Tag: William Strauss
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Generation Archetypes
In my last post, I wrote about the saeculum and its four turnings (or seasons). Each turning has a collective "mood." What drives these moods is the configuration of generations alive during each turning. Drawing on the work of political theorists and historians dating as far back as the Greeks and the Old Testament, William…
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The Turnings
William Strauss and Neil Howe claim America has just entered the “Fourth Turning” of the fifth saeculum since the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Below is a chart showing the timeframes of each saeculum and the turnings within that saeculum. A key dynamic in Strauss and Howe’s theory is the oscillation of crises.…
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Introduction to Strauss and Howe
More than twenty years, I was in graduate school at Kansas State University, studying sociology and demography. There was considerable interest at the time in the Baby Boom generation. Landon Jones published his book Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation in the fall of 1980. The Baby Boom generation was named as such…
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History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but it Rhymes
What time is it? Ask that question; usually, someone will look at a watch and tell you what it reads. Actually, there are several valid answers to the question. How about daytime? Wintertime? Christmastime? Wartime? Downtime? Dinnertime? Tool-Time? (Okay. Maybe not the last one.) All these have in common that they mark some point in…