Nevertheless what I've noticed is that until about 1983, I couldn't tell the difference between "the 70s" and "the 80s"...

That's just because 1983 was the year I came into being. I put the "8" in "80s".

Tattoos, piercings, lesbian chic, safe-sex, online dating...

Well, one big thing in the 90s was a recognition in the mainstream media that capitalism (which it had regarded with a big dose of skepticism, and does now more than ever) had the power to generate wealth. That idea surfaced for a while among the liberal fantasies of elevating the masses through confiscations and transfers from the successful. It has now largely been shoved subsurface again. See the political campaigns all competing by declaring that 'jobs' must be generated by vast gummint programs, instead of encouraging trade and private initiative. Oh yes, trade is good BUT....

The 1990's was when America went on vacation. The happy fun trip ended on 9/11.

BTW, WTH is this "wallflower culture"?? Do you mean "flower power"?

He meant flower child. It's fixed.

Stylisitically, one of the things I notice when I see images of the early-mid 90s is the bold, primary colors on everything. The 80s had the bright neon colors - pinks, oranges, electric blues. The style in the 90s, though, combined rich reds, greens and blues for its color palette. I had a sweater in 1995 that was red, green, blue, yellow and black vertical zigzag lines. Everytime I see the picture of me in that sweater I know exactly what year it is.

Grunge is another characteristic style. Grunge really only existed, in its purest form, in the 90s.

Music culture of the nineties:

Punk rock and (non "hair-band") heavy metal emerged from the eighties and kinda fused into a single "cultural type." In the early nineties the two styles could be typified by the dichotomy between Nirvana and Metallica. As the nineties progressed the styles somewhat merged into the same thing, typified by the Korn/Limp Bizkit type bands.

Jazz shed much of its lame keyboard sounds and general lameness of the eighties and expanded on what Miles Davis had introduced in the Bitches Brew album by combining it with Grateful Dead inspired jam band styles, ala Phish, Medeski Martin and Wood, Scofield,etc.

And of course the emergence of hip hop culture into the mainstream of culture, so much so that it can probably be identified (arguably) as the main cultural influence of the nineties.

The near future will probably see the continued merging of the above mentioned stylistic trends with the merging of hip hop production techniques and jazz/jam band improvisational philosophy with the enrgy and abandon of the good old days of punk rock.

A closely related question is what defines "generations." It's not as if the maternity wards close down periodically. Generations are also social constructs, defined by wars and other calamities best I can tell.

The Great Depression marked a generation. World War II created the boomer generation, and they (we) will in turn swamp the retirement and elder care resources of the nation. We're still paying for WWII and will continue to do so for many years to come.

In the 90's, we found out that people with lots of money and fame (OJ) could get away with murder.

In the 90's, the local evening newscasts everywhere started doing in-depth stories on every conceivable illness - causing millions of people to become hypochondriacs. The result of this was a huge increase in medical costs as the entire adult population of the USA insisted on being tested for every illness brought into our living rooms by the local newsteam. This practice continues on.

In the 90's many of us believed the large corporations we worked for when told that a 401 K was the best possible retirement savings plan - we won't believe that again!!

They were the Roaring 90's; like the Roaring 20's, we were flush with wealth, turned inwards, had new and interesting gang problems - and like the 20's, it all ended in a stock market bubble, follow by the war we let happen because we weren't paying attention.

It was, after all was said and done, nearly entirely a waste of time.

I agree that the 90's ended on September 11th, 2001.

My god, Mark Noonan took my thunder. I never thought we'd agree on anything. The 90's were just like the roaring 20's. The times between the wars. This one was the Cold war and Terror war. Both were fun, and fun usually has no substance, it's not supposed to.

Two words sums it up well: Bill Clinton.

Mark Noonam and Mark Adams are right, but nothing sums up the values of that era and explains the reactions against it as well as Bill Clinton.

dot.coms
e-mail
the macarena
the spicegirls
karaoke(sp?)
yankees and braves
venture capitalists
enviroMENTALists

The 90s were the time when rock & roll ceased being primarily about love and sex, and began being primarily about alienation and pain.

as far as the music, I'm with Mr. Hasty. "My life sucks" seemed to be THE recurring theme.

Mark Adams: I assume that you mean the '90s and '20s were fun and of no substance. %-)

Beth: 401(k) programs are more popular than ever before, so that's no '90s thing. Personally I love mine and firmly believe it's the best form of retirement funding. But then, I never put all my money in my company's stock, and never panicked and pulled out of the market.

Anyway, I would agree that 401(k) came into common parlance in the '90s. But they're more popular today than ever!

I like wen and Mark Hasty and wen are on the right track though. I'm still thinking about Steve Duane's comment about the colors. The '80s were very neon weren't they? But the '90s... yeah, more bright colors, but also more grungy colors too...

Dean,

At Sprint, all matching funds were in Sprint Stock - I never "bought" a penny of it. We were not allowed to sell the Sprint stock portion of our 401K. I saw my 401K go from over $100,000 to about $8,000. It's up to about $16,000 now - still not as much as I put into it without the matching funds.
The fact that I'm 12 or 13 years older than you may make that loss more sensitive to me than to you - you have a lot more time to recover from losses than I do (-:

Tupac & Biggie
Pets.com, yadda yadda
tattoos & body piercings
The Simpsons & Seinfeld
Bill Gates
Blewinsky
John Woo comes to Hollywood
Hollywood goes independent
Starbucks

Beth: What I'd say is that you did not learn that 401(K)s are a bad way to save for retirement. What you learned was that putting the majority of your funds in one stock is horribly dangerous.

I would agree with you, though, that putting all your money in your company's stock options was a very big '90s mistake (like casual sex was a horrible mistake of the '70s).

But I would otherwise see the 401(k) itself as one of the watershed positive developments of the 1990s. Really, one of the most progressive developments of our lifetime.

The other '90s thing I suppose was panicking and pulling all your money out of the market. But that's a mistake people make every few decades.

Mark Adams,

Lets just put it down to great minds thinking alike...

:o)

I hate to quibble with the common philosophy of academic thinking...Nothing can be all defining and I don't really see anything artificial about it - cultural construct or not [for all you post modern deconstruction theorists out there]. It begs the question of what is its opposite?

Antonym: natural, authentic, bona fide, genuine, real, sure-enough, true, veritable?

or its synonyms: dummy, ersatz, false, imitation, mock, sham, simulated, spurious, substitute?

If measurement is artificial then language is equally artificial, yet not being able to determine its opposite I might find the term to be moot - but - I offer the following as such.

The nineties saw the rise of the 'republicans' if you will, the religious right, trash tv, self esteem education, grade inflation, marketing for every aspect of living,i.e.: the sociologist and anthropologist as business practicioners, t-e-a-m work as buzz word mantra, overpaid ahtletes, overpaid CEOs [outrageously so after downsizing], supersizing everything, really cheap airfares, PC everything, cigar smoking and anti-cigarette fascists, the great western civ party ready for the simultaneous hangover, Ritalin for your 6 year old, and my very favorite - 'knowledge _______ and the acronyms used in conjunction that define and defy a common language.

Unfortunately, those cultural practices that seem to define a generation hardly have their roots in the same. Incidently, there's still quite a few mullet heads in Indiana today listening to 80s rock and smoking weed. I'm sure there are pockets of resistance elsewhere.

All of the above are really the part of what began in the heady monied 80's. I know the money my clients had in the 80's that they clutched a bit tighter in the 90s. Money earned in the 80's was tossed around seemingly as a last hurrah in the 90s. The downward slide has been 'interesting' to watch.

For my concerns, the 90s begin with Tiananmen Square and end with the twin towers. There's a whole lot of nastiness in between to go with everyone else's list.

Sadly, corporate malfeasance plays a huge part in the definition of artificial and something on the order of Mamet's 'Glengarry Glen Ross' comes to mind as its opposite. Ain't that ironic?

The 90's:
The digital age (e-mail and the web).
Brought tech home to everyone even the grand parents.
Harry Potter?
DVDs.
Cell phones.
The end of tape and records (mostly).
Handhelds.

Hmm... Most of my entries have to do with entertainment or technology.

One more: If they don't do anything to correct it soon. I think that time will be referred to as the beginning of the end of public education. Or at least that's when it started in Michigan.

The nineties meant a lot of different things to me seeing as how it was really the decade I grew up.
9 years old in 1990, 19 in 2000.

One of teh negatives I took from it was the lose of personal responsibility. Maybe that had been around for decades but I didnt notice. From the implementation of zero tolerance policies to everyone being viewed as a victim of some disorder or another the decade to me was a lot about pointing the finger at anyone that wasn't the one in need of being pointed at.

That and grunge music, computers, and the new fears of bombs exploding in my country.

Great post Dean. I was feeling a little nostalgic after my recent birthday and this post really capped everything off nicely.

microsoft (windows, browser wars, anti-trust)
3rd party politics
abercrombie & fitch
dot com bubble
viagra

But the '90s... yeah, more bright colors, but also more grungy colors too...

Flannel. Definitely flannel.

You can summarize the 90's from an exchange on the "HomerPalooza" episode of the Simpsons.

Teen1: Oh, here comes the cannonball guy. He's cool.
Teen2: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Teen1: I don't even know anymore.

Dean, actually on philosophical grounds I'd have to agree with observer: I'm not sure what can reasonably be meant by saying that shifting cultural trends are merely "a cultural construct." That's about like saying that hypnotism is "all in the mind." I mean, yeah, in a sense it is, but in another sense that's a misleadingly reductive, if not incoherent, way of putting it.

(If you can latch onto a set of the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, there's an interesting piece of his on "Natural Classes" toward the front of Volume I.)

That said, I'd say that what I call the 90s first broke on my consciousness around '93 or '94 or '95: tattoos, body piercing, young people inexplicably wearing nerdy eyeglasses. The World Wide Web. TV commercials with half a dozen surreal images per second flashing by. Folks feeling they were really saying something when they tried to justify changing mores by saying, "But it's the Nineties now!" The ongoing bottomless-pit mendacity of the Clintons. A general sense that we were living and eating lotuses at Francis Fukuyama's "End of History." Not all of this broke at once, but over a span of a couple of years I had a definite sense of the culture shifting gears.

And I had a sense that the 90s were culturally far less derivative from the 60s than the 70s or 80s had been.

Speaking of which, for me "the 80s" were pretty much of a piece: say "Reagan" and you're saying "80s." Along with many of the other cultural items you mention. Pretty obvious to me from '81 or so onward. The most peculiar hiccup I noticed in the 80s was the sudden advent, in first few months of 1988, of a neo-moralism which in one guise or another is with us yet. Am I the only person who remembers this? In early January 1988 it was not yet on the horizon. By March or April some commentators were remarking on the sudden shift.

I tend to think of "the 70s" as pretty much mid-to-late 70s. Starting some time during Ford's brief presidency, and not outlasting Jimmy Carter's departure from the White House.

As for "the 60s" (actually, the late 60s and early 70s), I remember their advent when I was midway through grade school, and throughout my junior high and high school years, "the 60s" ruled. It was not until the spring of 1975 that it dawned on me that the 60s, as a cultural force, were receding into the past. I was then a college freshman in Madison, Wisconsin, "the Berkeley of the Midwest." Well do I remember reading underground rags like Kaleidoscope and Free for All. Almost until my departure from Madison in 1981, it wasn't hard to look around you and pretend you were still living in the 60s, if only you squinted a little.

A cultural "decade" may start or end several years out of synch with a calendar decade. But there does seem to be a real sense of the culture shifting gears, noticeably and within a span of a year or two, every several years. It doesn't go smoothly, it sticks and then slips. If the shift is on the order of magnitude of 10 years (or 8 or 12 or 15), we may as well annoy the pedants by referring to it as a "decade."

Pokemon cards
The Rugrats
Steve Eurkle?
Heroin-chic
Everybody quit smoking (cigarettes that is)
Cigars and martinis
Gameboy
CNBC Chicks
Livin in a VAN down by the river!

Unbridled greed and conspicuous consumption.

Paul:

I'm curious to know what you mean by neo-moralism here.
I know that the stock market crash of October 87 brought about some changes in thinking and behavior albeit wasn't immediate but I wonder if ths event was brought about by the same conditions that gave rise to what you say was noticed as a sudden shift.
You've piqued my curiousity. I know where I was but...I can't quite put my finger on what you are referring to.

The 90s strike me as all together a backlash to the 60s. Interesting to note what people recall gives away some clues as to age which has a lot to do with personal interest at the time. I can't imagine a 40-50 yr old recalling Pokemon cards, unless they were instrumental in trading them for large amounts of $$ - similar to the Beanie Baby craze and before that, those Cabbage Patch Dolls [Ugh] :)

I got my one piercing to date (a second ear pierce, conch, is under serious consideration) and my first tattoos in the early 70s. Nose piercings were on their way out by then, and body piercings were only rumored. I lived for one summer with a woman who swung both ways because it was chic back then.

Unbridled greed and conspicuous consumption.

I can think of several decades, even perhaps some centuries, which could be distinguished thereby. The difference is the availability of these commodities to the common man, altho that, too, has happened before.

"So I ask you now: what are the cultural markers that set "the 90s" apart from the earlier decades, in your opinion?"

As any damned fool can tell ya, it was Al Gore, like come on, he invented the 90's.

I was confused by Paul's comment about "neo-moralism" too but then I thought more about it and it suddenly clicked with me: it was some time in the late '80s when it started being okay to talk about morality again, without people smirking at you. This was also about the same time that William Bennett became a major cultural force. (And he is, by the way, a man who takes far more abuse and haughty dismissal than he deserves.)

By the way though, I still like Wen's lists best! :-)

The 90s is kind of a vaporous decade, with the single most significant event being the maturation of the Internet and the resulting information explosion. Those of you born in the past 25 years can't really understand what the Internet has done for information junkies. Before the mid-to-late-90s, if you were born in, say New York, and were perhaps living in Los Angeles, you could go a public library and read a week-old NY Times. But you couldn't get much else. Foreign news? Even worse. Paradoxically, along with this information explosion, we also saw a considerable dumbing down of the populace, in particular those attending school.

I will also remember the 90s for: greed becoming respectable; personal entitlement and satisfaction above all else; diminution of sense of country and loyalty to same; greatly increased immigration of people who did not fit easily into the existing American paradigm; and, finally, a nation that lost more of its sense of identity and purpose, thus leaving it easier prey for flim-flam artists from the political, business and entertainment arenas.

I could go on for thousands of words on this topic, and almost did, but instead I'll leave it short and to the point.

The '90s represented the dawn of the super-modern age, where everyone in the developed world got rich, and no one seemed to notice.

P.S. 401k's suck. Notwithstanding that they have many positive benefits, they are wrong headed at the basic level. The should not be tied to employers, that's old think, they should be more like IRAs.

Maybe it's just because girls my age were obsessed with them, but I don't see how anyone could have failed to mention boy bands. The media-manufactured groups of 4-5 relatively attractive, unthreatening boys/men dressed in matching outfits are vintage '90s. New Kids on the Block, Backstreet Boys, Take That, N Sync, etc. etc. The list goes on and on.

If it comes down to sexual morality - I'd be thinking along the lines of Jesse Helms and his tirade against obscenity and the great NEA debate over Robert Mapplethorpe's fisted anus and Andre Serrano's 'Piss Christ'.
But I then might jump back to 1987 and recall Gary Hart's invitation and the ensuing yacht debacle that might just have opened the flood gates.
Discussing morality - as it is done these days - seems to be more about screaming loudly who is sleeping with who, who is divorcing who, and who is doing exactly what when they're naked.
Cultural shift - certainly- right back to Nathanial Hawthorne.
Yeah, actually I can see that [ as I convince myself that this is what neo-moralism amounts to].

On the other hand, I'm just this side of thick in that I might think that it encompasses so much more than that - brings me right back to corporate malfeasance.

What was that movie with Michael Douglas 'Greed is good'?

Thanks Dean-

We're the same age by the way. That puts us in a stange catagory when it comes to our generational world view. Not quite Boomers, not quite Gen-Xers.

Nathaniel Hawthorn? Oh, please.

Can we make this thread go back to being about cultural markers, not a place to editorialize about how fucked up America is? Thanks.

wen: I agree, although I do see myself as a member of Gen X. The teenagers and young twenty-somethings are Gen-Y now. ;-)

Dean & observer:

The neo-moralism I'm referring to is something that, in my memory, surfaced in a span of just a few months in early 1988.

Again, proceeding purely on the basis of my own memories, it seems that in January of 1988, Nancy Reagan was promoting her "Just Say No" slogan. My own offhand impression at the time (as a conservative who generally supported what the Reagan administration was up to) was that the administration was running out of steam, and this was an attempt to pump the steam pressure back up.

Anyhow, over the next few months, it seems that somehow something about "No" just caught fire in the culture— even among people who detested the Reagans. All of a sudden, even among "sophisticated" people, there was an attitude that it was thinkable to say "No" to excessive drinking, to smoking, to drug use, to randomly sleeping around, to whatever.

I remember reading columns by the likes of George Will and Meg Greenfield, remarking on this sudden sea change in the culture. Really, prior to early 1988, ever since the 60s hit "sophistos" would have laughed you out of the room for speaking a discouraging word against the wretched excesses of Sex & Drugs & Rock 'n Roll.

And without that shift toward neo-moralism, the later anti-smoking zealotry— to say nothing of today's anti-big-food thunderhead-on-the-horizon— would have been inconceivable.

Am I making this sudden cultural shift up out of my own mind? I remember browsing in a bookstore in '88 or '89, flipping through some humorous books about the new neo-moralism. I remember how, when John Tower was rejected in '89, people observed that not too long before, it would have been unthinkable to criticize someone seriously for his drinking and partying. My own take at the time was that the generation of the 60s had now aged enough that they could take the attitude of, "Okay, we've had our fun, now don't you dare have yours."

Just turned 43 last week.
Popification of country music.
dot.com bust (the movie was "Wall Street")
piercings/tatoos
enviromentalism more mainstream
PC PC PC PC PC PC PC PC til it makes you sick
Slick Willie and the prostitution of the press
Corporate downsizing, brainwashing, "streamlining", cut out middle management: "reengineering"

Personally, I went from party girl to mom. That's my defining moment in the 90's (5/16/96)

"Anti-big-food"? Argh, that shoulda been "anti-fast-food."

Just to prove that you ought not post comments when you wake up in the middle of the night (and yes, 5:51 is the middle of the night if you're a night owl like me): stange catagory? Try strange category. Mmmm- much better after coffee.
Coffee for the masses and a great big bookstore- that's a 90's archetype. Over to you Dean- You've got Mail.

Dishevelledness; heavy, slurred guitars; large aperture peircings; self-conscious addiction to irony (especially in the form of abusing the word 'oxymoron'); and self-centeredness.

I won't try to list all the popular fads that come and go and that I don't bother to keep up with, but I will agree strongly with Dean that history doesn't proceed according to calendar years ending with 0. (If, in the United States, it sometimes seems that way, that's only because some significant Presidential elections took place in those years.) Historical periods are shaped by the ideas and actions of men and women.

What, historically, was "the 18th century"? The Enlightenment really began with the ending of the religious wars of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and the philosophies of men like Hobbes and Locke, who hammered out ideas of social contract, individual rights, and religious freedom, culminating in the salon philosophies of Paris in the late 18th century, the American Revolution (based on Locke), the French Revolution (based on Rousseau), then Napoleon's conquests and his final downfall in 1815.

So, the 18th century, historically, ended and the 19th century began in 1815. That century was characterized by the supremacy of the West over the planet Earth, and also the rise of various philosophies and ideologies largely divergent from or opposed to the Enlightenment's rationalist democratic liberalism. The conservative peace of Prince Metternich's "concert of Europe" was broken up by the revolutions of 1848 and then by the rise of Prussia's "blood and iron" militarism -- the gestation, in other words, of the 20th century. In America, which felt itself to be entirely separate from Europe, the question of slavery culminated in the Civil War, followed by the Gilded Age of capitalism.

The 19th century ended and the 20th century began, historically, in 1914, World War I, when Americans woke up to the fact that we are inseparably a part of Europe. We went back to sleep, sort of, in "the 1920s" (which began in 1918 and ended with the Crash of 1929), felt by many to be a sort of "End of History". That still is one of my favorite eras aesthetically, so beautiful the way women dressed and cut their hair, the defying of Prohibition, Art Deco, "Krazy Kat", fabulous archeological discoveries (Egypt, Crete, Sumer). Chesterton and Spengler were both writing then, as were many others.

I was born in 1955, in the middle of "the 1950s" (both calendrically and historically), the middle of the Baby Boom, in the middle of the ideological "Vital Center"-Cold War consensus which was partly shattered with the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. There was the Goldwater vs. Johnson election of 1964. But "the 1960s", the years in which I myself began to be aware of ideologies, ideological conflicts, and ideological spectrums, began at least a year after that election. These were the years characterized by the breakdown of the Cold War consensus, the controversy over the War in Viet Nam, the shift from black-white integration to black separatism, the glorification of "sex, drugs, rock'n'roll" among my generation (symbolized by the Woodstock festival in 1969), man's first step on the Moon (also in 1969, but a culmination of the whole grand thrust of the West rather than specifically a phenomenon of "the 1960s"), the opposition between the long-haired young men (the "hippies" or "the Left" of that era) vs. the short-haired young men (the "squares" or "the Right" of that era) -- all of which came to an end with the resignation of President Nixon over the Watergate imbroglio and the Communist victory in South Viet Nam.

Then, we had that brief "End of History" period known as "the 1970s" under Presidents Ford and Carter -- which came to an end with the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Ayatollahs in Iran, the hostage crisis, and the ascension of President Reagan in response to that. President Reagan's "1980s" climaxed, and, historically, the 20th century ended, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and of Communism in Europe and Russia. Then we had another "End of History" period under President Clinton, which ended, not with election of President Bush in 2000, but with the mass murder of September 11, 2001, the true beginning, I think, of the 21st century. I don't see another "End of History" coming anytime soon. We're living in interesting times, as the Chinese curse says.

90's: Clinton, Internet incubators, DOOM, Newt Gingrich, the former Soviet Union, Monica, Gangsta Rap, Ross Perot, Netscape and belted-below-the-ass jeans.

The 90s (for the United States) were:
Militias formed in Inland Northwestern States. (didja notice we haven't heard much about them lately...)
The nation became aware of other places in the world besides Europe and the USSR; we became aware of troubles all over the place that didn't stem from the struggle between capitalism and communism: Rwanda, Bosnia/Kosovo, Somalia, Kuwait...
The 90s were all about Conspiracy Theories: black helicopters, Janet Reno shredding the Constitution to protect Bill Clinton, blaming the Oklahoma City Murrah Building bombing on "right wing" talk radio, the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy and Everyone Who Crossed Bill Clinton Ended Up Dead.
(...I guess that one still lives on in Halliburton/oil and the 2000 election theft accusations).
I'll add more when I think of 'em. Those are the big 3 to me. And if you think about it, every single one of them does revolve around Bill Clinton in some fashion.
Which leads me to believe that it was in the 90s when (thanks to Bill Clinton and the power he delivered to Leftish agendas) our politics became dominated by a Cult of Personality. Even now, many people love or hate George Bush because of his personality, not his accomplishments.

Well Nathanial Hawthorne springs to my mind at 3:00 a.m. I claim poetic license. I do think that cultures shift, perhaps in circles, perhaps back and forth, but the general behavior of human beings and how they relate to one another is not what I deem to be on a continuum always moving ahead.
In Illinois, Jack Ryan is being hounded to open his divorce papers all because Blair Hull's nasty divorce from his wife was in the spotlight.
Day dreamer that you are Dean, I'm sure you can appreciate my leap into the past and understand why I made that connection.
Neo-moralism, in one of its manifestations, has its ugly side.
And still it is a cultural marker.
Shall we call it character studies? As Paul as pointed out Ashcrofts drinking [thank you for clarifying what you meant on more], you bringing up William Bennett, the moralist who gambled millions away, I bring up Jesse Helms and the NEA.
The 90s certainly ushered in a different approach to politics and the way we relate to each other than what came previously.
The most outspoken anti-smoking zealots in my circles tend to be former smokers.
The 'just say no' campaign was so successful that vengeful jurisprudence is now all the rage.

Anyway, I digress from keeping it light. I find myself investigating the context around which something becomes some kind of cultural marker. It seems important to know why some things stand out.
Something like the ritual satanic child abuse trials of this same time period recalls the hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials.

Neo-moralism - absolutely. Ashcroft covering up a statue would be laughable if the setniment wasn't so prevalent these days.

On a separate note, but not irrelevant. When I was teaching in 2000, I noticed something wholly different in the students as compared to my student days of the 80s. It didn't seem to be a geneation gap, but more like a sea change in culture. I understood so little of it. In my days one could smoke in class. Few did, but occasionally, the instructor did. If there was an impromptu field trip, the instructor could offer a ride to a student.
Now, no impromptu field trips. Definitely no rides at all. No swearing. No smoking. No touching an arm. No comments on appearances. No comments on opinions. No drugs. No drinking. No pornography, obscenity - visual or literaure. You will be fired.

Nathan: speaking of cult of personality, my husband received some material from the republican national committee. Inside was wow! an 8x10 glossy of GW Bush - signed.
I might venture that Clinton and Bush are cut from the same generation, the same culture, albeit opposite sides of the track.

That cult was well crafted in other countries and other governments long before Clinton came around. Maybe we were a little late to that game?

OK- Last list, I promise!

the healing power of crystals
aromatherapy
Tonya Harding vs. Nancy Kerrigan
line dancing
rave parties
Must See TV
Roller Blades
Rosie O'Donnell had a nice TV show that served as an antidote to regular afternoon fair about embittered lesbians and so forth

crap! I mean regular afternoon fare.

No Fitch in the 90's; just Abercrombie. I got my first sports jacket and real neckties from the original company in 1967, from their Chicago franchisee Van Lengerque and Antoine, who also sold (legally at the time) the Thompsons used in the St. Valentines Day massacre.

Steven

Great post! I was gripped with interest from the very first line and didn't even bother to scope down to see who was commenting. I too see history in the descriptions you provided but you are far better read and articulate on the subject of changes through the centuries. When I finally got to your name, I thought - wow, still waters... Thanks for giving us your overview of western history from the 18th century through to this decade. Fascinating stuff.

Is it my imagination, or has no one mentioned SUV's, superstores, and McMansions? Maybe because I've lived somewhere that miniaturizes everything since 1996 (damned misplaced modifier, but I don't feel like fixing it), I notice these things disproportionately when I go back, but they definitely weren't as prevalent in the '80's.

Also: the fixation on people in their 20's being marooned between adolescence and real adulthood (half the students in the Ivy League on Prozac, ubiquitous talk shows about date rape, Naomi Wolf's and Katie Roiphe's first books, Friends, Will & Grace, The Real World, Reality Bites, Singles...).

BTW, I'd sooner eat ground glass than call myself a Generation X-er [retch, heave, hurl], but people seriously think that the '90's were differentiated from the '80's by being more self-centered? Uh, okay.

Oh my God. How could I have forgotten "date rape?" Whoof!

Ain't no way you could have if you'd done time in the college classrooms you so love from 1991-95.

:)

Dear Jane M.: Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Great thread!

I’m reminded of a conversation I had of late about when “cultural decades” start and end (obviously not on Dec. 31). We pretty much came up with the following for the 20th century, acknowledging that virtually all the markers were great political events, where the overall culture trailed in it’s wake.

THE ‘OUGHTS.

Began – Sept. 6, ’01, when 19th century Prez McKinley was killed and replaced by the very 20th century Teddy Roosevelt

Ended - An era marked by technological advance went down on April 15, 1912, with the Titanic. Soon thereafter, Europe began to go akilter and gear up for war.

THE TEENS

Began above. Ended – With the Treaty of Versailles that settled (for now) the war.

THE TWENTIES

Began above. Ended - Stock Market crash, October 1929

THE THIRTIES

Began above. Ended with Nazi invasion of Poland, September 1939

THE FORTIES

Began above. Ended with the advent of the Korean War, June 1950

THE FIFTIES

Began above. Ended… (BIG debate here), but I say on Nov. 22, 1963, with the murder of JFK. JFK was a fifties guy, in style, taste, Cold War, Rat Pack, everything. My argument? ‘Take The Dick Van Dyke Show’. Was that a “60’s” show? No way. But is was from 1960-1964. But it was totally 50’s.

THE SIXTIES.

Began above. Ended with the resignation of Nixon in August, 1974. Early 70’s? Kent State, Hanoi bombing, SLA terror, major protest, even Watergate…. All 60’s stuff. Music too.

THE SEVENTIES.

Began above. A short decade. Ended with the inauguration of Reagan, thank God.

THE EIGHTIES.

Began above. Ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. After that, the Gulf War, the Soviet collapse, all under Bush, but very 90’s.

THE NINETIES.

Began above, ended…… well, I would argue that it ended on election night, 2000. God Bless W., but it seems that a lot of weirdness began that day, and we are still living it big time.

Any arguments?

I'll call the 90's "The Bubble."

"The Bubble" was an imaginary world where war was obsolete, technology reigned supreme, everybody got rich, wages rose at unprecedented rates, AIDS and other diseases were losing to medical science, Real Estate prices skyrocketed, the stock market soared, and nobody, nobody could lose. It was as close to Utopia as we are likely to come.

And it was false. While we dreamed, crooks absconded with billions in fraudulent profits, from Iraq, to France, to Enron, to Tyco. Terrorists plotted and built their constituency and power base, and no one floating down the River Paradise saw the waterfall up ahead.

The longest peacetime expansion in history made us all believe it could, indeed it would last forever. It changed the baseline expectations to unreasonable levels. It was a house built on sand without a firm foundation which was brutally washed away beginning in March of 2000, and culminating on 9/11/2001.

It was a glorious dream. Its no wonder that many who still sleep do not want to wake, and those awake want to go back to sleep. It was reward without cost, freedom without responsibility. Reality sucks!

Scott

(I see manys similarities between the 20s and the 90s.) I think you've pretty much nailed it. I have only one thing to add to the beginning of the 60s...I believe the 60s began closer to 1965 after the introduction of the Beatles to American music fans and color TV took off. If you watch all those 50s and early 60s newscasts, all the guys were in dark suits and narrow ties and everything is in black and white in my memory. I watched the Kennedy horror on TV the entire 1963 Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

I left the country in early 1966 for 3 years in the UK. Long hair for men was just beginning to be the fashion in the US and American kids were starting to have sex (that probably started in 63 and 64) without apology (unless pregancy ensued). Other than that it still seemed pretty 60s. When I returned to the US in 1969, I was faced with a lot of talk of pot, anti-war rhetoric, Nixon hatred by young people, Timothy Leary and of course the fascinating Tate-LaBianca murders ala Charlie Manson. Society was turned on its ear and the 60s were in full sway. After spending a year or so in Haight Asbury, my best friend had become a follower of an Eastern Hindu guru named Baba and had been to India on a pilgrimage. Wow! a lot to take in for a naive young woman from Nebraska.

Let's boil all the previous comments down to one theme: The Seattlefication of America.

Andrew X, Scott Harris, and Jane M.: Thank you for your additional insights into this whole subject. I'm glad that everybody's talking about Seattle now. I like in Bellevue, which is a sort of suburb of Seattle. If people back east keep talking about Seattle, I won't have to keep saying "the state not the Death Star" when I mention that I live in Washington.

A couple more points on historical perspective:

1) "The Future" is relative. Back in 1965 or so, when I was in elementary school, there was a science fiction show "The Time Tunnel" which took place in the futuristic year 1968. As I recall, it was a secret project. If so, it must have been _very_ secret because the newspapers of 1968 never reported on it. Instead, throughout that year, they were reporting assassinations (Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King) and riots and the derailment of the Democratic party (from which that party has never recovered).

The year 2000 was looked forward to as The Future. When that year finally arrived, my brother and I joked "We're in The Future now!" There was also a constant debate as to whether the 21st century would begin in 2000 or 2001. Most of the "Jetsons"-style stuff hasn't come about, we still drive cars and walk on sidewalks and cook our own meals. But we have computers in our homes now which are more powerful than the old room-sized computers of my day, we have the Internet, and (what was not predicted back then) _blogs)_.

I must add that most of the predictions of what the 21st century would be like were based on the premise that we would be a thoroughly secular society in which religion would play hardly any role at all. How wrong they were. I say religion is, has always been, and will always be, the most powerful force in history, because it is the realm of ultimate values, of origin, meaning, and destiny. Never underestimate the power of religion, for good or for bad!

2) "The Past" is relative. If you're in a car or on a train, you may notice how nearby objects (people, buildings, etc.) seem to fly by quickly, while the mountains in the distance seem hardly to move at all. It's the same way with history.

We divide our own lives, and thus the history of our times, into periods of more or less 10 years (and/or by who is President). So, the 20th century is seen by us as radically different in each decade or so.

But we lump the histories of our ancestors into much larger periods of centuries and more. The Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Middle Ages -- these seem like single continuous blocks to us. Similarly, the Roman Empire, the age of Alexander, the age of Pericles, the age of Homer. Ancient Egypt to most people today seems to be one continuous unchanging entity , as still as the pyramids though it was thousands of years. (Historians divide Egypt's history roughly into Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms.)

To an Egyptian, however, each Pharaoh's reign would have been at least as significant as a Presidential term is to us. To an Egyptian or a Greek, our own history, which we perceive as changing momentously from decade to decade, would no doubt have seemed to be but one single unending succession of wars by barbarians armed with fantastic weapons.

I should mention that most people seem to think, having seen too many movies, that the pyramids of Egypt were build by the Hebrew slaves. The fact is that, by the time the Egyptians started conquering the Hebrews, the Nubians, and other foreign peoples, the pyramids were already thousands of years old, were as ancient to them by then as the Roman Empire is to us.

the things which leap out at me as being quintessentially "Nineties":

--on-line everything...it's almost unbelievable how the Internet has changed the ways people access information and interact.
--electronic dance music and the rise of "raves": check the background music on typical commercials these days...there's almost as much dance music featured as hip-hop or fifteen-year-old hit singles
--J.Peterman
--half-round metal eyeglass frames, often with plastic faux-tortoiseshell accents (the "Oughties" equivalent would be tiny oval-shaped frames)
--the final mainstreaming and neutralization, via "grunge," of the aesthetic of punk

more Nineties:

--the Nineties were the decade during which the imported car became a mainstream mom-'n'-pop option, to the point that imports started selling as much or more than domestics. if the 80's was the decade of the Chrysler Corporation "K-car," the 90's was the decade of the Toyota Corolla.

--what i like to call "fake comfort": "business casual," "casual Fridays," Dockers™ pants for men...

I guess a lot of younger people don't read this kind of stuff. But after wandering in, I decided to post the defining views of the '90s from a child's point of view.

2 in 1990
12 in 2000

Ninja Turtles
Power Rangers
Pogs
Pokemon cards
Chinese skipping
The internet
It became okay to begin a sentence with but or and
Boy bands
Spice Girls
Barbie Girl
Friends
Body piercing
Japanese anime
Pagan religions among teens
Skateboarding and snowboarding got big
Reality TV
Clinton
The degradation of Star Wars (read sequels)
Bell bottoms come back (and my mother laughs)

Obviously, there is the possibility of my perception being flawed. I have no memory of the eighties, therefore the differences up to now are my only base for comparison.

An interesting note on the 'Just Say No' campaign of early 1988 (year of my birth) is that it became my first word.