I have two answers that pretty much overlap.
It began with Alan Shepard’s Mercury flight and ended with Apollo 17 splashing down. This was the golden age of space exploration, never to be equaled.
Otherwise, I’d say from the JFK assassination to the fall of Saigon.
June 17, 1964 …
This is the day Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters boarded the bus Furthur and took their “show on the road” as it were … the Beatniks had been around for some time but without widespread television ownership these folks were only really known in the communities where they existed; New York City and San Francisco for example … places like Springfield, IL and Little Rock, AR the Beat generation was only a rumor … when the Furthur bus showed up in Small Town, USA it was the first time many folks saw the counter-culture in vivid psychedelic colors … the youth in these small communities saw this as an alternative to Barry Goldwater …
August 9, 1974 …
The day Richard Nixon resigned … the day the counter-culture of “don’t trust government” became mainstream culture … the day government demonstrated they can’t be trusted … we as a nation have never been the same since …
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To this very day I still get stared at and hear the whispers behind my back when I visit places east of the Sierra Nevada mountains … a man with hair down to his waist … walking down the Las Vegas Strip I had some Midwesterners stop me and ask if they could smoke pot with me and take pictures … I guess so they could go home and say they got high with an authentic hippy … I didn’t have the heart to tell them I wasn’t …
The sixties is the decade made famous by the baby boomer narsicists who lived through it.
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As long as we are quibbling - we’re Dopers, after all - I would date the beginning of the 50s in 1948, with the Berlin blockade. 1946 was the beginning of the Baby Boom, but 1948 was the end of WWII and the full onset of the Cold War. It was clear that Uncle Joe was no longer our ally but our worst enemy.
Other decades are easier - the 30s were the decade of the Great Depression, so it started October 1929 and lasted until December 7, 1941, when it became a World War. The 20s - the end of WWI until 1929.
I would say the 21st century started on 9/11/01, and ended with the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009. I am tempted to say that the teens ended when Obama left office, but it scares me to think of this as the Trump era.
Regards,
Shodan
The entire century ended when Obama took office? Guess we can just phone in the last 83 years of the century, then.
No, the 21st century will end when Trump starts WWIII. So, any day now.
Regards,
Shodan
I would say The Sixties faded out in the summer of 1971. The last significant protest of that era was May Day 1971; by the fall of 1971 it was clear that the energy for more of that sort of thing was gone.
By 1973 streaking was ‘in’, and that was basically a co-opting of hippie nudity by frat boys. If that didn’t signal that the Sixties were not only over, but had been over, I don’t know what would suffice.
I think at the end of the 21st Century … we’ll say that the Century began when the Bernie Sanders campaign made it to the Democrat Nation Convention on his socialism platform … this is the Century laissez-faire capitalism finally dies in the United Sates …