I don’t doubt this, because you have a cite and I don’t, but it does go against what I’ve heard several times. I’ve heard the offset is the other way, and the first few years of a decade belong culturally to the previous one. Eg: the early 60s wasn’t particularly hippy-ish (outside of the related 50s beatniks) in the mainstream and there were still quite a few hippies and long-hairs well into the 70s, and I can recall music “experts” saying in 1980 or so that the Village People were the new sound for the 80s! Huh? Looking back, they were a last hurrah of pure 70s cheesiness.
I suspect all this is pretty fluid though, and we could find examples both ways.
Apologies. Didn’t see you had some decades extending out both sides of the calendar ones. FWIW, I’ve heard they go from year _4 to year _4. An inexact science, to be sure.
Generally speaking yes that is how it works. The 50s are kind of an exception because they basically started after WW2 ended and they lasted until about 1963 when the 60s culture really began taking off.
I think most decades start and finish late, the only exceptions being the 70s, which IMO began right in the year 1970, and this decade the 10s which I think began in 2008 or 2009.
Nah I think the delay tends to be about 18 months to 2 years. 1983 is extremely 80s to me, and 1993 was definitely the 90s. 2003 was the 00s too though it doesn’t feel at all far removed from the second half of the 90s either.
The Untouchables was set after Al Capone was arrested, which was the 1930s. I’m not positive, but I think The Sting was set in the '30s, even though the music was older.
I think it depends on the events which changed people’s perceptions. The '50s ended with the Kennedy assassination. The '20s ended with the start of the Depression. If anyone ever cared about the '90s, it ended with 9/11. And the 1900s probably ended with the start of WW I.
Citizen Kane (an otherwise timeless movie) seems to obliquely display a certain amount of 1880s-1910s nostalgia. Don’t forget, those 40s-style newsreels symbolized modern times.
It didn’t seem necessary to worry about peak anything.
Promotional ads from major corporations were usually about the amazing advances that were thought to be imminent, like electricity that would be too abundant to bother metering.
Only a few days ago I saw a magazine ad from one of the big oil companies, maybe Exxon but I don’t remember for sure. The picture showed a carefree little girl.
The ad said something about how perhaps we can keep the lights on when she’s the age of the person now reading the magazine.
I get that ads like this are politically motivated, and the subtext is that Exxon or whoever it was wants us to vote for politicians and policies that favor their business. But still…the knot in the pit of my stomach hasn’t quite gone away.
How often does mad men portray the 50’s? I’m just curious, I know a lot of the episodes have flashbacks, but I can’t really remember which ones are in the 50’s. The whole series takes place in the 60’s, then the scenes where Don is a child would be in the 30’s. Are you referring to any scene in particular?
The fourth-season episode “Waldorf Stories” flashes back to the 50s several times to show us how Don got his job at Sterling Cooper. (You can tell it’s the 50s from the lapels.)
I remember that scene - I haven’t seen it in a while, so I would have to rewatch it to speak intelligently about it (and even then I might not be speaking intelligently). I don’t recall getting the sense of crushing conformity though; is there something in particular that I missed? It’s an interesting interpretation to me - I don’t think it’s wrong or weird, I’m assuming it’s something valid I just did not pick up on.
In “The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek: The First 25 Years”, there are some quotes from Star Trek writers that the only time travel stories worth doing were years that had a “pivotal historical moment” or modern day (when traveling from the future).
There was some flippant quote in there that the 1960s was the only decade worth exploring, as “nothing happening” in the 1970s.
Those living in the '50s were under the shadow of the Cold War (when they weren’t fighting in or had relatives fighting in the Korean War) and potential atomic destruction, and had Red-baiting and economically unsettled conditions to contend with. The '60s were widely viewed by many who lived through those years as times when things fell apart, war divided America, cities were torn by riots and beloved politicians and public figures were assassinated.
Forget all that, concentrate on popular music and certain social memes, and both decades were Nirvana-esque. :dubious:
Likewise, plenty of people idolized the '30s and '40s as a more innocent time when people pulled together and gathered around the Philco for wonderful radio dramas and comedies (pretty much crap when you hear them now, but what the hell). The '20s weren’t all flappers and carefree sneaking around Prohibition, but that’s what people wanted to remember.
Most nostalgia has to do with hearkening back to a time before you took wrong turns and got embedded in dead-end jobs and relationships.
excitement for the future.
There was a revolution, a HUGE revolution, in just about every kind of tech in the 50s. From antibiotics to jet aircraft to spacecraft to the pill to-well everything. And they all became popular in the 60s. There were jets in the 50s, but mass air travel didn’t start until the 60s. Lots of science fiction spaceships in the 50s, the Apollo program in the 60s. Civil rights came of age. And we had millions of young people showing up to take advantage of the bounty.
No wonder the 60s were a special time (I was a young teenager at the time and didn’t do drugs so I can actually remember the 60s ).
Then the 70s arrived and the bills came due. Pollution and DDT, we learned that civil rights weren’t going to be suddenly solved with the stroke of a pen, the terrible end to the terrible Vietnam war, Nixon and Watergate, the oil crisis, inflation, etc.
It was kind of like someone who goes crazy with a credit card. And then the bill arrives.
Everyone is going to look back fondly to the time when everything was hopeful. And compare it to the time when we learned that no we weren’t going to Mars next decade no matter what Nixon promised.
I know that is why I remember the 60s so fondly. I was young, carefree, and expected that things would just keep getting better. And the cold war. Don’t forget the threat of nuclear annihilation. Every young person had in the back of their mind that they would be one of the survivors and it would be like Boy Scout camping once the radiation died down. You used that as a reason to live in the moment and not worry too much about bills coming due. The bill collectors would all be gone. Ah, the eternal optimism and naivete of youth.
We aren’t discussing history here. In retrospect the 50s and 60s were primitive times to live in. We all recognize that.
The OP asked about nostalgia for the 60s. I grew up then and I certainly have fond positive memories of the 60s. As for those folks who weren’t white middleclass success stories-they lived through the 60s to. If you were black in the 60s it was an amazing time. My parents were active in the civil rights movement and saw that excitement. Yes, there was discrimination, but we had turned the corner! In the fifties discrimination was socially acceptable and considered right. At least by whites. In the 60s society turned and equality was all the rage. If a black person couldn’t rent a room in the 50s there wasn’t much he could do about it. In the 60s he could protest and fight. Even if he lost, even if he had to keep fighting-you have no idea what it meant to blacks and whites who all of a sudden were on the socially acceptable and right side. Yes I know that wasn’t true in many places and many people didn’t share that view. But in the 50s civil rights was an intellectual exercise. It was supreme court cases and investigative journalism. In the 60s it was about libraries where everyone could go. One reason there were so many riots in the late 60s was the discriminated expected rapid change. They came to realize that passing a law was just the first step. They were disappointed and frustrated. It lead to some bad decisions. In the 70s people picked themselves up and realized that the changes had to come step by step and person by person. It was part of the loss of the excitement of the 60s. At first it seemed like you could pass a law and everyone would be equal overnight. You could build an Apollo capsule and space travel would be easy and routine. In the 70s people realized the revolution would be a lot harder and slower.
Really, I think it’s because the time period falls after our victory in WWII and before all the turmoil of Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement in the late 60s.
The 70s were regarded as a time of Jimmy Carter, stagflation, terrorism and the inauspicious end of Vietnam.
I think the 80s are also a time of nostalgia. There is this romanticized view of Wall Street, winning the Cold War and MTV. But growing up during the 80s, I kind of feel like it was a kind of bleak period to actually live in it. What with the realities of Wall Street, the Cold War and MTV.
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