in the U.S., and barely took effect at all in the province of Quebec, which led to Montreal's becoming a tourist destination for legal alcohol consumption. The continuation of legal alcohol production in Canada soon led to a new industry in smuggling liquor into the U.S.
Rise of the speakeasy:
Speakeasies were illegal bars selling beer and liquor after paying off local police and government officials. They became popular in major cities and helped fund large-scale gangsters operations such as those of:
They operated with connections to organized crime and liquor smuggling. While the U.S. Federal Government agents raided such establishments and arrested many of the small figures and smugglers, they rarely managed to get the big bosses; the business of running speakeasies was so lucrative that such establishments continued to flourish throughout the nation.
In major cities, speakeasies could often be elaborate, offering food, live bands, and floor shows. Many shows in cities such as New York, Paris, London, Berlin, and San Francisco featured female impersonators or drag performers in a wave of popularity known as the Pansy Craze.
Police were notoriously bribed by speakeasy operators to either leave them alone or at least give them advance notice of any planned raid.
Literature:
Further information: 1920s § Literature
The Roaring Twenties was a period of literary creativity, and works of several notable authors appeared during the period. D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was a scandal at the time because of its explicit descriptions of sex.
After an initially mixed response, T. S. Eliot's multi-part poem The Waste Land came to be regarded as a seminal Modernist work, and its experimentation with intertextuality would heavily influence the evolution of 20th Century poetry. Books that take the 1920s as their subject include:
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, set in 1922 in the vicinity of New York City, is often described as the symbolic meditation on the "Jazz Age" in American literature.
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque recounts the horrors of World War I and also the deep detachment from German civilian life felt by many men returning from the front.
- This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald, primarily set up in post-World War I Princeton University, portrays the lives and morality of youth.
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway is about a group of expatriate Americans in Europe during the 1920s.
The 1920s also saw the widespread popularity of the pulp magazine. Printed on cheap pulp paper, these magazines provided affordable entertainment to the masses and quickly became one of the most popular forms of media during the decade.
Many prominent writers of the 20th century would get their start writing for pulps, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett, and H. P. Lovecraft. Pulp fiction magazines would last in popularity until the 1950s.
Solo flight across the Atlantic:
Charles Lindbergh gained sudden great international fame as the first pilot to fly solo and non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean, flying from Roosevelt Airfield (Nassau County, Long Island), New York to Paris on May 20–21, 1927. He had a single-engine airplane, the "Spirit of St. Louis", which had been designed by Donald A. Hall and custom built by Ryan Airlines of San Diego, California. His flight took 33.5 hours.
The president of France bestowed on him the French Legion of Honor and, on his arrival back in the United States, a fleet of warships and aircraft escorted him to Washington, D.C., where President Calvin Coolidge awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Sports:
The Roaring Twenties was the breakout decade for sports across the modern world. Citizens from all parts of the country flocked to see the top athletes of the day compete in arenas and stadiums.
Their exploits were loudly and highly praised in the new "gee whiz" style of sports journalism that was emerging; champions of this style of writing included the legendary writers Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon in American sports literature presented a new form of heroism departing from the traditional models of masculinity.
High school and junior high school students were offered to play sports that they had not been able to play in the past. Several sports, such as golf, that had previously been unavailable to the middle-class finally became available.
In 1929, driver Henry Segrave reached a record land speed of 231.44 mph in his car, the Golden Arrow.
Olympics
Following the 1922 Latin American Games in Rio de Janeiro, IOC officials toured the region, helping countries establish national Olympic committees and prepare for future competition.
In some countries, such as Brazil, sporting and political rivalries hindered progress as opposing factions battled for control of the international sport. The 1924 Olympic Games in Paris and the 1928 games in Amsterdam saw greatly increased participation from Latin American athletes.
Sports journalism, modernity, and nationalism excited Egypt. Egyptians of all classes were captivated by news of the Egyptian national soccer team's performance in international competitions. Success or failure in the Olympics of 1924 and 1928 was more than a betting opportunity but became an index of Egyptian independence and a desire to be seen as modern by Europe.
Egyptians also saw these competitions as a way to distinguish themselves from the traditionalism of the rest of Africa.
Balkans
The Greek government of Eleftherios Venizelos initiated a number of programs involving physical education in the public schools and raised the profile of sports competition. Other Balkan nations also became more involved in sports and participated in several precursors of the Balkan Games, competing sometimes with Western European teams.
The Balkan Games, first held in Athens in 1929 as an experiment, proved a sporting and a diplomatic success. From the beginning, the games, held in Greece through 1933, sought to improve relations among Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Albania.
As a political and diplomatic event, the games worked in conjunction with an annual Balkan Conference, which resolved issues between these often-feuding nations. The results were quite successful; officials from all countries routinely praised the games' athletes and organizers. During a period of persistent and systematic efforts to create rapprochement and unity in the region, this series of athletic meetings played a key role.
United States
The most popular American athlete of the 1920s was baseball player Babe Ruth. His characteristic home-run hitting heralded a new epoch in the history of the sport (the "live-ball era"), and his high style of living fascinated the nation and made him one of the highest-profile figures of the decade.
Fans were enthralled in 1927 when Ruth hit 60 home runs, setting a new single-season home run record that was not broken until 1961. Together with another up-and-coming star named Lou Gehrig, Ruth laid the foundation of future New York Yankees dynasties.
A former bar room brawler named Jack Dempsey, also known as The Manassa Mauler, won the world heavyweight boxing title and became the most celebrated pugilist of his time.
Enrique Chaffardet the Venezuelan Featherweight World Champion was the most sought-after boxer in 1920s Brooklyn, New York City. College football captivated fans, with notables such as Red Grange, running back of the University of Illinois, and Knute Rockne who coached Notre Dame's football program to great success on the field and nationwide notoriety.
Grange also played a role in the development of professional football in the mid-1920s by signing on with the NFL's Chicago Bears. Bill Tilden thoroughly dominated his competition in tennis, cementing his reputation as one of the greatest tennis players of all time. Bobby Jones also popularized golf with his spectacular successes on the links.
Ruth, Dempsey, Grange, Tilden, and Jones are collectively referred to as the "Big Five" sporting icons of the Roaring Twenties.
Organized crime:
See also: American Mafia
During the 19th century, vices such as gambling, alcohol, and narcotics had been popular throughout the United States in spite of not always being technically legal. Enforcement against these vices had always been spotty.
Indeed, most major cities established red-light districts to regulate gambling and prostitution despite the fact that these vices were typically illegal.
However, with the rise of the progressive movement in the early 20th century, laws gradually became tighter with most gambling, alcohol, and narcotics outlawed by the 1920s. Because of widespread public opposition to these prohibitions, especially alcohol, a great economic opportunity was created for criminal enterprises.
Organized crime blossomed during this era, particularly the American Mafia. After the 18th Amendment went into effect, bootlegging became widespread. So lucrative were these vices that some entire cities in the U.S. became illegal gaming centers with vice actually supported by the local governments.
Notable examples include Miami, Florida, and Galveston, Texas. Many of these criminal enterprises would long outlast the Roaring Twenties and ultimately were instrumental in establishing Las Vegas as a gambling center.
Culture of Weimar Germany
Main article: Weimar culture
Weimar culture was the flourishing of the arts and sciences in Germany during the Weimar Republic, from 1918 until Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933. 1920s Berlin was at the hectic center of the Weimar culture.
Although not part of Germany, German-speaking Austria, and particularly Vienna, is often included as part of Weimar culture. Bauhaus was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts. Its goal of unifying art, craft, and technology became influential worldwide, especially in architecture.
Germany, and Berlin in particular, was fertile ground for intellectuals, artists, and innovators from many fields. The social environment was chaotic, and politics were passionate. German university faculties became universally open to Jewish scholars in 1918.
Leading Jewish intellectuals on university faculties included:
- physicist Albert Einstein;
- sociologists:
- philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Edmund Husserl;
- sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld;
- political theorists Arthur Rosenberg and Gustav Meyer;
- and many others.
Nine German citizens were awarded Nobel Prizes during the Weimar Republic, five of whom were Jewish scientists, including two in medicine.
Sport took on a new importance as the human body became a focus that pointed away from the heated rhetoric of standard politics. The new emphasis reflected the search for freedom by young Germans alienated from rationalized work routines.
American politics:
See also: 1920 United States presidential election
The 1920s saw dramatic innovations in American political campaign techniques, based especially on new advertising methods that had worked so well selling war bonds during World War I.
Governor James M. Cox of Ohio, the Democratic Party candidate, made a whirlwind campaign that took him to rallies, train station speeches, and formal addresses, reaching audiences totaling perhaps 2,000,000 people. It resembled the William Jennings Bryan campaign of 1896.
By contrast, the Republican Party candidate Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio relied upon a "front porch campaign". It brought 600,000 voters to Marion, Ohio, where Harding spoke from his home.
Republican campaign manager Will Hays spent some $8,100,000; nearly four times the money Cox's campaign spent. Hays used national advertising in a major way (with advice from adman Albert Lasker). The theme was Harding's own slogan "America First". Thus the Republican advertisement in Collier's Magazine for October 30, 1920, demanded, "Let's be done with wiggle and wobble."
The image presented in the ads was nationalistic, using catchphrases like:
- "absolute control of the United States by the United States,"
- "Independence means independence, now as in 1776,"
- "This country will remain American. Its next President will remain in our own country,"
- and "We decided long ago that we objected to a foreign government of our people."
1920 was the first presidential campaign to be heavily covered by the press and to receive widespread newsreel coverage, and it was also the first modern campaign to use the power of Hollywood and Broadway stars who traveled to Marion for photo opportunities with Harding and his wife.
Among the celebrities to make the pilgrimage were:
Business icons Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone also lent their cachet to the Front Porch Campaign. On election night, November 2, 1920, commercial radio broadcast coverage of election returns for the first time.
Announcers at KDKA-AM in Pittsburgh, PA read telegraph ticker results over the air as they came in. This single station could be heard over most of the Eastern United States by the small percentage of the population that had radio receivers.
Calvin Coolidge was inaugurated as president after the sudden death of President Warren G. Harding in 1923; he was re-elected in 1924 in a landslide against a divided opposition.
Coolidge made use of the new medium of radio and made radio history several times while president:
- his inauguration was the first presidential inauguration broadcast on radio;
- on February 12, 1924, he became the first American president to deliver a political speech on radio.
Herbert Hoover was elected president in 1928.
Decline of labor unions:
Main article: Labor history of the United States § Weakness of organized labor 1920–1929
Unions grew very rapidly during the war but after a series of failed major strikes in steel, meatpacking and other industries, a long decade of decline weakened most unions and membership fell even as employment grew rapidly.
Radical unionism virtually collapsed, in large part because of Federal repression during World War I by means of the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918.
The 1920s marked a period of sharp decline for the labor movement. Union membership and activities fell sharply in the face of economic prosperity, a lack of leadership within the movement, and anti-union sentiments from both employers and the government.
The unions were much less able to organize strikes. In 1919, more than 4,000,000 workers (or 21% of the labor force) participated in about 3,600 strikes. In contrast, 1929 witnessed about 289,000 workers (or 1.2% of the workforce) stage only 900 strikes.
Unemployment rarely dipped below 5% in the 1920s and few workers faced real wage losses.
Progressivism in 1920s:
Main article: Progressive Era
The Progressive Era in the United States was a period of social activism and political reform that flourished from the 1890s to the 1920s. The politics of the 1920s was unfriendly toward the labor unions and liberal crusaders against business and so many, if not all, historians who emphasize those themes write off the decade.
Urban cosmopolitan scholars recoiled at the moralism of prohibition and the intolerance of the nativists of the KKK and denounced the era. Historian Richard Hofstadter, for example, wrote in 1955 that prohibition "was a pseudo-reform, a pinched, parochial substitute for reform" that "was carried about America by the rural-evangelical virus."
However, as Arthur S. Link emphasized, the progressives did not simply roll over and play dead. Link's argument for continuity through the 1920s stimulated a historiography that found Progressivism to be a potent force.
Palmer, pointing to people like George Norris, wrote, "It is worth noting that progressivism, whilst temporarily losing the political initiative, remained popular in many western states and made its presence felt in Washington during both the Harding and Coolidge presidencies."
Gerster and Cords argued, "Since progressivism was a 'spirit' or an 'enthusiasm' rather than an easily definable force with common goals, it seems more accurate to argue that it produced a climate for reform which lasted well into the 1920s, if not beyond."
Even the Klan has been seen in a new light as numerous social historians reported that Klansmen were "ordinary white Protestants" primarily interested in purification of the system, which had long been a core progressive goal. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan experienced a resurgence, spread all over the country, and found a significant popularity that has lingered to this day in the Midwest.
It was claimed at the height of the second incarnation of the KKK, its membership exceeded 4 million people nationwide. The Klan did not shy away from using burning crosses and other intimidation tools to strike fear into their opponents, who included not just blacks but also Catholics, Jews, and anyone else who was not a white Protestant.
Massacres of black people were common in the 1920s. Tulsa, 1921: On May 31, 1921, a White mob descended on "Black Wall Street", a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa. Over the next two days, they murdered more than 300 people, burned down 40 city blocks and left 10,000 Black residents homeless.
Business progressivism:
What historians have identified as "business progressivism," with its emphasis on efficiency and typified by Henry Ford and Herbert Hoover reached an apogee in the 1920s.
Reynold M. Wik, for example, argues that Ford's "views on technology and the mechanization of rural America were generally enlightened, progressive, and often far ahead of his times."
Tindall stresses the continuing importance of the progressive movement in the South in the 1920s involving increased democracy, efficient government, corporate regulation, social justice, and governmental public service.
William Link finds political progressivism dominant in most of the South in the 1920s. Likewise, it was influential in Midwest.
In Birmingham, Alabama, the Klan violently repressed mixed-race unions but joined with white Protestant workers in a political movement that enacted reforms beneficial to the white working class. But Klan attention to working-class interests was circumstantial and rigidly restricted by race, religion, and ethnicity.
Historians of women and of youth emphasize the strength of the progressive impulse in the 1920s. Women consolidated their gains after the success of the suffrage movement, and moved into causes such as:
- world peace,
- good government,
- maternal care (the Sheppard–Towner Act of 1921),
- and local support for education and public health.
The work was not nearly as dramatic as the suffrage crusade, but women voted and operated quietly and effectively.
Paul Fass, speaking of youth, wrote "Progressivism as an angle of vision, as an optimistic approach to social problems, was very much alive." The international influences which had sparked a great many reform ideas likewise continued into the 1920s, as American ideas of modernity began to influence Europe.
There is general agreement that the Progressive Era was over by 1932, especially since a majority of the remaining progressives opposed the New Deal.
Canadian politics:
Canadian politics were dominated federally by the Liberal Party of Canada under William Lyon Mackenzie King. The federal government spent most of the decade disengaged from the economy and focused on paying off the large debts amassed during the war and during the era of railway over expansion.
After the booming wheat economy of the early part of the century, the prairie provinces were troubled by low wheat prices. This played an important role in the development of Canada's first highly successful third political party, the Progressive Party of Canada that won the second most seats in the 1921 national election. As well with the creation of the Balfour Declaration of 1926, Canada achieved with other British former colonies autonomy, forming the British Commonwealth.
End of an era:
Black Tuesday:
Main article: Wall Street Crash of 1929
The Dow Jones Industrial Stock Index had continued its upward move for weeks, and coupled with heightened speculative activities, it gave an illusion that the bull market of 1928 to 1929 would last forever. On October 29, 1929, also known as Black Tuesday, stock prices on Wall Street collapsed.
The events in the United States added to a worldwide depression, later called the Great Depression, that put millions of people out of work around the world throughout the 1930s.
Repeal of Prohibition:
The 21st Amendment, which repealed the 18th Amendment, was proposed on February 20, 1933.
The choice to legalize alcohol was left up to the states, and many states quickly took this opportunity to allow alcohol. Prohibition was officially ended with the ratification of the amendment on December 5, 1933.
In popular culture;
Television and film:
The television show Boardwalk Empire is set chiefly in Atlantic City, New Jersey, during the Prohibition era of the 1920s.
The film The Great Gatsby is a 2013 historical romantic drama film based on the 1925 novel of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Music:
For the 1987 album Bad, singer Michael Jackson's single "Smooth Criminal" featured an iconic video that took place during Prohibition in a speak-easy setting. This is also where his iconic anti-gravity lean was debuted.
For the classic album Rebel of the Underground released June 21, 2013, by recording artist Marcus Orelias, the album featured the song titled "Roaring 20s".
On September 2, 2013, musical duo Rizzle Kicks released their second album titled Roaring 20s under Universal Island.
On July 20, 2022, rap artist Flo Milli released her commercial debut album, You Still Here, Ho? which featured a bonus track called "Roaring 20s". The song was accompanied with a 1920s themed video.
Pray for the Wicked, the sixth studio album by American pop rock solo project Panic! at the Disco, released on June 22, 2018, features a song titled "Roaring 20s".
My Roaring 20s is the second studio album by American rock group Cheap Girls; it was released on October 9, 2009, and the title is a reference to the era.
See also:
- Interwar Britain
- Interwar period, worldwide
- Los Angeles in the 1920s
- The 1920s
- Teaching the American Twenties Exhibit from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin
- 1920s timeline, Harlem
- The Roaring Twenties – History.com
The Silent Generation
Silent Generation | Years, Characteristics, & Name Meaning | Britannica (See * below)
- YouTube Video: What is the Silent Generation?
- YouTube Video: Silent Generation, Boomers, Millennials, GenZ (And Don't Forget GenX) | Karen Morgan | Clean Comedy
- YouTube Video: Generation Comparison (1901-2024)
Silent Generation | Years, Characteristics, & Name Meaning | Britannica (See * below)
* - from Encyclopedia Britannica:
The "Silent Generation are those people sandwiched between the “Greatest Generation,” which fought World War II, and the “baby boomers,” the generation born during the surge in births in the United States and other countries in the years immediately following the war.
The range of birth years ascribed to the Silent Generation varies slightly according to the generational scheme employed, beginning with either 1925, 1928, or 1929 and ending with either 1942 or 1945. In the early 2020s the Silents were mostly in their 80s and 90s.
Constituting roughly 50 million individuals in the United States, this generation was both less populous (owing to diminished birth rates in the 1930s and ’40s) and, at first blush, seemingly less dynamic than the larger-than-life generations that bookended it.
Sometimes also called “Traditionalists,” the members of this cohort are generally characterized as cautious conformists who sought stability, worked hard, and thrived by not rocking the boat in an era of booming postwar economic prosperity.
But a closer look reveals a rebellious tendency that slowly emerged across the social, political, and cultural landscape during the years in which they came of age—roughly the late 1940s to the early 1960s—even if it was rebellion more grounded in reforming the system rather than in tearing it down.
Consensus culture:
Childhood in crisis
Childhood for the Silent Generation came in a time of crisis. The youngest Silents grew up with both the extreme economic deprivation of the Great Depression (including, for some, Dust Bowl dislocation) and the terrifying upheaval of World War II. Scarcity was ubiquitous, first as a consequence of widespread unemployment and lack of income, then as a result of rationing to abet the war effort.
Frugality was the essential strategy; delayed gratification was the corollary consequence.
Both attitudes influenced the Silents’ response to the world, even in better times.
The Lucky Few:
Yet, as the Silents came of age, the U.S. economy not only rebounded but also went into overdrive, entering a period of tremendous expansion and prosperity. Indeed, another of the sobriquets bestowed upon the Silents is the “Lucky Few,” because at almost every stage of their lives they have been well positioned to take advantage of the economic opportunities that have opened up for them.
As the postwar economy heated up, industry and commerce needed young workers, and the Silents were there to fit the bill. Moreover, it has been argued that because they were not a numerically large generation, the Silents could command high wages and salaries in a relatively scarce labour market.
Similarly, they exploited low mortgage rates to become homeowners early in adulthood and capitalized on generous pension schemes to fortify their futures.
Big business:
The Silents entered the job market in an era of institutional growth. Ever-expanding corporations were at the centre of American economic life, and manufacturing was booming. Big business was king.
From most indications, the Silents enthusiastically embraced the stability offered by corporate employment, whether behind a desk or on the assembly line.
Although members of the Silent Generation fought in the Korean War (1950–53), Silents are often depicted as having been in awe of the returning war heroes of the Greatest Generation, seemingly content to cast their lot with the institutions that were being reshaped by the preceding generation.
Taking no chances:
Twenty-first century depictions of the Silent Generation frequently reference a pair of magazine articles from the era that characterized the worldview of the Silents and established the received understanding of them.
Often evoked is a Fortune article, “College Class of ’49,” which found that most “Forty-Niners” aspired to a happy family, a comfortable home, and two automobiles. Even more frequently cited is a Time essay from November 1951, “The Younger Generation,” which popularized the term “Silent Generation”:
Home and family
The desire to build families was central to the zeitgeist of the Silents. On average they married younger and had children younger than any generation to date. Their aspiration to homeownership was indirectly aided by the G.I. Bill (Service Readjustment Act of 1944).
While they were largely unable to capitalize on the no-money-down low-interest loans available to veterans to purchase homes, the Silents benefited from the resulting boom in the construction of affordable housing in suburbia in places such as the planned community of Levittown, New York, where, it was said, a new prefabricated house was completed every 16 minutes at the height of a construction frenzy that began in 1947.
Conformity and McCarthyism:
The Time article also emphasized Silents’ tendency to conform:
Unquestionably this conformity was partly conditioned by the Silents’ arrival at the outset of the Cold War, in the era of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Beyond the belief that one got ahead by playing by the rules, there was a fear that unusual behaviour or dissenting opinions would be viewed as un-American.
More than just being marginalized, those who had been members of or sympathetic to the Old Left were being dragged before congressional committees and compelled to acknowledge whether they had ever been a member of the Communist Party, encouraged to identify communists among their friends and associates, and blacklisted from employment.
Not everyone was paranoid about communists having supposedly infiltrated the State Department or worried that secret subversives were hiding in plain sight, ready to corrupt American youth, but “right-minded” consensus and cheerful conformity ruled the day during most of the administration of Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–61).
Quiet desperation:
Yet for all the commitment to straight-and-narrow meritocratic striving and the supposed contentment with the relatively staid lifestyle to which it gave rise, there was an undercurrent of dissatisfaction among the Silents, a sense of lives being lived in the “quiet desperation” Henry David Thoreau identified a century earlier. Among those to call attention to it were academics, journalists, and novelists.
The Lonely Crowd:
Even before the Time article hit the newsstands, in 1950 sociologist David Riesman and collaborators Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney published The Lonely Crowd. In it they argued that the bureaucratized society of big business and big institutions was fostering the replacement of the inventive, “inner-directed” individuals of earlier generations with “other-directed” conformists, who looked not inside themselves but to others for their values and approval and who, in the process, were becoming dispirited.
Getting ahead, according to Riesman, had less to do with what one thought or did than how one was perceived by others.
The Organization Man
William H. Whyte, a business writer for Fortune, made similar observations in his book The Organization Man (1956). In evaluating contemporary corporate culture, Whyte concluded that the rugged individualism, creativity, and entrepreneurship that he believed had long been pivotal to American achievement was losing out to the notion that organizations were better able to solve problems than individuals were and thus were better suited to steer society:
"Once people liked to think, at least, that they were in control of their destinies, but few of the younger organization people cherish such notions. Most see themselves as objects more acted upon than acting—and their future, therefore, determined as much by the system as by themselves."
The men in the gray flannel suits:
Dissatisfaction with corporate life is at the centre of Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), in which a series of crises compel the titular protagonist (taken from the corporate uniform of the day) to reexamine the value of the blind pursuit of an existence based on received aspirations and approved creature comforts.
Set in 1955, Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961) covers similar ground, focusing on a married couple that longs to leave behind a boring job and escape their cookie-cutter suburb. And Holden Caulfield, the preppie protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s landmark The Catcher in the Rye (1951), is enraged by “phonies” and “phoniness.”
From a whisper to a scream
As the 1950s progressed, a significant portion of the Silent Generation chose to break out and strive to change their world, not only through art but also through social and political engagement.
The Beats
The most overt rejection of the postwar culture of consensus and conformity came from the Beat movement of poets, novelists, and other bohemians who both withdrew from and protested against a society they found to be joyless and purposeless. They demonstrated their alienation by adopting a style of dress, manners, and “hip” vocabulary borrowed from jazz musicians and sought release and illumination in drugs, jazz, sex, and Zen Buddhism.
Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957) offered a vision of an alternative lifestyle; Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl (1956) was the boisterous, indignant antithesis of silence.
The civil rights movement:
When the Silents came of age, Jim Crow was still alive and well in the American South. In the North discriminatory practices such as redlining and restrictive covenants kept Black and brown aspirants to the “good life” from taking advantage of the explosion in suburban housing.
But by the mid-1950s the American civil rights movement was in full swing, and many of its principal leaders were members of the Silent Generation, most notably:
Leveling the playing field
When the Greatest Generation’s Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s colour barrier in 1947, he opened the door to a legion of supremely gifted Black athletes from the Silent Generation, including:
Among the other great athletes of the Silent Generation were:
The playboy and the feminist:
Members of the Silent Generation also had a significant impact on gender roles in American society.
In 1953 Silent Hugh Hefner featured a nude photo of iconic actress Marilyn Monroe (also a Silent) in the first issue of Playboy magazine.
By legitimizing female nudity in what became a mainstream publication, Hefner theoretically contributed to the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s while reinforcing the hegemony of the male gaze, but another member of the Silent Generation, Gloria Steinem, would become a powerful countervailing feminist force as one of the world’s most prominent leaders of the women’s liberation movement.
Film noir:
At the height of the Silent Generation’s influence, most married women continued to work in the home, but the influx of women in the workforce during World War II had a lingering effect on the male psyche.
One reflection of that effect was the emergence of the femme fatale (French: “fatal woman”) in film noir, the genre of stylized films characterized by pessimism, fatalism, and menace that were popular from the 1940s to the mid-1950s.
The threat posed by the femme fatale seemed to imply that strong women were dangerous.
The cynicism and muddled morality of film noir conveyed a complex worldview that flew in the face of the straightforward good-versus-evil model favoured by those enthralled by consensus.
Rebels without a cause
The Hollywood movies of the era also offered images of youthful rebels.
However, all of the following were members of the Silent Generation:
Rock around the clock
Members of the Silent Generation were also America’s first teenagers, the new sociodemographic group that arose with postwar prosperity, blessed with disposable cash, leisure time, and a surfeit of youth-oriented products to purchase.
Along with clothes, soft drinks, and drive-in burgers, pop music vinyl records were at the top of their shopping lists. The eureka moment of rock and roll is often debated, but, if it is predicated on the fusion of rhythm and blues (R&B) and country music (and not just on the advent of white people playing R&B), a good argument can be made for the recording of “That’s All Right, Mama” by Elvis Presley at the Memphis Recording Service in July 1954.
Elvis was a Silent and so were most of the first wave of rockers and rockabillies, including:
But the Silent Generation also reached to encompass later rock icons such as members of the following:
The “Godfather” and “Queen of Soul,” James Brown and Aretha Franklin, respectively, were also Silents.
So were:
Most of the participants of the folk revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s were also Silents, catalyzed by the release of Harry Smith’s Anthology of Folk Music (1952). Early-born Silents, though, likely were more partial to the pop stylings of:
Finally, a Silent president
Many of the movers and shakers of the tumultuous 1960s, it turns out, were not boomers but Silents. Even the Chicago Seven (with the exception of David Dellinger), the political activists famously tried for their anti-Vietnam War activities during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, were Silents.
Yet, after the failed runs for the presidency by Silents such as Jack Kemp, Michael Dukakis, and John McCain, and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy during his presidential bid, it looked as if no member of the Silent Generation would occupy the White House—that is, until the election of Joe Biden in 2020.
[End of Encyclopedia Britannica article about the Silent Generation]
___________________________________________________________________________
The Silent Generation (Wikipedia)
The Silent Generation, also known as the Traditionalist Generation, is the Western demographic cohort following the Greatest Generation and preceding the Baby Boomers. The generation is generally defined as people born from 1928 to 1945. By this definition and U.S. Census data, there were 23 million Silents in the United States as of 2019.
In the United States, the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the early-to-mid 1940s caused people to have fewer children and as a result, the generation is comparatively small.
It includes most of those who fought during the Korean War. Upon coming of age in the postwar era, Silents were sometimes characterized as trending towards conformity and traditionalism, as well as comprising the "silent majority".
However, they have also been noted as forming the leadership of the civil rights movement and the 1960s counterculture, and creating the rock and roll music of the 1950s and 1960s.
In the United Kingdom, the Silent Generation was also born during a period of relatively low birthrates for similar reasons to the United States and was quite traditional upon coming of age. They lived through times of prosperity as young adults, economic upheaval in middle age, and relative comfort in later life.
The Sixtiers is a similar age group in the Soviet Union whose upbringings were also heavily influenced by the troubles of the mid-20th century.
The term "the builders" has been used to describe a similar cohort in Australia. Most people of the Silent Generation are the parents of Baby Boomers and older Generation Xers. Their own parents most commonly belonged to either the Greatest Generation or the Lost Generation.
Terminology:
Time magazine first used the term "Silent Generation" in a November 5, 1951, article titled "The Younger Generation", although the term appears to precede the publication:
The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence. With some rare exceptions, youth is nowhere near the rostrum. By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers & mothers, today's younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not issue manifestoes, make speeches or carry posters. It has been called the "Silent Generation."
The Time article used birth dates of 1923 to 1933 for the generation, but the term somehow migrated to the later years currently in use. A reason later proposed for this perceived silence is that as young adults during the McCarthy Era, many members of the Silent Generation felt it was unwise to speak out.
The term "Silent Generation" is also used to describe a similar age group in the UK but has been at times described as a reference to strict childhood discipline which taught children to be "seen but not heard."
In Canada, it has been used with the same meaning as in the United States. The cohort is also known as the "Traditionalist Generation".
Dates and age range definitions:
The Pew Research Center uses 1928 to 1945 as birth years for this cohort. According to this definition, people of the Silent Generation are 78 to 96 years old in 2024.
The Intergenerational Centre of the Resolution Foundation has used 1926 to 1945, while the Encyclopedia of Strategic Leadership and Management uses the range 1925 to 1945. This generation had reached maturity as early as 1946 and as late as 1963. However, the majority of Silents had become of age in the 1950s, in the wake of the Civil rights movement, which was followed by older boomers in the 1960s.
Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe use 1925 to 1942. People born in the later years of World War II who were too young to have any direct recollections of the conflict are sometimes considered to be cultural, if not demographically, baby boomers.
Characteristics:
Australia:
Australia's McCrindle Research uses the name "Builders" to describe the Australian members of this generation, born between 1925 and 1945, and coming of age to become the generation "who literally and metaphorically built [the] nation after the austerity years post-Depression and World War II".
Soviet Union:
Main article: Sixtiers
The Silent Generation in the Soviet Union is similar to Sixtiers. These people were born into Stalinism, raised during collectivization, and were witnesses of the Holodomor. So even though there was no Great Depression in the Soviet Union, they still experienced a lack of resources and food as children. In the 1930s and 1940s many of them lost their parents or close relatives during Stalinist repressions and later during battles and German occupation in WWII. Sometimes this generation is called the "Children of XX-th Congress".
United Kingdom:
Childhood and youth
There was a slump in birth rates in the UK between the two major baby booms following each world war. This roughly correlated with the economic downturn in the 1930s and World War II.
The era of the Great Depression was a time of deprivation for many children, unemployment was high and slum housing was common. However, education was compulsory from the age of five to fourteen years old.
Gaining a place at grammar school was a way for young people whose families could not afford them to be privately educated to gain full access to secondary schooling. In a time before widespread car use, children commonly played outside in the street and further afield without adult supervision.
Toys of this era were quite simple but examples included dolls, model aeroplanes, and trains.
Other popular activities included reading comics, playing board games, going to the cinema, and joining children's organizations such as the scouts. It was estimated that more than 85% of British households owned a wireless (radio) by 1939.
The Second World War impacted the lives of children in various ways. Significant numbers of schoolchildren were evacuated without their parents to the countryside to avoid the threat of bombing throughout the war years. The quality of education fell everywhere but particularly in urban areas for various reasons, including a shortage of teachers and supplies, the distress pupils suffered from air raids and the disruption caused by evacuations.
The degree of supervision children received also fell as fathers left to fight and mothers joined the workforce. However, rationing during World War II and the years after improved the health of the population overall with one study conducted in the early 2000s suggesting that a typical 1940s child ate a healthier diet than their counterpart at the start of the 21st century.
Following the Second World War, the school-leaving age was raised to 15 with every child being allocated to one of three types of school based on a test taken at the age of 11 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (selection between two types of school took place at age 12 in Scotland.
Pictured below: Early television, an example of mid-20th century consumer goods
The "Silent Generation are those people sandwiched between the “Greatest Generation,” which fought World War II, and the “baby boomers,” the generation born during the surge in births in the United States and other countries in the years immediately following the war.
The range of birth years ascribed to the Silent Generation varies slightly according to the generational scheme employed, beginning with either 1925, 1928, or 1929 and ending with either 1942 or 1945. In the early 2020s the Silents were mostly in their 80s and 90s.
Constituting roughly 50 million individuals in the United States, this generation was both less populous (owing to diminished birth rates in the 1930s and ’40s) and, at first blush, seemingly less dynamic than the larger-than-life generations that bookended it.
Sometimes also called “Traditionalists,” the members of this cohort are generally characterized as cautious conformists who sought stability, worked hard, and thrived by not rocking the boat in an era of booming postwar economic prosperity.
But a closer look reveals a rebellious tendency that slowly emerged across the social, political, and cultural landscape during the years in which they came of age—roughly the late 1940s to the early 1960s—even if it was rebellion more grounded in reforming the system rather than in tearing it down.
Consensus culture:
Childhood in crisis
Childhood for the Silent Generation came in a time of crisis. The youngest Silents grew up with both the extreme economic deprivation of the Great Depression (including, for some, Dust Bowl dislocation) and the terrifying upheaval of World War II. Scarcity was ubiquitous, first as a consequence of widespread unemployment and lack of income, then as a result of rationing to abet the war effort.
Frugality was the essential strategy; delayed gratification was the corollary consequence.
Both attitudes influenced the Silents’ response to the world, even in better times.
The Lucky Few:
Yet, as the Silents came of age, the U.S. economy not only rebounded but also went into overdrive, entering a period of tremendous expansion and prosperity. Indeed, another of the sobriquets bestowed upon the Silents is the “Lucky Few,” because at almost every stage of their lives they have been well positioned to take advantage of the economic opportunities that have opened up for them.
As the postwar economy heated up, industry and commerce needed young workers, and the Silents were there to fit the bill. Moreover, it has been argued that because they were not a numerically large generation, the Silents could command high wages and salaries in a relatively scarce labour market.
Similarly, they exploited low mortgage rates to become homeowners early in adulthood and capitalized on generous pension schemes to fortify their futures.
Big business:
The Silents entered the job market in an era of institutional growth. Ever-expanding corporations were at the centre of American economic life, and manufacturing was booming. Big business was king.
From most indications, the Silents enthusiastically embraced the stability offered by corporate employment, whether behind a desk or on the assembly line.
Although members of the Silent Generation fought in the Korean War (1950–53), Silents are often depicted as having been in awe of the returning war heroes of the Greatest Generation, seemingly content to cast their lot with the institutions that were being reshaped by the preceding generation.
Taking no chances:
Twenty-first century depictions of the Silent Generation frequently reference a pair of magazine articles from the era that characterized the worldview of the Silents and established the received understanding of them.
Often evoked is a Fortune article, “College Class of ’49,” which found that most “Forty-Niners” aspired to a happy family, a comfortable home, and two automobiles. Even more frequently cited is a Time essay from November 1951, “The Younger Generation,” which popularized the term “Silent Generation”:
Home and family
The desire to build families was central to the zeitgeist of the Silents. On average they married younger and had children younger than any generation to date. Their aspiration to homeownership was indirectly aided by the G.I. Bill (Service Readjustment Act of 1944).
While they were largely unable to capitalize on the no-money-down low-interest loans available to veterans to purchase homes, the Silents benefited from the resulting boom in the construction of affordable housing in suburbia in places such as the planned community of Levittown, New York, where, it was said, a new prefabricated house was completed every 16 minutes at the height of a construction frenzy that began in 1947.
Conformity and McCarthyism:
The Time article also emphasized Silents’ tendency to conform:
Unquestionably this conformity was partly conditioned by the Silents’ arrival at the outset of the Cold War, in the era of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Beyond the belief that one got ahead by playing by the rules, there was a fear that unusual behaviour or dissenting opinions would be viewed as un-American.
More than just being marginalized, those who had been members of or sympathetic to the Old Left were being dragged before congressional committees and compelled to acknowledge whether they had ever been a member of the Communist Party, encouraged to identify communists among their friends and associates, and blacklisted from employment.
Not everyone was paranoid about communists having supposedly infiltrated the State Department or worried that secret subversives were hiding in plain sight, ready to corrupt American youth, but “right-minded” consensus and cheerful conformity ruled the day during most of the administration of Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–61).
Quiet desperation:
Yet for all the commitment to straight-and-narrow meritocratic striving and the supposed contentment with the relatively staid lifestyle to which it gave rise, there was an undercurrent of dissatisfaction among the Silents, a sense of lives being lived in the “quiet desperation” Henry David Thoreau identified a century earlier. Among those to call attention to it were academics, journalists, and novelists.
The Lonely Crowd:
Even before the Time article hit the newsstands, in 1950 sociologist David Riesman and collaborators Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney published The Lonely Crowd. In it they argued that the bureaucratized society of big business and big institutions was fostering the replacement of the inventive, “inner-directed” individuals of earlier generations with “other-directed” conformists, who looked not inside themselves but to others for their values and approval and who, in the process, were becoming dispirited.
Getting ahead, according to Riesman, had less to do with what one thought or did than how one was perceived by others.
The Organization Man
William H. Whyte, a business writer for Fortune, made similar observations in his book The Organization Man (1956). In evaluating contemporary corporate culture, Whyte concluded that the rugged individualism, creativity, and entrepreneurship that he believed had long been pivotal to American achievement was losing out to the notion that organizations were better able to solve problems than individuals were and thus were better suited to steer society:
"Once people liked to think, at least, that they were in control of their destinies, but few of the younger organization people cherish such notions. Most see themselves as objects more acted upon than acting—and their future, therefore, determined as much by the system as by themselves."
The men in the gray flannel suits:
Dissatisfaction with corporate life is at the centre of Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), in which a series of crises compel the titular protagonist (taken from the corporate uniform of the day) to reexamine the value of the blind pursuit of an existence based on received aspirations and approved creature comforts.
Set in 1955, Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961) covers similar ground, focusing on a married couple that longs to leave behind a boring job and escape their cookie-cutter suburb. And Holden Caulfield, the preppie protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s landmark The Catcher in the Rye (1951), is enraged by “phonies” and “phoniness.”
From a whisper to a scream
As the 1950s progressed, a significant portion of the Silent Generation chose to break out and strive to change their world, not only through art but also through social and political engagement.
The Beats
The most overt rejection of the postwar culture of consensus and conformity came from the Beat movement of poets, novelists, and other bohemians who both withdrew from and protested against a society they found to be joyless and purposeless. They demonstrated their alienation by adopting a style of dress, manners, and “hip” vocabulary borrowed from jazz musicians and sought release and illumination in drugs, jazz, sex, and Zen Buddhism.
Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957) offered a vision of an alternative lifestyle; Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl (1956) was the boisterous, indignant antithesis of silence.
The civil rights movement:
When the Silents came of age, Jim Crow was still alive and well in the American South. In the North discriminatory practices such as redlining and restrictive covenants kept Black and brown aspirants to the “good life” from taking advantage of the explosion in suburban housing.
But by the mid-1950s the American civil rights movement was in full swing, and many of its principal leaders were members of the Silent Generation, most notably:
- Martin Luther King, Jr.,
- Malcolm X,
- Ralph Abernathy,
- and Jesse Jackson.
- Rosa Parks was a member of the Greatest Generation, but her defiant refusal to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, which sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, came on December 1, 1955, in the middle of the Silents’ ascendance.
Leveling the playing field
When the Greatest Generation’s Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s colour barrier in 1947, he opened the door to a legion of supremely gifted Black athletes from the Silent Generation, including:
- fellow baseball players
- basketball’s
- tennis players
- Althea Gibson
- and Arthur Ashe;
- decathlete
- Rafer Johnson;
- sprinter Wilma Rudolph;
- football’s
- Jim Brown,
- Jim Parker,
- and Gale Sayers;
- and boxers
Among the other great athletes of the Silent Generation were:
- Mickey Mantle,
- Sandy Koufax,
- Al Kaline,
- Bob Cousy,
- Bob Pettit,
- Jerry West,
- Pancho Gonzales,
- Billie Jean King,
- Bob Mathias,
- Arnold Palmer,
- Jack Nicklaus,
- Alan Ameche,
- Johnny Unitas,
- Bart Starr,
- and Dick Butkus.
The playboy and the feminist:
Members of the Silent Generation also had a significant impact on gender roles in American society.
In 1953 Silent Hugh Hefner featured a nude photo of iconic actress Marilyn Monroe (also a Silent) in the first issue of Playboy magazine.
By legitimizing female nudity in what became a mainstream publication, Hefner theoretically contributed to the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s while reinforcing the hegemony of the male gaze, but another member of the Silent Generation, Gloria Steinem, would become a powerful countervailing feminist force as one of the world’s most prominent leaders of the women’s liberation movement.
Film noir:
At the height of the Silent Generation’s influence, most married women continued to work in the home, but the influx of women in the workforce during World War II had a lingering effect on the male psyche.
One reflection of that effect was the emergence of the femme fatale (French: “fatal woman”) in film noir, the genre of stylized films characterized by pessimism, fatalism, and menace that were popular from the 1940s to the mid-1950s.
The threat posed by the femme fatale seemed to imply that strong women were dangerous.
The cynicism and muddled morality of film noir conveyed a complex worldview that flew in the face of the straightforward good-versus-evil model favoured by those enthralled by consensus.
Rebels without a cause
The Hollywood movies of the era also offered images of youthful rebels.
- When asked what he is rebelling against, Marlon Brando’s feisty biker in The Wild One (1953) says simply, “Whaddya got?”
- James Dean’s angst-ridden teenager in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) is anything but at home in suburbia.
- Dean was a Silent; Brando was born one year too early.
However, all of the following were members of the Silent Generation:
- Paul Newman,
- Robert Redford,
- Elizabeth Taylor,
- Natalie Wood,
- Dustin Hoffman,
- Jack Nicholson,
- Faye Dunaway,
- Jane Fonda,
- Clint Eastwood,
- Robert De Niro,
- Al Pacino,
- Martin Scorsese,
- Francis Ford Coppola,
- Audrey Hepburn,
- Woody Allen,
- Steve McQueen,
- Shirley MacLaine,
- Warren Beatty,
- and Mel Brooks.
Rock around the clock
Members of the Silent Generation were also America’s first teenagers, the new sociodemographic group that arose with postwar prosperity, blessed with disposable cash, leisure time, and a surfeit of youth-oriented products to purchase.
Along with clothes, soft drinks, and drive-in burgers, pop music vinyl records were at the top of their shopping lists. The eureka moment of rock and roll is often debated, but, if it is predicated on the fusion of rhythm and blues (R&B) and country music (and not just on the advent of white people playing R&B), a good argument can be made for the recording of “That’s All Right, Mama” by Elvis Presley at the Memphis Recording Service in July 1954.
Elvis was a Silent and so were most of the first wave of rockers and rockabillies, including:
- Chuck Berry,
- Little Richard,
- Bo Diddley,
- Buddy Holly,
- Fats Domino,
- Jerry Lee Lewis,
- Carl Perkins,
- Wanda Jackson,
- and Johnny Cash.
But the Silent Generation also reached to encompass later rock icons such as members of the following:
- Beach Boys,
- the Byrds,
- and Buffalo Springfield,
- along with Bob Dylan,
- Simon and Garfunkel,
- Joni Mitchell,
- Leonard Cohen,
- Janis Joplin,
- and, across the Atlantic,
- the Beatles
- and the Rolling Stones.
The “Godfather” and “Queen of Soul,” James Brown and Aretha Franklin, respectively, were also Silents.
So were:
- Sam Cooke,
- Smokey Robinson,
- Marvin Gaye,
- Otis Redding,
- the Temptations,
- and the Supremes.
Most of the participants of the folk revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s were also Silents, catalyzed by the release of Harry Smith’s Anthology of Folk Music (1952). Early-born Silents, though, likely were more partial to the pop stylings of:
- Patti Page,
- Doris Day,
- Johnny Mathis,
- and the Four Freshmen.
Finally, a Silent president
Many of the movers and shakers of the tumultuous 1960s, it turns out, were not boomers but Silents. Even the Chicago Seven (with the exception of David Dellinger), the political activists famously tried for their anti-Vietnam War activities during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, were Silents.
Yet, after the failed runs for the presidency by Silents such as Jack Kemp, Michael Dukakis, and John McCain, and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy during his presidential bid, it looked as if no member of the Silent Generation would occupy the White House—that is, until the election of Joe Biden in 2020.
[End of Encyclopedia Britannica article about the Silent Generation]
___________________________________________________________________________
The Silent Generation (Wikipedia)
The Silent Generation, also known as the Traditionalist Generation, is the Western demographic cohort following the Greatest Generation and preceding the Baby Boomers. The generation is generally defined as people born from 1928 to 1945. By this definition and U.S. Census data, there were 23 million Silents in the United States as of 2019.
In the United States, the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the early-to-mid 1940s caused people to have fewer children and as a result, the generation is comparatively small.
It includes most of those who fought during the Korean War. Upon coming of age in the postwar era, Silents were sometimes characterized as trending towards conformity and traditionalism, as well as comprising the "silent majority".
However, they have also been noted as forming the leadership of the civil rights movement and the 1960s counterculture, and creating the rock and roll music of the 1950s and 1960s.
In the United Kingdom, the Silent Generation was also born during a period of relatively low birthrates for similar reasons to the United States and was quite traditional upon coming of age. They lived through times of prosperity as young adults, economic upheaval in middle age, and relative comfort in later life.
The Sixtiers is a similar age group in the Soviet Union whose upbringings were also heavily influenced by the troubles of the mid-20th century.
The term "the builders" has been used to describe a similar cohort in Australia. Most people of the Silent Generation are the parents of Baby Boomers and older Generation Xers. Their own parents most commonly belonged to either the Greatest Generation or the Lost Generation.
Terminology:
Time magazine first used the term "Silent Generation" in a November 5, 1951, article titled "The Younger Generation", although the term appears to precede the publication:
The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence. With some rare exceptions, youth is nowhere near the rostrum. By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers & mothers, today's younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not issue manifestoes, make speeches or carry posters. It has been called the "Silent Generation."
The Time article used birth dates of 1923 to 1933 for the generation, but the term somehow migrated to the later years currently in use. A reason later proposed for this perceived silence is that as young adults during the McCarthy Era, many members of the Silent Generation felt it was unwise to speak out.
The term "Silent Generation" is also used to describe a similar age group in the UK but has been at times described as a reference to strict childhood discipline which taught children to be "seen but not heard."
In Canada, it has been used with the same meaning as in the United States. The cohort is also known as the "Traditionalist Generation".
Dates and age range definitions:
The Pew Research Center uses 1928 to 1945 as birth years for this cohort. According to this definition, people of the Silent Generation are 78 to 96 years old in 2024.
The Intergenerational Centre of the Resolution Foundation has used 1926 to 1945, while the Encyclopedia of Strategic Leadership and Management uses the range 1925 to 1945. This generation had reached maturity as early as 1946 and as late as 1963. However, the majority of Silents had become of age in the 1950s, in the wake of the Civil rights movement, which was followed by older boomers in the 1960s.
Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe use 1925 to 1942. People born in the later years of World War II who were too young to have any direct recollections of the conflict are sometimes considered to be cultural, if not demographically, baby boomers.
Characteristics:
Australia:
Australia's McCrindle Research uses the name "Builders" to describe the Australian members of this generation, born between 1925 and 1945, and coming of age to become the generation "who literally and metaphorically built [the] nation after the austerity years post-Depression and World War II".
Soviet Union:
Main article: Sixtiers
The Silent Generation in the Soviet Union is similar to Sixtiers. These people were born into Stalinism, raised during collectivization, and were witnesses of the Holodomor. So even though there was no Great Depression in the Soviet Union, they still experienced a lack of resources and food as children. In the 1930s and 1940s many of them lost their parents or close relatives during Stalinist repressions and later during battles and German occupation in WWII. Sometimes this generation is called the "Children of XX-th Congress".
United Kingdom:
Childhood and youth
There was a slump in birth rates in the UK between the two major baby booms following each world war. This roughly correlated with the economic downturn in the 1930s and World War II.
The era of the Great Depression was a time of deprivation for many children, unemployment was high and slum housing was common. However, education was compulsory from the age of five to fourteen years old.
Gaining a place at grammar school was a way for young people whose families could not afford them to be privately educated to gain full access to secondary schooling. In a time before widespread car use, children commonly played outside in the street and further afield without adult supervision.
Toys of this era were quite simple but examples included dolls, model aeroplanes, and trains.
Other popular activities included reading comics, playing board games, going to the cinema, and joining children's organizations such as the scouts. It was estimated that more than 85% of British households owned a wireless (radio) by 1939.
The Second World War impacted the lives of children in various ways. Significant numbers of schoolchildren were evacuated without their parents to the countryside to avoid the threat of bombing throughout the war years. The quality of education fell everywhere but particularly in urban areas for various reasons, including a shortage of teachers and supplies, the distress pupils suffered from air raids and the disruption caused by evacuations.
The degree of supervision children received also fell as fathers left to fight and mothers joined the workforce. However, rationing during World War II and the years after improved the health of the population overall with one study conducted in the early 2000s suggesting that a typical 1940s child ate a healthier diet than their counterpart at the start of the 21st century.
Following the Second World War, the school-leaving age was raised to 15 with every child being allocated to one of three types of school based on a test taken at the age of 11 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (selection between two types of school took place at age 12 in Scotland.
Pictured below: Early television, an example of mid-20th century consumer goods
The years after the Second World War saw a continuation of difficult social conditions, there was a serious housing shortage and rationing was at times more restrictive than it had been during the war. The late 1940s saw substantial social reforms and changes to the structure of the British economy.
Economic conditions and living standards improved significantly during the 1950s and 60s. Unemployment rested at roughly two percent during this period, much lower than it had been during the depression or would be later in the 20th century. Consumer goods such as Televisions and household labour saving devices became increasingly common.
By the late 1950s, Britain was one of the most affluent societies anywhere in the world. In 1957, 52% of the British population described themselves as "very happy" in comparison to 36% in 2005. That year, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously said:
"Let us be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good. Go round the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime – nor indeed in the history of this country."
The idea of the "teenager" as a distinctive phase of life associated with rebellion against adult authority and older generations social norms became increasingly prominent in public discourse during the 1940s and 50s.
Though in many ways those reaching maturity in the years after the Second World War were quite traditionally conservative in experience and attitudes. National service (military conscription) was reintroduced after the war and continued throughout the 1950s.
Young people would often attend ballroom dances to socialise and find potential romantic partners. The average age of first marriage in England and Wales fell reaching its lowest level in more than a hundred years by the late 1960s of 27.2 and 24.7 years for men and women respectively.
Cultural norms and government policy encouraged marriage and women to focus on their role as homemaker, wife and mother whilst their husband acted as the household's primary breadwinner. The treatment of those who did not meet society's expectations in their personal lives was often quite unsympathetic.
Abortion and homosexuality were illegal whilst later investigations suggest that many women who gave birth out of wedlock had their babies forcibly removed from them.
Laws were liberalised significantly in the late 1960s, but change was slower in certain areas in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Mid and later life
Heavy industry had been troubled in the UK throughout the 1960s, this combined with a global energy crisis and influx of cheap goods from Asia led to rapid deindustrialisation by the mid 1970s. New jobs were either low wage or too high-skilled for those laid off. This situation led to significant political instability and industrial unrest causing a great deal of frustration and inconvenience to the general public.
Meanwhile, another set of problems was developing in Northern Ireland where politics had become increasingly tense and divided during the 1960s. This developed into a sectarian conflict with the British Army involved known as The Troubles which continued over several decades. This conflict caused more than 3,500 deaths.
In 1979, Margaret Thatcher became prime minister and brought about the end to some aspects of the Post-war consensus on economic policy.
For instance, her government created the right-to-buy scheme which allowed renters to buy up their council homes at a reduced prices. Middle aged people were one of the social groups which particularly benefited from this policy.
Thatcher's policies have been described as giving millions of people direct ownership of capital through share or house ownership but have also been associated with high unemployment, rising poverty and social unrest.
For several decades prior to 2010, women received the State Pension from the age of 60 and men from the age of 65. A 2019 report stated that Pensioner Poverty in the UK had increased rapidly during the 1970s and the 1980s but fell in the 1990s and early 21st century.
According to the report 20% of the silent generation, which it described as individuals born from 1926 to 1945, had lived in poverty at the age of 70 in comparison to 45% of the Greatest Generation and 15% of Baby Boomers at similar ages.
The report attributed the change to more private pensions, increased home ownership and government policy. Commentators suggested that older people were somewhat insulated from the effects of the austerity programme in the 2010s. Though pensioner poverty was rising slightly by the mid to late 2010s and early 2020s, especially among women. The average life expectancy was around 80 years old, a few years older for women than men, in the late 2000s and 2010s.
General trends:
An analysis of British Election Study surveys for the 1964 to 2019 general elections suggested that the Silent Generation as a cohort became more likely to vote for the Conservative Party as they grew older.
The results suggested that at 35 years old, people born from 1928 to 1945 were about 5 percentage points less likely to vote Conservative than the national average, but that by the time they were 70 years old, they were about ten percentage points more likely to do so than the national average.
They were, however, by the end of the time period studied, less likely to vote for the Conservatives than the next youngest age group, baby boomers. An article on the analysis commented that it is conventional wisdom that people become more conservative as they get older but that isn't true of all the age groups the analysis covered and environmental factors are also important in influencing the development of voter behavior.
United States:
As children and adolescents:
As a cultural narrative, the Silent Generation are described as children of the Great Depression whose parents, having revelled in the highs of the Roaring Twenties, now faced great economic hardship and struggled to provide for their families. Before reaching their teens, they shared with their parents the horrors of World War II but through children's eyes.
Many lost their fathers or older siblings who were killed in the war. They saw the fall of Nazism and the catastrophic devastation made capable of the nuclear bomb.
When the Silent Generation began coming of age after World War II, they were faced with a devastated social order within which they would spend their early adulthood and a new enemy in Communism via the betrayal of post-war agreements and rise of the Soviet Union.
Unlike the previous generation who had fought for "changing the system," the Silent Generation was about "working within the system." They did this by keeping their heads down and working hard, thus earning themselves the "silent" label.
Their attitudes leaned toward not being risk-takers and playing it safe. Fortune magazine's story on the College Class of '49 was subtitled "Taking No Chances".This generation was also heavily influenced by the transformations brought about by the following during their formative years :
In adulthood
From their childhood experiences during the Depression and the example of frugality set by their parents, Silents tended to be thrifty and even miserly, preferring to maximize a product's lifespan, i.e., "get their money's worth." This led some members of the Silent Generation to develop hoarding behaviors in the guise of "not being wasteful."
As with their own parents, Silents tended to marry and have children young. American Silents are noted as being the youngest of all American generations in the age of marriage and parenthood.
As young parents, the older members of this generation primarily produced the later Baby Boomers, while younger members of the generation and older members who held off raising a family until later in life gave birth to Generation X.
Whereas divorce in the eyes of the previous generation was considered aberrant behavior, the Silents were the generation that reformed marriage laws to allow for divorce and lessen the stigma. This led to a historically unprecedented wave of divorces among Silent Generation couples in the United States.
Critics of the theory that Silents tend towards conformity and playing it safe note that, at least in the United States, leaders of 1960s-era rebellion/innovation/protest such as the following were members of the Silent Generation, and not Baby Boomers: for whom these figures were heroes, although the majority of their followers were Boomers.
The following seven Presidents of the United States were members of the Greatest Generation:
Four presidents have been Baby boomers:
And two presidents were members of the Lost Generation:
Only one President, Joe Biden, has been a member of the Silent Generation.
As a birth cohort, Silents never rose in protest as a unified political entity. Widely seen as "following the rules" and benefiting from stable wealth creation, their Boomer and Gen X children would become estranged from them due to their different views regarding social issues of the day and their relatively decreased economic opportunity, creating a different generational zeitgeist.
For example, the Boomer children were instrumental in bringing about the counterculture of the 1960s, and the rise of left wing, liberal views considered anti-establishment, which went directly against the "work within the system" approach that many Silents had practiced.
Gen X children grew up in the 1970s and 1980s with the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over them and a resultant bleak view of the future, contributing to their generational disaffection, in contrast to the optimistic outlook of their Silent Generation parents.
The style of parenting from the Lost Generation or the Interbellum Generation (older members of the Greatest Generation), was known to the Silents and the generations before them originated in the late 1800s, when the Lost Gens were Children or Teenagers.
Representative of this was the idea that "children should be seen but not heard". These ideas were ultimately challenged following the 1946 publication of the book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock, which influenced some Boomers' views on parenting and family values when they became parents themselves. The book also influenced how Baby Boomers were parented.
These less-restrictive behavioral standards, seen as overly permissive by the Silents, further estranged those Boomers from their parents and, among other things, gave rise in the 1970s to the term generation gap.
This was to describe the initial conflict of cultural values between the Silents and their Generation Joneser (younger Baby Boomers) and to a lesser extent, their Generation X'er children in the 1980s, although it wasn't quite as extreme as it was between the Greatest Generation and the "Leading Edge Boomers", (older Baby Boomers) in the 1960s.
Demographics
Economic conditions and living standards improved significantly during the 1950s and 60s. Unemployment rested at roughly two percent during this period, much lower than it had been during the depression or would be later in the 20th century. Consumer goods such as Televisions and household labour saving devices became increasingly common.
By the late 1950s, Britain was one of the most affluent societies anywhere in the world. In 1957, 52% of the British population described themselves as "very happy" in comparison to 36% in 2005. That year, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously said:
"Let us be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good. Go round the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime – nor indeed in the history of this country."
The idea of the "teenager" as a distinctive phase of life associated with rebellion against adult authority and older generations social norms became increasingly prominent in public discourse during the 1940s and 50s.
Though in many ways those reaching maturity in the years after the Second World War were quite traditionally conservative in experience and attitudes. National service (military conscription) was reintroduced after the war and continued throughout the 1950s.
Young people would often attend ballroom dances to socialise and find potential romantic partners. The average age of first marriage in England and Wales fell reaching its lowest level in more than a hundred years by the late 1960s of 27.2 and 24.7 years for men and women respectively.
Cultural norms and government policy encouraged marriage and women to focus on their role as homemaker, wife and mother whilst their husband acted as the household's primary breadwinner. The treatment of those who did not meet society's expectations in their personal lives was often quite unsympathetic.
Abortion and homosexuality were illegal whilst later investigations suggest that many women who gave birth out of wedlock had their babies forcibly removed from them.
Laws were liberalised significantly in the late 1960s, but change was slower in certain areas in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Mid and later life
Heavy industry had been troubled in the UK throughout the 1960s, this combined with a global energy crisis and influx of cheap goods from Asia led to rapid deindustrialisation by the mid 1970s. New jobs were either low wage or too high-skilled for those laid off. This situation led to significant political instability and industrial unrest causing a great deal of frustration and inconvenience to the general public.
Meanwhile, another set of problems was developing in Northern Ireland where politics had become increasingly tense and divided during the 1960s. This developed into a sectarian conflict with the British Army involved known as The Troubles which continued over several decades. This conflict caused more than 3,500 deaths.
In 1979, Margaret Thatcher became prime minister and brought about the end to some aspects of the Post-war consensus on economic policy.
For instance, her government created the right-to-buy scheme which allowed renters to buy up their council homes at a reduced prices. Middle aged people were one of the social groups which particularly benefited from this policy.
Thatcher's policies have been described as giving millions of people direct ownership of capital through share or house ownership but have also been associated with high unemployment, rising poverty and social unrest.
For several decades prior to 2010, women received the State Pension from the age of 60 and men from the age of 65. A 2019 report stated that Pensioner Poverty in the UK had increased rapidly during the 1970s and the 1980s but fell in the 1990s and early 21st century.
According to the report 20% of the silent generation, which it described as individuals born from 1926 to 1945, had lived in poverty at the age of 70 in comparison to 45% of the Greatest Generation and 15% of Baby Boomers at similar ages.
The report attributed the change to more private pensions, increased home ownership and government policy. Commentators suggested that older people were somewhat insulated from the effects of the austerity programme in the 2010s. Though pensioner poverty was rising slightly by the mid to late 2010s and early 2020s, especially among women. The average life expectancy was around 80 years old, a few years older for women than men, in the late 2000s and 2010s.
General trends:
An analysis of British Election Study surveys for the 1964 to 2019 general elections suggested that the Silent Generation as a cohort became more likely to vote for the Conservative Party as they grew older.
The results suggested that at 35 years old, people born from 1928 to 1945 were about 5 percentage points less likely to vote Conservative than the national average, but that by the time they were 70 years old, they were about ten percentage points more likely to do so than the national average.
They were, however, by the end of the time period studied, less likely to vote for the Conservatives than the next youngest age group, baby boomers. An article on the analysis commented that it is conventional wisdom that people become more conservative as they get older but that isn't true of all the age groups the analysis covered and environmental factors are also important in influencing the development of voter behavior.
United States:
As children and adolescents:
As a cultural narrative, the Silent Generation are described as children of the Great Depression whose parents, having revelled in the highs of the Roaring Twenties, now faced great economic hardship and struggled to provide for their families. Before reaching their teens, they shared with their parents the horrors of World War II but through children's eyes.
Many lost their fathers or older siblings who were killed in the war. They saw the fall of Nazism and the catastrophic devastation made capable of the nuclear bomb.
When the Silent Generation began coming of age after World War II, they were faced with a devastated social order within which they would spend their early adulthood and a new enemy in Communism via the betrayal of post-war agreements and rise of the Soviet Union.
Unlike the previous generation who had fought for "changing the system," the Silent Generation was about "working within the system." They did this by keeping their heads down and working hard, thus earning themselves the "silent" label.
Their attitudes leaned toward not being risk-takers and playing it safe. Fortune magazine's story on the College Class of '49 was subtitled "Taking No Chances".This generation was also heavily influenced by the transformations brought about by the following during their formative years :
- the Golden Age of Radio,
- the rise of trade unions,
- the development of transatlantic flight
- and the discovery of penicillin
In adulthood
From their childhood experiences during the Depression and the example of frugality set by their parents, Silents tended to be thrifty and even miserly, preferring to maximize a product's lifespan, i.e., "get their money's worth." This led some members of the Silent Generation to develop hoarding behaviors in the guise of "not being wasteful."
As with their own parents, Silents tended to marry and have children young. American Silents are noted as being the youngest of all American generations in the age of marriage and parenthood.
As young parents, the older members of this generation primarily produced the later Baby Boomers, while younger members of the generation and older members who held off raising a family until later in life gave birth to Generation X.
Whereas divorce in the eyes of the previous generation was considered aberrant behavior, the Silents were the generation that reformed marriage laws to allow for divorce and lessen the stigma. This led to a historically unprecedented wave of divorces among Silent Generation couples in the United States.
Critics of the theory that Silents tend towards conformity and playing it safe note that, at least in the United States, leaders of 1960s-era rebellion/innovation/protest such as the following were members of the Silent Generation, and not Baby Boomers: for whom these figures were heroes, although the majority of their followers were Boomers.
The following seven Presidents of the United States were members of the Greatest Generation:
- John F. Kennedy,
- Lyndon B. Johnson,
- Richard Nixon,
- Gerald Ford,
- Jimmy Carter,
- Ronald Reagan,
- and George H. W. Bush
Four presidents have been Baby boomers:
And two presidents were members of the Lost Generation:
Only one President, Joe Biden, has been a member of the Silent Generation.
As a birth cohort, Silents never rose in protest as a unified political entity. Widely seen as "following the rules" and benefiting from stable wealth creation, their Boomer and Gen X children would become estranged from them due to their different views regarding social issues of the day and their relatively decreased economic opportunity, creating a different generational zeitgeist.
For example, the Boomer children were instrumental in bringing about the counterculture of the 1960s, and the rise of left wing, liberal views considered anti-establishment, which went directly against the "work within the system" approach that many Silents had practiced.
Gen X children grew up in the 1970s and 1980s with the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over them and a resultant bleak view of the future, contributing to their generational disaffection, in contrast to the optimistic outlook of their Silent Generation parents.
The style of parenting from the Lost Generation or the Interbellum Generation (older members of the Greatest Generation), was known to the Silents and the generations before them originated in the late 1800s, when the Lost Gens were Children or Teenagers.
Representative of this was the idea that "children should be seen but not heard". These ideas were ultimately challenged following the 1946 publication of the book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock, which influenced some Boomers' views on parenting and family values when they became parents themselves. The book also influenced how Baby Boomers were parented.
These less-restrictive behavioral standards, seen as overly permissive by the Silents, further estranged those Boomers from their parents and, among other things, gave rise in the 1970s to the term generation gap.
This was to describe the initial conflict of cultural values between the Silents and their Generation Joneser (younger Baby Boomers) and to a lesser extent, their Generation X'er children in the 1980s, although it wasn't quite as extreme as it was between the Greatest Generation and the "Leading Edge Boomers", (older Baby Boomers) in the 1960s.
Demographics
Data is from the Pew Research Center. Recent cohort sizes are greater than the number born due to immigration.
See also:
See also:
- List of generations
- Time magazine, The Younger Generation, 1951
- Time magazine, "The Silent Generation Revisited", 1970
- The Silent Generation