I agree as to the Fifties: the Korean War is as good a “culture marker” for the decade as any. Jackie Robinson and start of network television were major news, for sure, that’s still Forties news, pointing to what lay just around the corner but not quite there. Korea and Joe McCarthy kicked off the 50s IMHO; and Eisenhower’s election in 1952 “cemented” the decade. Another marker: the ‘53 Chevy, the first aerodynamically designed car, the one that set the tone, the car look, of the Fifties, which signaled the end of “box cars”, the beginning of tail fins and swervy (sic) designs. Also, the Fifties was the last decade when baseball was America’s favorite sport. I’m not sure the exact years the NFL and NBA began, but after 1960 baseball had to share space in the nation’s consciousness. The Babe Ruth-Joltin’ Joe-Mickey Mantle era was coming to an end.
The Fifties ended officially in 1960, and the start of the cultural Sixties as we came to know that decade can be seen in a TV show, Route 66, which premiered in the fall of that year; the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, Psycho, which was the highest grossing film of the year; and of course the election of John F. Kennedy as president in November. Also very 60s: the rise of beach or surf music, especially the Beach Boys. I disagree that the Beatles ushered in the decade. Culturally the Fifties lingered through the Kennedy era, but for all that, the brief, youthful and vigorous era popularly known as Camelot ushered out the old beginning in January, 1961.
Maybe this recent election year has biased my thinking towards politics, but I’d say Obama taking office in January 2009 is when the current decade started. The Bush years were very different.
Partly that’s because I got out of the Army (for the second time) in 2008 and graduated college in 2009, so the 2000s were my Iraq/Army years and once Obama took office I became a full fledged civilian again and then an engineer. Other people’s lives might not have that similarly clean break, but I think the draw down in Iraq was a pretty big cultural shift either way.
Good point, I hadn’t looked up when Happy Days got going, and I was only aware of it in the early eighties.
But still, it supports what I’m getting at. You can find talk about what each “ies” was all about DURING each decade, too, but the overall mythos that ultimately comes together and becomes a SHARED sense of what each decade was about, only happens a VERY long time after the fact.
I think it’s due to the organic nature of History. History, being defined NOT as the past itself, but rather as the stories we TELL ourselves about the past.
That’s a good one to start the mood of the 2010s, but I’ll also argue the death of Osama did a lot psychologically to close the 2000’s chapter and start the next.
Yeah, but unless I’m misreading the OP, this is more about US cultural decades more than anything else.
And the Arab Spring revolutions had exactly zero impact on that. I mean, literally nothing is significantly different in US culture/entertainment/zeitgeist for a long time now, and none of it has much to do with the Arab Spring in any event.
I’d actually pin down the 2008 economic troubles (financial implosion, high gas prices) and Obama’s election as the real start to the 2010s- those things had a much larger and lasting effect on the country’s state-of-being than anything I can think of since 9/11.
This is a tough one to answer, because so much depends on just what you think the predominant theme of “The Fifties” was.
If you think of “The Fifties” in a nostalgic way, if you picture “Happy Days,” malt shops, drive-ins and bobby socks… then maybe the Fifties start with Ike’s election and the end of the Korean War. That was the start of the prosperous, fat, happy, frivolous USA that old timers reminisce about.
But of course, a LOT was going on in the Fifties that Richie Cunningham never dealt with. The Fifties were ALSO the Beat decade, the McCarthy decade, the Warren Court decade, the dawn of TV, the dawn of the Civil Rights era… which of those things defines the Fifties for you?