Last year I watched a couple of episodes of a French TV series that was set in late 1930s I believe. It was following (at least in the episodes I watched) an upper class French family where the father was the owner of an automobile factory (and a newspaper? although I might be confusing with another character this part) who is in financial dire straits and plans to marry his daughter to the heir of a rich family. He´s also nazi or fascist sympathizer and there seems to be a plot to control upcoming election results. Anyone can help?

I. Introduction: Consumption, Narcissism, and Mass Culture
Materialism and Mass Culture
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Those who take a hopeful view of recent cultural changes disagree among themselves about the difficulty of the “transition” ahead and about the nature of the society to which it is leading. The only thing that justifies treating them as a group is that all of them reject the diagnosis of our society as “narcissistic.” As Yankelovich puts it, the “American quest for self-fulfillment” cannot be reduced to the “pathology” of narcissistic personality disorders.” Narcissism “is not the essence of the recent American search for self-fulfillment.” “Far from being its defining characteristic, narcissism is a betrayal of it.”
The controversy about narcissism, which revives in a new form earlier controversies about mass culture and the American national character, raises important questions and helps to call attention to the connections between social and economic changes and changes in cultural and personal life. Nevertheless, much of it is deeply confused. For one thing, the concept of narcissism remains elusive and obscure, even though it appears eminently accessible. Those who object to the description of advanced industrial culture as a culture of narcissism do not understand very clearly what the description implies, while those who accept it all too quickly accept it as a journalistic slogan that merely restates moralistic platitudes in the jargon of psychoanalysis. Narcissism is a difficult idea that looks easy - a good recipe for confusion.
Another source of confusion is the persistence of certain preconceptions derived from the controversy that divided critics of “mass culture” in the fifties and sixties from celebrants of cultural democracy and pluralism. Recent attempts to reformulate this debate - to salvage what was useful in the critique of mass culture by detaching it from an ill-conceived defense of cultural modernism - have been misunderstood as attempts to revive earlier positions in their original form. I have suggested elsewhere that the phenomenon of mass culture, too often treated from the point of view of its impact on aesthetic standards, raises questions about technology, not about the level of public taste. Advanced technologies of communication, which seems merely to facilitate the dissemination of information on a wider scale than was possible before, prove on closer examination to impede the circulation of ideas and to concentrate control over information in a handful of giant organizations. Modern technology has the same effect on culture that it has on production, where it serves to assert managerial control over the labor force. The study of mass culture that it has on production, where it serves to assert managerial control over the labor force. The study of mass culture thus leads to the same conclusion prompted by a study of the mechanization of the workplace: that much advanced technology embodies by design (in both senses of the word) a one-way system of management and communication. It concentrates economic and political control - and, increasingly, cultural control as well - in a small elite of corporate planners, market analysts, and social engineers. It invites popular “input” or “feedback” only in the form of suggestion boxes, market surveys, and public opinion polls. Technology thus comes to serve as an effective instrument of social control - in the case of mass media, by short-circuiting the electoral process through opinion surveys that help to shape opinion instead of merely recording it, by reserving to the media themselves the right to select political leaders and “spokesmen,” and by presenting the choice of leaders and parties as a choice among consumer goods.
This interpretation of mass culture and advanced technology may be wrong, but it is a different argument from the old accusation that mass culture lowers public taste or from the Marxist version of this accusation, according to which mass culture brainwashes the workers and keeps them in a state of “false consciousness.” Yet the terms of the earlier debate remain so coercive that new arguments are immediately assimilated to old ones. Criticism of the narcissistic elements in our culture strikes many observers as a lament for the “morally tuned, well-crafted self,” in the words of Peter Clecak. It is not my position, however, as Herbert Gans tries to summarize it, that “if commercial popular culture were eliminated, workers could and would become intellectuals.” Why should workers become intellectuals? I find it hard to imagine a less attractive prospect than a society made up of intellectuals. What is important is that working men and women have more control over their work. It is also important for intellectuals and workers alike to see that this question of control is not just a political or an economic question but a cultural question as well.
Mass Production and Mass Consumption
Still another source of confusion, in recent controversies about contemporary culture, is the failure to distinguish a moralistic indictment of “consumerism” - typified by Carter’s complaint about the obsession with “owning things, consuming things” - from an analysis that understands mass consumption as part of a larger pattern of dependence, disorientation, and loss of control. Instead of thinking of consumption as the antithesis of labor, as if the two activities called for completely different mental and emotional qualities, we need to see them as two sides of the same process. The social arrangements that support a system of mass production and mass consumption tend to discourage initiative and self-reliance and to promote dependence, passivity, and a spectatorial state of mind both at work and at play. Consumerism is only the other side of the degradation of work - the elimination of playfulness and craftsmanship from the process of production.
In the United States, a consumer culture began to emerge in the twenties, but only after the corporate transformation of industry had institutionalized the division of labor that runs all through modern industrial society, the division between brain work and manual labor: between the design and the execution of production. Under the banner of scientific management, capitalists expropriated the technical knowledge formerly exercised by workers, reformulated it as science, and vested its control in a new managerial elite. The managers extended their power not at the expense of the workers. Nor did the eventual triumph of industrial unionism break this pattern of managerial control. By the 1930s, even the most militant unions had acquiesced in the division of labor between the planning and execution of work. Indeed the very success of the union movement was predicated on a strategic retreat from issues of worker control. Unionization, moreover, helped to stabilize and rationalize the labor market and to discipline the work force. It did not alter the arrangement whereby management controls the technology of production, the rhythm of work, and the location of plants (even when these decisions affect whole communities), leaving the worker with the task merely of carrying out orders.
Having organized mass production on the basis of new division of labor, most fully realized in the assembly line, the leaders of American industry turned to the organization of a mass market. The mobilization of consumer demand, together with the recruitment of a labor force, required a far-reaching series of cultural changes. People had to be discouraged from providing for their own wants and resocialized as consumers. Industrialism by its very nature tends to discourage homo production and to make people dependent on the market, but a vast effort of reeducation, starting in the 1920s, had to be undertaken before Americans accepted consumption as a way of life. As Emma Rothschild has shown in her study of the automobile Industry, Alfred Sloan’s innovations in marketing - the annual model change, constant upgrading of the product, efforts to associate it with social status, the deliberation inculcation of a boundless appetite for change - constituted the necessary counterpart of Henry Ford’s innovations in production. Modern industry came to rest on the twin pillars of Fordism and Sloanism. Both tended to discourage enterprise and independent thinking and to make the individual distrust his own judgment, even in matters of taste. His own untutored preferences, it appeared, might lag behind current fashion; they too needed to be periodically upgraded.
The Fantastic World of Commodities
The psychological effects of consumerism can be grasped only when consumption is understood as another phase of the industrial work routine. The repeated experience of uneasy self-scrutiny, of submission to expert judgment, of distrust of their own capacity to make intelligent decisions, either as producers or as consumers, colors people’s perceptions both of themselves and of the world around them. It encourages a new kind of self-consciousness that has little in common with introspection or vanity. Both as a worker and as a consumer, the individual learns not merely to measure himself against others but to see himself through others’ eyes. He learns that the self-image he projects counts for more than accumulated skills and experience. Since he will be judged, both by his colleagues and superiors at work and by the strangers he encounters on the street, according to his possessions, his clothes, and his “personality” - not, as in the nineteenth century, by his “character” - he adopts a theatrical view of his own “performance” on and off the job. Outright incompetence, of course, still weighs heavily against him at work, just as his actions as a friend and neighbor often outweigh his skill in managing impressions. But the conditions of everyday social intercourse, in societies based on mass production and mass consumption, encourage an unprecedented attention to superficial impressions and images, to the point where the self becomes almost indistinguishable from its surface. Selfhood and personal identity become problematic in such societies, as we can easily see from the outpouring of psychiatric and sociological commentary on these subjects. When people complain of feeling inauthentic or rebel against “role-playing,” they testify to the prevailing pressure to see themselves with the eyes of strangers and to shape the self as another commodity offered up for consumption on the open market.
Commodity production and consumerism alter perceptions not just of the self but of the world outside the self. They create a world of mirrors, insubstantial images, illusions increasingly indistinguishable from reality. The mirror effect makes the subject an object; at the same time, it makes the world of objects an extension or projection of the self. It is misleading to characterize the culture of consumption as a culture dominated by things. The consumer lives surrounded not so much by things as by fantasies. He lives in a world that has no objective or independent existence and seems to exist only to gratify or thwart his desires.
This insubstantiality of the external world arises out of the very nature of commodity production, not out of some character flaw in individuals, some excess of greed or “materialism.” Commodities are produced for immediate consumption. Their value lies not in their usefulness of or permanence but in their marketability. They wear out even if they are not used, since they are designed to be superseded by “new and improved” products, changing fashions, and technological innovations. Thus the current “state of the art” in tape recorders, record players, and stereophonic speakers makes earlier models worthless (except as antiques), even if they continue to perform the tasks for which they were designed, just as a change in women’s fashions dictates a complete change of wardrobe. Articles produced for use, on the other hand, without regard to their marketability, wear out only when they are literally used up. “It is this durability,” Hannah Arendt once observed, “that gives the things of the world their relative independence from men who produced and use them, their ‘objectivity’ which makes them withstand, ‘stand against’ and endure, at least for a time, the voracious needs and wants of their living makers and users. From this viewpoint, the things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life, and their objectivity lies in the fact that … men, their everchanging nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table.”
The changing meaning of “identity” illuminates the connection between changing perceptions of the self and changing perceptions of the outside world. As used in common speech, identity still retains its former connotation of sameness and continuity: “the sameness of a person or thing at all times or in all circumstances,” in the language of the Oxford English Dictionary, “the condition or fact that a person or thing is itself and not something else; individuality, personality.” In the 1950s, however, the term came to be used by psychiatrists and sociologists to refer to a fluid, protean, and problematical self, “socially bestowed and socially sustained,” in the words of Peter L. Berger, and defined either by the social roles an individual performs, the “reference group” to which he belongs, or, on the other hand, by the deliberate management of impressions or “presentation of self,” in Erving Goffman’s phrase. The psychosocial meaning of identity, which has itself passed into common usage, weakens or eliminates altogether the association between identity and “continuity of the personality.” It also excludes the possibility that identity is defined largely through a person’s actions and the public record of those actions. In its new meaning, the term registers the waning of the old sense of a life as a life-history or narrative - a way of understanding identity that depended on the the belief in a durable public world, reassuring in its solidity, which outlasts an individual life and passes some sort of judgment on it. Note that the older meaning of identity refers both to persons and to things. Both have lost their solidity in modern society, their definiteness and continuity. Identity has become uncertain and problematical not because people no longer occupy fixed social stations - a commonplace explanation that unthinkingly incorporates the modern equation of identity and social role - but because they no longer inhabit a world that exists independently of themselves.
Now that the public or common world has receded into the shadows, we can see more clearly than before the extent of our need for it. For a long time, this need was forgotten in the initial exhilaration that accompanied the discovery of the fully developed interior life, a life liberated at last from the prying eyes of neighbors, from village prejudices, from the inquisitorial presence of elders, from everything narrow, stifling, petty, and conventional. But now it is possible to see that the collapse of our common life has impoverished private life as well. It has freed the imagination from external constraints but exposed it more directly than before to the tyranny of inner compulsions and anxieties. Fantasy ceases to be liberating when it frees itself from the checks imposed by practical experience of the world. Instead it gives rise to hallucinations; and the progress of scientific knowledge, which might be expected to discourage the projection of our inner hopes and fears onto the world around us, leaves these hallucinations undisturbed. Science has not fulfilled the hope that it would replace discredited metaphysical traditions with a coherent explanation of the world and of man’s place in it. Science cannot tell people, and at its best does not pretend to tell people, how to live or how to organize a good society. Nor does science offer the same check to the otherwise unrestrained imagination that is offered by practical experience of the world. It does not recreate a public world. Indeed it heightens the prevailing sense of unreality by giving men the power to achieve their wildest flights of fantasy. By holding out a vision of limitless technological possibilities - space travel, biological engineering, mass destruction - it removes the last obstacle to wishful thinking. It brings reality into conformity with our dreams, or rather with our nightmares.
A culture organized around mass consumption encourages narcissism - which we can define, for the moment, as a disposition to see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one’s own fears and desires - not because it makes people grasping and self-assertive but because it makes them weak and dependent. It undermines their confidence in their capacity to understand and shape the world and to provide for their own needs. The consumer feels that he lives in a world that defies practical understanding and control, a world of giant bureaucracies, “information overload,” and complex, interlocking technological systems vulnerable to sudden breakdown, like the giant power failure that blacked out the Northeast in 1965 or the radiation leak at Three Mile Island in 1979.
The consumer’s complete dependence on these intricate, supremely sophisticated life-support systems, and more generally on externally provided goods and services, recreates some of the infantile feelings of helplessness. If nineteenth-century bourgeois culture reinforced anal patterns of behavior - hoarding of money and pullies, control of bodily functions, control of affect - the twentieth-century culture of mass consumptions recreates oral patterns rooted in an even earlier stage of emotional development, when the infant was completely dependent on the breast. The consumer experiences his surroundings as a kind of extension of the breast, alternately gratifying and frustrating. He finds it hard to conceive of the world except in connection with his fantasies. Partly because the propaganda surrounding commodities advertises them so seductively as wish-fulfillments, but also because commodity production by its very nature replaces the world of durable objects with disposable products designed for immediate obsolescence, the consumer confronts the world as a reflection of his wishes and fears. He knows the world, moreover, largely through insubstantial images and symbols that seem to refer not so much to a palpable, solid, and durable reality as to his inner psychic life, itself experienced not as an abiding sense of self but as reflections glimpsed in the mirror of his surroundings.
Consumption and Mass Culture
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According to this view of the “modernization” process, it is the very abundance of choices to which people are now exposed that underlies the malaise of modern man. “Where complex alternatives are available in a society,” in the words of Fred Weinstein and Gerald Platt, “it becomes necessary for the individual to direct his own existence without traditional supports, i.e., without class, ethnic, or kindship ties.” The need to make choices among a growing range of alternatives gives rise to “persistent feelings of discontent.”
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The pluralist conception of freedom rests on the same protean sense of the self that finds popular expression in such panaceas as “open marriage” and “nonbinding commitments.” Both originate in the culture of consumption. A society of consumers defines choice not as the freedom to choose one course of action over another but as the freedom to choose everything at once. “Freedom of choice” means “keeping your options open.” The idea that “you can be anything you want,” though it preserves something of the older idea of the career open to talents, has come to mean that identities can be adopted and discarded like a change of costume. Ideally, choices of friends, lovers, and careers should all be subject to immediate cancellation: such is the open-ended, experimental conception of the good life upheld by the propaganda of commodities, which surrounds the consumer with images of unlimited possibility. But if choice no longer implies commitments and consequences - as making love formerly carried important “consequences,” for instance, especially for women - the freedom to choose amounts in practice to an abstention from choice. Unless the idea of choice carries with it the possibility of making a difference, of changing the course of events, of setting in motion a chain of events that may prove irreversible, it negates the freedom it claims to uphold. Freedom comes down to the freedom to choose between Brand X and Brand Y, between interchangeable lovers, interchangeable jobs, interchangeable neighborhoods. Pluralist ideology provides an accurate reflection of the traffic in commodities, where ostensibly competing products become increasingly indistinguishable and have to be promoted, therefore, by means of advertising that seeks to create the illusion of variety and to present these products as revolutionary breakthroughs…
Industrial Technology, Mass Culture, and Democracy
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Since both parties to this debate agree that “modernization” leads to the democratization of society and culture, the difference between them comes down to the issue of
As for the new “narcissism” and the “culture of selfishness,” they can be dismissed as “excesses,” “unavoidable byproducts,” “troubling side effects” of social and economic progress - “extreme instances of more salutary trends.” Intellectuals who see only the negative side of progress see American society through a framework of nostalgia. According to Wachtel, critics of contemporary narcissism obscure the “valuable features of the search for person fulfillment” by “tarring them with the same brush used to describe severe psychopathology.” “To gauge American character by means of a rising index of selfishness,” Clecak argues, “seems to me as unprofitable as assessing progress in cardiac surgery during the sixties and seventies by counting the number of patients who die in operating rooms.”
In the form in which it has been conducted now for the last forty years, the debate about what used to be called mass culture and is now called narcissism can never be resolved. The debate has turned on the controlling conception of cultural change as a balance sheet, in which material gains offset cultural losses. It turns on the question of whether material progress exacts too heady a price in the loss of cultural “excellence.” But who is to say whether the gains of social and economic democracy outweighs its cultural “side effects”?
Suppose the question is misconceived. What if we reject the premise behind this whole discussion, that industrialism fosters political and economic progress? What if we reject the equation of industrialism with democracy and start instead from the premise that large-scale industrial production undermines local institutions of self-government, weakens the party system, and discourages popular initiative? In that case, cultural analysis can no longer content itself with balancing the social and political gains allegedly attendant on indifferent on industrial progress against cultural losses. It will have to decide instead whether the invasion of culture and personal life by the modern industrial system produces the same effects that it produces in the social and political realm: a loss of autonomy and popular control, a tendency to confuse self-determination with the exercise of consumer choices, a growing ascendance of elites, the replacement of practical skills with organized expertise.
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The point is that modern surgery, taken as a whole, has done very little, if anything, to improve the general level of health and physical well-being or even to prolong life. All medical technology has done is to increase patients’ dependence on machines and the medical experts who operate these “life-support systems.” The development of modern technology, not only in medicine but in other fields as well, has improved human control over the physical environment only in a very superficial way, by enabling scientists to make short-term modifications of nature, of which the long-term effects are incalculable. Meanwhile it has concentrated this control in a small elite of technicians and administrators.
Modern technology and mass production have been defended, like mass culture, on the grounds that although they may have taken some of the charm out of life, they have added immeasurably to the comforts enjoyed by ordinary men and women. “I have no quarrel with tradition,” Gans writes. “I am in favor of washing machines over washboards, and over river banks, however.” But it is precisely the democratizing effects of industrial technology that can no longer be taken for granted. If this technology reduces some of the drudgery of housekeeping, it also renders the housekeeper dependent on machinery - not merely the automatic washer and dryer but the elaborate energy system required to run these and innumerable other appliances - the breakdown of which brings housekeeping to a halt. As we have seen, modern technology undermines the self-reliance and autonomy both of workers and consumers. It expands man’s collective control over his environment at the expense of individual control; and even this collective control, as ecologists have pointed out again and again, is beginning to prove illusory as human intervention threatens to provoke unexpected responses from nature, including changes in climate, depletion of the ozone layer, and the exhaustion of natural resources. Nor can it be argued that advanced technology expands the range of options. Whatever its power to create new options in theory, in practice industrial technology has developed according to the principle of radical monopoly, as Ivan Illich calls it, whereby new technologies effectively eliminate older technologies even when the old ones remain demonstrably more efficient for many purposes. Thus the automobile did not simply add another form of transportation to existing forms; it achieved its preeminence at the expense of canals, railways, streetcars, and horse-drawn carriages, thereby forcing the population to depend almost exclusively on automotive transport even for those purposes for which it is obviously unsuited, such as commuting back and forth to work.
Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to a widespread feeling of powerlessness and victimization. The proliferation of protest groups, seen as an assertion of “personhood” in the arguments advanced by Clecak, Gans, and other pluralists, actually arises out of a feeling that other people are controlling our lives. The dominant imagery associated with political protest in the sixties, seventies, and eighties is not the imagery of “personhood,” not even the therapeutic imagery of self-actualization, but the imagery of victimization and paranoia, of being manipulated, invaded, colonized, and inhabited by alien forces. Angry citizens who find themselves living near poisonous chemical dumps or nuclear power plants, neighbors who band together to keep out schools for retarded children or low-income housing or nursing homes, angry taxpayers, opponents of abortion, opponents of busing, and minority groups all see themselves, for different reasons, as victims of policies over which they have no control. They see themselves as victims not only of bureaucracy, big government, and unpredictable technologies but also, in many cases, of high-level plots and conspiracies involving organized crime, intelligence agencies, and politicians at the upper reaches of government. Side by side with the official myth of a beleaguered government threatened by by riots, demonstrations, and unmotivated, irrational assassinations of public figures, a popular mythology has taken shape that sees government as a conspiracy against the people themselves.
The Decline of Authority
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The decline of authority is a good example of the kind of change that promotes the appearance of democracy without its substance. It is part of a shift to a manipulative, therapeutic, “pluralistic,” and “nonjudgmental” style of social discipline that originated, like so many other developments, with the rise of a professional and managerial class in the early years of the twentieth century and then spread from the industrial corporation, where it was first perfected, into the political realm as a whole. As we have seen, managerial control of the work force created a passive work force, excluded from decisions about the design and execution of production. Passivity, however, created new problems of labor discipline and social control - problems of “morale,” of “motivation,” of the “human factor,” as they were known to the industrial sociologists and industrial psychologists who began to appear in the twenties. According to these professional students of “human relations,” modern industry had created a feeling of drift, uncertainty, anomie: the worker lacked a sense of “belonging.” Problems of labor discipline and “manpower recruitment” demanded an extension of the cultural reforms already inaugurated by the rise of mass marketing. Indeed the promotion of consumption as a way of life came to be seen as itself a means of easing industrial unrest. But the conversion of the worker into a consumer of therapies designed to ease his “adjustment” to the realities of industrial life. Experiments carried out at Western Electric by Elton Mayo and his colleagues at the Harvard Business School - the famous Hawthorne studies - showed how complaints about low wages and excessive supervision could be neutralized by psychiatric counseling and observation. Mayo and his colleagues found, or claimed to find, that changes in physical conditions of work, wage incentives, and other material considerations had little influence on industrial productivity. The workers under observation increased their output simply because they had become the object of professional attention and for the first time felt as if someone cared about their work. Interviews instituted with the intention of eliciting complaints about the quality of supervision, which might in turn have enabled management to improve supervisory techniques, turned up instead subjective and intensely emotional grievances having little relation to the objective conditions of work.
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“Selfishness” or Survivalism?
In its liberal use of labels, its addiction to slogans, its reduction of cultural change to simplified sets of opposite characteristics, and its conviction that reality is an illusion, this simpleminded case for “cultural revolution” betrays its affinity with the consumerism it claims to repudiate. The most glaring weakness of this argument, however - and of the whole debate in which it is immersed - is the equation of narcissism with “selfishness of an extreme form,” in the words of Daniel Yankelovich. The terms have little in common. Narcissism signifies a loss of selfhood, not self-assertion. It refers to a self threatened with disintegration and by a sense of inner emptiness. To avoid confusion, what I have called the culture of narcissism might better be characterized as a culture of survivalism. Everyday life has begun to pattern itself on the survival strategies forced on those exposed to extreme adversity. Selective apathy, emotional disengagement from others, renunciation of the past and the future, a determination to live one day at a time - these techniques of emotional self-management, necessarily carried to extremes under extreme conditions, in more moderate form have come to shape the lives of ordinary people under the ordinary conditions of a bureaucratic society widely perceived as a far-flung system of total control.
Confronted with an apparently implacable and unmanageable environment, people have turned to self-management <““Freedom in thought has only pure thought as its truth, a truth lacking the fullness of life. Hence freedom in thought, too, is only the notion of freedom, not the living reality of freedom itself.” Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit>. With the help of an elaborate network of therapeutic professions, which themselves have largely abandoned approaches stressing introspective insight in favor of “coping” and behavior modification, men and women today are trying to piece together a technology of the self, the only apparent alternative to personal collapse. Among many people, the fear that man will be enslaved by his machines has given way to a hope that man will become something like a machine in his own right and thereby achieve a state of mind “beyond freedom and dignity,” in the words of B.F. Skinner. Behind the injunction to “get in touch with your feelings” - a remnant of an earlier “depth” psychology” - lies the now-familiar insistence that there is no depth, no desire even, and that the human personality is merely a collection of needs programmed either by biology or by culture.
We are not likely to get any closer to an understanding of contemporary culture as long as we define the poles of debate as selfishness and self-absorption, on the one hand, and self-fulfillment or introspection on the other. According to Peter Clecak, selfishness is the “deficit side” of cultural liberation - an “unavoidable byproduct of the quest for fulfillment.” It is a part of contemporary culture that must not be confused with the whole. “Though they are plausible to a degree, characterizations of America as a selfish culture typically confuse excesses with norms, by-products with central and on the whole salutary outcomes of the quest” for self-fulfillment. But the question is not whether the salutary effects of “personhood” outweigh hedonism and self-seeking. The question is whether any of these terms capture either the prevailing patterns of psychological relations or the prevailing definition of selfhood.
The dominant conception of personality sees the self as a helpless victim of external circumstances. This is the view encouraged both by our twentieth-century experience of domination and by the many varieties of twentieth-century social thought that reach their climax in behaviorism. It is not a view likely to encourage either a revival of old-fashioned acquisitive individualism (which presupposed far more confidence about the future than most people have today) or the kind of search for self-fulfillment celebrated by Clecak, Yankelovich, and other optimists. A genuine affirmation of the self, after all, insists on a core of selfhood not subject to environmental determination, even under extreme conditions. Self-affirmation remains a possibility precisely to the degree that an older conception of personality, rooted in Judaeo-Christian traditions, has persisted alongside a behavioral or therapeutic conception. But this kind of self-affirmation, which remains a potential source of democratic renewal, has nothing in common with the current search for psychic survival - the varieties of which we must now examine in some detail.

I've recently been reading a book by Jane Jacobs. Her work predates the NIMBY and environmental movements of the '70s, and at that time, urban sprawl hadn't yet caused housing shortages. Therefore, she wasn't really focusing on "how to provide places for people to live," but rather on "how to promote social interaction." Initially, I thought "walkability" merely referred to having life's amenities within walking distance, such as a town center or the British concept of a high street. However, I didn't expect Jacobs to emphasize that every street you live on must have destinations that attract strangers.I think "walkability" is quite misleading. Streets are primarily for people to traverse between starting points and destinations, being easy to walk or bike on should suffice. Does every street really need to be turned into a theme park or shopping mall to satisfy Mrs. Jacobs?
Even in the Netherlands, renowned for urbanism, the most common type of housing is the terraced house. She definitely reject the so-called "missing middle" like terraced house: "Between ten and twenty dwellings to the acre yields a kind of semisuburb … However densities of this kind bringing a city are a bad long-term bet, designed to become a grey area." Moreover, her accusations against suburbanization are only partially valid (for instance, I completely agree that forcibly taking working-class homes to build highways is despicable). Ignoring that some projects towers in a park are housing cooperatives, which are clearly voluntary and grassroots like Penn South and co-op city, the major world cities were already rapidly suburbanizing before World War II, such as London in the 1930s.
This expansion was unrelated to automobiles, as even after cars became popular in the 1930s, the British council estates built post-World War I hardly planned for parking spaces(e.g. Becontree for WWI veterans).

Resurrection Mary is a well-known Chicago area ghost story of the "vanishing hitchhiker" type. According to the story, the ghost resides in Resurrection Cemetery in Justice, Ilinois, a few miles southwest of Chicago. Resurrection Mary is considered to be Chicago's most famous ghost.
Since the 1930s, several men driving northeast along Archer Avenue between the Willowbrook Ballroom and Resurrection Cemetery have reported picking up a young female hitchhiker. This young woman is dressed somewhat formally in a white party dress and is said to have light blond hair and blue eyes. There are other reports that she wears a thin shawl, dancing shoes, carries a small clutch purse, and possibly that she is very quiet. When the driver nears the Resurrection Cemetery, the young woman asks to be let out, whereupon she disappears into the cemetery.
The story goes that Mary had spent the evening dancing with a boyfriend at the Oh Henry Ballroom. At some point, they got into an argument and Mary stormed out.
She left the ballroom and started walking up Archer Avenue. She had not gotten very far when she was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver, who fled the scene leaving Mary to die. Her parents found her and were grief-stricken at the sight of her dead body. They buried her in Resurrection Cemetery, wearing a beautiful white dancing dress and matching dancing shoes. The hit-and-run driver was never found.
Some researchers have attempted to link Resurrection Mary to one of the many thousands of burials in Resurrection Cemetery. A particular focus of these efforts has been Mary Bregovy, who died in 1934, although her death came in an automobile accident in the downtown Chicago Loop. Chicago author Ursula Bielski in 1999 documented a possible connection to Anna "Marija" Norkus, who died in a 1927 auto accident while on her way home from the Oh Henry Ballroom, a theory which has gained popularity in recent years.

In January of 1905, Chico saw the opening of an electric streetcar line; the Chico Electric Railway. Before the year's end, the railroad was sold and became the Northern Electric Railway. The new company expanded service to Oroville by 1906, then Downtown Sacramento in 1907. Having connected to the state capitol, the Northern Electric expanded outward to Colusa, Woodland, Vacaville, and Fairfield. The Northern Electric had managed to build out 157 miles of railroad by 1914, all electric.
The Northern Electric was facing financial difficulties by this time and was reorganized into the Sacramento Northern Railway. By this time, the length of the system had caused it to have two uses: urban and interurban travel. Express trains ran from central stations in the towns and villages along the railway into the downtown core of Sacramento, while local services operated within the towns and their outer-lying areas. From large stations at the heart of towns and cities to flag-stops like Rio Linda, the system provided transit and freight service across the northern end of the Central Valley while also connecting to the Central California Traction Company which offered service to Stockton.
Western Pacific then acquired the Sacramento Northern in 1922. In 1927, Western Pacific purchased another NorCal interurban railway; the San Francisco-Sacramento Railway, which ran from Oakland to Pittsburg. The two systems began the process of intertwining which was completed in 1929. While a railroad bridge was planned between Pittsburg and Rio Vista, it would never be built. Instead, trains were driven onto a ferry called Ramon and shipped across the Delta. Service extended from Chico to Oakland until 1939 when service was extended to San Francisco via newly opened the Bay Bridge.
But soon after the system reached it's maximum extent, it began truncating passenger service. The Sacramento Northern experienced difficulties for a few different reasons. Intercity rail-travel had become dominated by faster trains which ran on fully grade-separated tracks, whereas the Sacramento Northern was still surface running its trains which necessitated slower speeds. The lack of a bridge crossing the Delta also became a problem when the Martinez-Benicia railroad bridge was opened in 1930. This bridge allowed other train services to bypass the step of loading and unloading trains onto a ferry to cross the Delta, a timesaver the Sacramento Northern lacked. Another thing the Sacramento Northern lacked was a unified power system. The trains used a combination of overhead wires and electric third-rail to power the trains. This dual-system increased maintenance costs on both the trains and the track infrastructure.
Time conscious travelers increasingly had another option as well, the automobile. Throughout the 1930s, the state drastically expanded its highway system with newly paved roads. Many of these routes paralleled the Sacramento Northern Railway and bus companies began to offer services along these routes while private motorists were able to drive themselves. These forces combined to turn the railway unprofitable. In 1941, the Sacramento Northern cut all passenger service and began to de-electrify the railroad in a successful attempt to stave off complete collapse. Freight service would continue via diesel trains until 1983, the year that Union Pacific acquired the Sacramento Northern and its parent company, Western Pacific. Union Pacific consolidated freight service and fully abandoned the Sacramento Northern label, ripping up much of the system.
Today, the old rights-of-way for the system have seen a number of uses. Much of the system ran on street-level, and these portions near-universally saw the tracks ripped up or torn out. Several sections were integrated into the rest of Union Pacific's network. Other sections have been converted into rail trails such as the Sacramento Northern Bike Trail which runs from Sacramento to Elverta through Rio Linda. The portion of the system in the Bay Area was converted into BART's Yellow line.
The Sacramento Northern Railway offers a few lessons. We can learn from the failures of the railway to determine how not to run a such a system. Had the SNR employed a standardized electrification scheme its maintenance costs would've fallen. Full grade separation for inter-urban routes would've decreased travel times and may have increased passenger numbers. Combined, these two changes could've brought the SNR into financial solvency. It is worth noting that the SNR had to fund all of its infrastructure on its own. In contrast, the bus companies which out-competed the SNR drove entirely on state-funded roads. This amounted to a hefty subsidy for the bus companies, and private motorists, while no such benefit was given to the railway. We should always consider what we subsidize and what we don't.
The Sacramento Northern Railway also offers inspiration. Sacramento, and much of the northern Central Valley, once had a fully electric mass transit system. A system that spanned 183 miles! If we did it once, we can do it again. We could rebuilt it, but better; with higher speeds and unified infrastructure. If we chose, we could regain train service from Chico to Fairfield, and the cities in between.

Good evening. Good evening. If I were smart, I would go home now.
Mr. Speaker, Madam Vice President, members of Congress, my fellow Americans, in January 1941, Franklin Roosevelt came to this chamber to speak to the nation, and he said, “I address you in a moment, unprecedented in the history of the union.”
Hitler was on the march. War was raging in Europe. President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary time. Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world.
Tonight, I come to the same chamber to address the nation. Now, it’s we who face unprecedented moment in the history of the union. And yes, my purpose tonight is to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment either. Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today.
What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack both at home and overseas at the very same time. Overseas, Putin of Russia is on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond. If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not.
But Ukraine, Ukraine can stop Putin. Ukraine can stop Putin, if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons they need to defend itself. That is all — that is all Ukraine is asking. They’re not asking for American soldiers. In fact, there are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine, and I’m determined to keep it that way.
But now, assistance to Ukraine is being blocked by those who want to walk away from our world leadership. Wasn’t long ago when a Republican president named Ronald Reagan thundered, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
Now, now my predecessor, a former Republican president, tells Putin, quote, do whatever the hell you want. That’s a quote. A former president actually said that, bowing down to a Russian leader. I think it’s outrageous, it’s dangerous, and it’s unacceptable.
America is a founding member of NATO, the military alliance of democratic nations created after World War II to prevent, to prevent war and keep the peace.
And today, we’ve made NATO stronger than ever. We welcomed Finland to the alliance last year, and just this morning, Sweden officially joined, and their minister is here tonight. Stand up. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome. And they know how to fight.
Mr. Prime Minister, welcome to NATO, the strongest military alliance the world has ever seen.
I say this to Congress: We have to stand up to Putin. Send me a bipartisan national security bill. History is literally watching. History is watching. If the United States walks away, it will put Ukraine at risk. Europe is at risk. The free world will be at risk, emboldening others to what they wish to do us harm.
My message to President Putin, who I have known for a long time, is simple: We will not walk away. We will not bow down. I will not bow down.
In a literal sense, history is watching. History is watching. Just like history watched three years ago on Jan. 6, when insurrectionists stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger to the throat of American democracy.
Many of you were here on that darkest of days. We all saw with our own eyes. The insurrectionists were not patriots. They had come to stop the peaceful transfer of power, to overturn the will of the people.
Jan. 6 lies about the 2020 election, and the plots to steal the election, posed a great, gravest threat to U.S. democracy since the Civil War.
But they failed. America stood. America stood strong and democracy prevailed.
We must be honest. The threat to democracy must be defended. My predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth about Jan. 6.
I will not do that.
This is a moment to speak the truth and to bury the lies. Here’s the simple truth: You can’t love your country only when you win.
As I’ve done ever since being elected to office, I ask all of you, without regard to party, to join together and defend democracy. Remember your oath of office and defend against all threats foreign and domestic.
Respect free and fair elections. Restore trust in our institutions. And make clear — political violence has absolutely no place, no place in America. Zero place.
Again, it’s not, it’s not hyperbole to suggest history is watching. We’re watching. Your children, your grandchildren will read about this day and what we do.
History is watching another assault on freedom.
Joining us tonight is Latorya Beasley, a social worker from Birmingham, Ala. Fourteen months, 14 months ago, she and her husband welcomed a baby girl thanks to the miracle of I.V.F.
She scheduled treatments to have that second child, but the Alabama Supreme Court shut down I.V.F. treatments across the state, unleashed by a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
She was told her dream would have to wait. What her family got through should never have happened. Unless Congress acts, it could happen again, so tonight, let’s stand up for families like hers.
To my friends across the aisle, don’t keep this waiting any longer. Guarantee the right to I.V.F. Guarantee it nationwide.
Like most Americans, I believe Roe v. Wade got it right. I thank Vice President Harris for being an incredible leader, defending reproductive freedom and so much more.
But my predecessor came to office determined to see Roe v. Wade overturned. He’s the reason it was overturned. And he brags about it. Look at the chaos that has resulted.
Joining us tonight is Kate Cox, a wife and mother from Dallas. She’d become pregnant again, and had a fetus with a fatal condition. Her doctor told Kate that her own life and her ability to have children in the future were at risk if she didn’t act.
Because Texas law banned her ability to act, Kate and her husband had to leave the state to get the what she needed. What her family got through should have never happened as well. But it is happening to too many others.
There are state laws banning the freedom to choose, criminalizing doctors, forcing survivors of rape and incest to leave their states to get the treatment they need.
Many of you in this chamber and my predecessor are promising to pass a national ban on reproductive freedom. My God, what freedom else would you take away?
Look, in its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court majority wrote the following, and with all due respect justices, “Women are not without electoral, electoral power” — excuse me — “electoral or political power.” You’re about to realize just how much you got right about that.
Clearly, clearly, those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women. But they found out when reproductive freedom was on the ballot. We won in 2022 and 2023, and we will win again in 2024.
If you, the American people, send me a Congress that supports the right to choose, I promise you, I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.
Folks, America cannot go back. I am here tonight to show what I believe the way forward. Because I know how far we’ve come. Four years ago next week, before I came to office, the country was hit by the worst pandemic and the worst economic crisis in a century.
Remember the fear, record losses. Remember the spikes in crime and the murder rate, raging virus that took more than one million American lives of loved ones, millions left behind, a mental health crisis of isolation and loneliness.
A president, my predecessor, failed the most basic presidential duty that he owes to American people: the duty to care. I think that’s unforgivable.
I came to office determined to get us through one of the toughest periods in the nation’s history. We have. It doesn’t make new, news — in a thousand cities and towns, the American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told.
So let’s tell the story here. Tell it here and now.
America’s comeback is building a future of American possibilities, building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down, investing in all America, in all Americans, to make sure everyone has a fair shot and we leave no one, no one behind.
The pandemic no longer controls our lives. The vaccines that saved us from Covid are now being used to beat cancer.
Turning setback into comeback — that’s what America does. That’s what America does.
Folks, I inherited an economy that was on the brink. Now our economy is literally the envy of the world. Fifteen million new jobs in just three years — a record, a record. Unemployment at 50-year lows. A record 16 million Americans are starting small businesses, and each one is a literal act of hope.
With historic job growth and small business growth for Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans, 800,000 new manufacturing jobs in America and counting.
Where is it written that we can’t be the manufacturing capital of the world? We are. We will.
More people have health insurance today; more people have health insurance today than ever before. The racial wealth gap is the smallest it’s been in 20 years.
Wages keep going up. Inflation keeps coming down. Inflation has dropped from 9 percent to 3 percent — the lowest in the world and trending lower. The landing is and will be soft.
And now instead of importing, importing foreign products and exporting American jobs, we’re exporting American products and creating American jobs — right here in America where they belong.
And it takes time, but the American people are beginning to feel it. Consumer studies show consumer confidence is soaring.
“Buy America” has been the law of the land since the 1930s. Past administrations including my predecessor, including some Democrats as well in the past, failed to buy American. Not anymore.
On my watch, federal projects that you fund, like helping build American roads, bridges and highways, will be made with American products and built by American workers — creating good-paying American jobs.
And thanks to our CHIPS and Science Act, the United States is investing more in research and development than ever before.
During the pandemic, a shortage of semiconductors, chips that drove up prices for everything from cellphones to automobiles. And by the way, we invented those chips right here in America.
Well instead of having to import them, private companies are now investing billions of dollars to build new chip factories here in America, creating tens of thousands of jobs, many of those jobs paying $100,000 a year and don’t require a college degree.
In fact, my policies have attracted $650 billion in private-sector investment, in clean energy, advanced manufacturing, creating tens of thousands of jobs here in America.
And thanks to our bipartisan infrastructure law, 46,000 new projects have been announced all across your communities. And by the way, I notice, some of you strongly voted against it are there cheering on that money coming on. I’m with you. I’m with you. If any of you don’t want that money in your district, just let me know.
Modernize our roads and bridges, ports and airports, public transit systems. Removing poisonous lead pipes so every child can drink clean water without risk of brain damage. Providing affordable high-speed internet for every American no matter where you live: urban, suburban or rural communities — in red states and blue states. Record investments in tribal communities.
Because of my investment in family farms, because of my investment in family farms led by my secretary of agriculture who knows more about this than anybody I know, we’re better able to stay in the family for those farms, and their children and grandchildren won’t have to leave home to make a living.
It’s transformative.
A great comeback story is Belvidere, Ill., home to an auto plant for nearly 60 years. Before I came to office the plant was on its way to shutting down. Thousands of workers feared for their livelihoods. Hope was fading.
Then I was elected to office and we raised the Belvidere repeatedly with auto companies knowing unions would make all the difference.
The U.A.W. worked like hell to keep the plant open and get these jobs back. And together, we succeeded. Instead of auto factories shutting down, auto factories reopening. A new state-of-the art battery factory is being built to power those cars there at the same —
Folks, to the folks of Belvidere, I say, instead of your town being left behind, your community is moving forward again. Because instead of watching auto jobs of the future go overseas, 4,000 union jobs with higher wages are building the future in Belvidere, right here in America.
Here tonight is U.A.W. President Shawn Fain, a great friend and a great labor leader. Shawn, where are you? Stand up. And Dawn Simms, a third generation worker, U.A.W. worker in Belvidere.
Shawn, I was proud to be the first president to stand in a picket line, and today, Dawn has a job in her hometown providing stability for her family and pride and dignity as well.
Showing once again, Wall Street didn’t build America. They’re not bad guys, they didn’t build it though. The middle class built this country. And unions built the middle class.
I say to the American people, when America gets knocked down, we get back up. We keep going. That’s America! That’s you, the American people.
It’s because of you America is coming back. It’s because of you, our future is brighter. It’s because of you that tonight we can proudly say the state of our union is strong and getting stronger.
Tonight, I want to talk about the future of possibilities that we can build together, a future where the days of trickle-down economics are over, and the wealthy and biggest corporations no longer get all the tax breaks.
And by the way, I understand corporations. I come from a state that has more corporations invested than every one of your states in the United States combined. And I represented it for 36 years. I’m not anti-corporation, but I grew up in a home where trickle-down economics didn’t put much on my dad’s kitchen table.
That’s why I determined to turn things around so middle class does well. When they do well, the poor have a way up and the wealthy still do very well. We all do well.
And there’s more to do to make sure you’re feeling the benefits of all we’re doing. Americans pay more for prescription drugs than anywhere in the world. It’s wrong and I’m ending it.
With a law that I proposed and signed — not one of you Republican buddies voted for it — we finally beat Big Pharma. Instead of paying $400 a month or thereabouts for insulin with diabetes, it’ll only costs ten bucks to make — they only get pay 35 a month now and still make a healthy profit. And now I want to cap the cost of insulin at $35 a month for every American who needs it — everyone.
For years, people have talked about it, but finally we got it done and gave Medicare the power to negotiate lower prices on prescription drugs, just like the V.A.’s able to do for veterans.
That’s not just saving seniors money. It’s saving taxpayers money. We cut the federal deficit by $160 billion because Medicare will no longer have to pay those exorbitant prices to Big Pharma.
This year Medicare is negotiating lower prices for some of the costliest drugs on the market that treat everything from heart disease to arthritis. It’s now time to go further and give Medicare the power to negotiate lower prices for 500 different drugs over the next decade.
They are making a lot of money, guys. And they are still going to be extremely profitable. That will not only save lives; it will save taxpayers another $200 billion.
Starting next year, that same law caps total prescription drug costs for seniors on Medicare at $2,000 a year, even for expensive cancer drugs that can cost $10,000, $12,000, $15,000.
Now I want to cap prescription drug costs at $2,000 a year for everyone. Folks, I am going to get in trouble for saying this, but maybe you want to get into Air Force One with me and fly to Toronto, Berlin, Moscow — I mean, excuse me — well even in Moscow, probably. And bring your prescription with you, and I promise you I’ll get it for you for 40 percent the cost you are paying now. Same company, same drug, same place. Folks, the Affordable Care Act, the old Obamacare, is still a very big deal.
Over 100 million of you can no longer be denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions. But my predecessor, and many in this chamber, want to take those prescription drugs away by repealing the Affordable Care Act. I am not going to let that happen.
We stopped you 50 times before and we will stop you again. In fact, I am not only protecting it, I am expanding it.
I enacted tax credits that save $800 per person per year, reduce health care cost for millions of working families. That tax credit expires next year. I want to make that savings permanent.
To state the obvious, women are more than half of our population, but research on women’s health has always been underfunded. That’s why we’re launching the first-ever White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, led by Jill doing an incredible job as first lady.
Pass my plan for $12 billion to transform women’s health research and benefit millions of lives across America.
I know the cost of housing is so important to you. If inflation keeps coming down, mortgage rates will come down as well. And the Fed acknowledges that. But I’m not waiting.
I want to provide an annual tax credit that will give Americans $400 a month for the next two years as mortgage rates come down, to put toward their mortgage when they buy a first home or trade up for a little more space. That’s for two years.
And my administration is also eliminating title insurance on federally backed mortgages. When you refinance your home, you can save $1,000 or more as a consequence.
For millions of renters, we’re cracking down on big landlords who use antitrust laws — who break antitrust laws by price-fixing and driving up rents. We’ve cut red tape so builders can get federally financing, which is already helping build a record 1.7 million new housing units nationwide.
Now pass and build and renovate two million affordable homes, and bring those rents down.
To remain the strongest economy in the world, we need to have the best education system in the world. And I’d, like I’d suspect all of you, want to give a child, every child, a good start by providing access to preschool for 3- and 4-years-old.
You know, I think I pointed out last year — I think I pointed out last year that children coming from broken homes where there’s no books, not read to, not spoken to very often, start school — kindergarten or first grade — hearing, having heard a million fewer words spoken.
Well, studies show that children who go to preschool are nearly 50 percent more likely to finish high school and go on to earn a two- or four-year degree no matter what their background is.
I met a year and a half ago with the leaders of a business round table. They were mad that I — they were angry — well, they were discussing why I wanted to spend money on education.
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I pointed out to them as vice president. I met with over — I think it was 182 of those folks. Don’t hold me to the exact number. And I asked them what they need the most, the C.E.O.s. And you have had the same experience on the both sides of the aisle: They said a better educated work force.
So I looked at them, and I say, I come from Delaware. DuPont used to be eighth-largest corporation in the world. And every new enterprise they bought, they educated the work force to that enterprise. But none of you do that anymore. Why are you angry with me, providing you the opportunity for the best-educated work force in the world? They all looked at me and said, I think you’re right.
I want to expand high-quality tutoring and summer learning time and see to it that every child learns to read by third grade.
I’m also connecting local businesses and high schools so students get hands-on experience and a path to a good-paying job whether or not they go to college. And I want to make sure that college is more affordable.
Let’s continue increasing Pell Grants to working- and middle-class families and increase record investments in H.B.C.U.s and minority-serving institutions, including Hispanic institutions.
When I was told I couldn’t universally just change the way in which we dealt with student loans, I fixed two student loan programs that already existed to reduce the burden of student debt for nearly four million Americans, including nurses, firefighters and others in public service like Keenan Jones, a public educator in Minnesota. Keenan, where are you? Keenan, thank you.
He’s educated hundreds of students so they can go to college. Now he’s able to help, after debt forgiveness, get his own daughter to college.
Folks, look. Such relief is good for the economy because folks are now able to buy a home, start a business, start a family. While we’re at it, I want to give public-school teachers a raise.
By the way, for the first couple of years, we cut the deficit.
Now let me speak to the question of fundamental fairness for all Americans. I’ve been delivering real results in fiscally responsible ways. We’ve already cut the federal deficit — we’ve already cut the federal deficit by over a trillion dollars.
I signed a bipartisan deal that will cut another trillion dollars over the next decade. It’s my goal to cut the federal deficit $3 trillion more by making big corporations and the very wealthy finally beginning to pay their fair share.
Look, I’m a capitalist. If you want to make, you can make a million or millions of bucks, that’s great. Just pay your fair share in taxes.
A fair tax code is how we invest in the things and make this country great: health care, education, defense and so much more.
But here’s the deal: The last administration enacted a $2 trillion tax cut, overwhelmingly benefited the top 1 percent — the very wealthy and the biggest corporations — and exploded the federal deficit.
They added more to the national debt than in any presidential term in American history. Check the numbers. For folks at home, does anybody really think the tax code is fair?
Do you really think the wealthy and big corporations need another $2 trillion tax break? I sure don’t. I’m going to keep fighting like hell to make it fair. Under my plan nobody earning less than $400,000 a year will pay an additional penny in federal taxes. Nobody. Not one penny. And they haven’t yet.
In fact, the child tax credit I passed during the pandemic cut taxes for millions of working families and cut child poverty in half. Restore that child tax credit. No child should go hungry in this country.
The way to make the tax code fair is to make big corporations and the very wealthy begin to pay their fair share. Remember, in 2020, 55 of the biggest companies in America made $40 billion in profits and paid zero in federal income taxes. Zero. Not anymore.
Thanks to the law I wrote and signed, big companies now have to pay a minimum of 15 percent. But that’s still less than working people pay in federal taxes.
It’s time to raise the corporate minimum tax to at least 21 percent so every big corporation finally begins to pay their fair share.
I also want to end the tax breaks for Big Pharma, Big Oil, private jets and massive executive pay. They can pay 20 million if they want but deduct a million. End it now.
You know, there are 1,000 billionaires in America. You know what the average federal tax is for these billionaires? They are making great sacrifices: 8.2 percent.
That’s far less than the vast majority of Americans pay. No billionaire should pay a lower federal tax rate than a teacher, a sanitation worker or a nurse.
I propose a minimum tax for billionaires of 25 percent, just 25 percent. You know what that would raise? That would raise $500 billion over the next 10 years.
Imagine what that could do for America. Imagine a future with affordable child care. Millions of families can get — they need to go to work to help grow the economy.
Imagine a future with paid leave because no one should have to choose between working and taking care of a sick family member.
Imagine a future of home care and elder care and peoples living with disabilities so they can stay in their homes and family caregivers can finally get the pay they deserve. Tonight, let’s all agree once again to stand up for seniors.
Many of my friends on the other side of the aisle want to put Social Security on the chopping block. If anyone here tries to cut Social Security or Medicare or raise the retirement age, I will stop you.
The working people who built this country pay more into Social Security than millionaires and billionaires do. It’s not fair.
We have two ways to go: Republicans can cut Social Security and give more tax breaks to the wealthy. I will — That’s the proposal. Oh no. You guys don’t want another $2 trillion tax cut? I kind of thought that’s what your plan was. Well, that’s good to hear. You’re not going to cut another $2 trillion for the super wealthy? That’s good to hear.
I will protect and strengthen Social Security and make the wealthy pay their fair share. Look, too many corporations raise prices to pad their profits, charging more and more for less and less.

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INTRODUCTION
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I saw this article...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13062273/rare-earth-minerals-wyoming-green-energy-material.html
...and after a weekend of research I bought 130K shares of ARRNF. Here's why.
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BACKGROUND
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Rare earths (REs) are a group of 17 elements from the 92 naturally occurring ones on chemistry's Periodic Table. They have many highly specialized and valuable industrial uses; Wikipedia has a good overview ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element ). REs can be roughly divided into three categories: Magnetic (Dy, Nd, Pr, Sm and Tb); Non-magnetic (Ce and La : additives to specialty glass for things like lasers and fiber optics); and Other (Eu, Er, Gd, Ho, Lu, Pm, Sc, Tm, Y and Yb).
The five magnetic rare earth elements have revolutionized the industrial production of magnets. Early manufactured magnets were made from Alnico (aluminum-nickel-cobalt) developed in the 1930s and ceramic Ferrite (iron-boron) developed in the 1950s. SmCo (samarium-cobalt) was the first rare earth magnet alloy developed in the 1960s and is still in widespread use today. In the 1980s, American and Japanese researchers literally changed the world when they independently developed magnets using a neodymium-iron-boron material known as Nd2Fe14B. Today Nd2Fe14B permanent magnets are the strongest known to humanity, capable of lifting over 1,300x their own weight. They have enabled a vast array of otherwise impossible technologies from tiny hard drives to electric automobiles to gigantic wind power generators.
Besides the foundational uses of Nd and Sm described above, the other three magnetic rare earths also have important roles to play. Nd and Pr are typically found and processed together at a mine site into an NdPr alloy with a 80:20 to 70:30 ratio. This NdPr alloy can itself be mixed directly with iron and boron to make a cheaper and less powerful type of magnet suitable for many common uses. Alternately, extra processing can yield the pure elemental Nd needed for true Nd2Fe14B magnets. Dy can then be added to these in amounts up to 12%, creating so-called EH and AH Grades for specialty uses needing greater resistance to high temperatures and demagnetization stress. Similar effects can be achieved by adding Te although at greater expense because of its greater scarcity.
In the $40 billion and growing annual sales magnet market, Nd2Fe14B magnets (25% Nd) currently make up two-thirds of all magnet sales worldwide, currently using around $3 billion of Nd per year. SmCo rare earth magnets (36% Sm) have mostly captured the remaining third of worldwide magnet sales due to the relatively low cost of Sm compared to Nd as a foundational magnetic rare earth. Alnico and Ferrite magnets are now considered niche products.
Pure rare earths are sold on the world market as 99+% pure chemical oxides priced in Chinese yen, which at the time of this writing are worth about $0.14 each. Most REs are priced by the metric ton (mt = 2200 pounds), but some are produced in such small quantities they are priced and sold by the kilogram (kg = 2.2 pounds). Doing the math on website data that tracks RE global prices ( https://www.metal.com/Rare-Earth-Oxides ) yields the following (Feb 2024) average prices in dollars per metric ton of oxide for selected REs:
Lanthanum Oxide = $560 / mt
Cerium Oxide = $ 960 / mt
Samarium Oxide = $ 2,100 / mt
Neodymium Oxide = $ 54,250 / mt
Praseodymium Oxide = $ 54,600 / mt
Dysprosium Oxide = $ 259,000 / mt (but very scarce, normally priced in kgs)
Terbium Oxide = $ 749,000 / mt (but very scarce, normally priced in kgs)
So the lowest value non-magnetic "light" REs of La and Ce sell for hundreds of dollars per ton. Sm sells for thousands of dollars per ton while Nd and Pr sell in the mid-range tens of thousands of dollars per ton. Obviously, profit in magnetic rare earths is to be found by mining Nd and Pr.
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AMERICAN RARE EARTHS - HALLECK CREEK PROJECT
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Mining Nd and Pr from an open pit mine is exactly what American Rare Earths (ARRNF - see https://americanrareearths.com.au/ ) plans to do in Halleck Creek, Wyoming. Their efforts and findings so far are detailed in their Feb 2024 Investor's Presentation ( https://app.sharelinktechnologies.com/announcement/asx/fdb51bbc46d54d1aac95253ac4b69308 ). Key topics are the "Snapshot" on page 4, the "Rare Earth Distribution" on page 9, and the "Breakthrough Metallurgical Results" on Page 10. Each of these will be examined in turn.
First, note that on Page 4 there are data lines for Measured, Indicated and Inferred. American Rare Earths, despite its name, is an Australian company and these terms come from official Australian JORC mineral reporting rules. Roughly speaking, Measured = "actually observed in a test drilled area", Indicated = "conservative present estimate for entire claim given test drilling results" and Inferred = "speculative future additional resources requiring further confirmation". Under Australian mining rules, financial estimates can only be developed and released to the public using Measured and Inferred (M+I) figures.
Also on Page 4, ppm stands for "parts per million" and is a measurement of concentration in the raw ore. 10,000 ppm is equal to a material-of-interest concentration of 1%, so the Halleck Creek ore is seemingly dilute. The Total concentration of Rare Earth Oxide equivalents (TREO) is around 0.3% in the raw ore. Lightweight Rare Earth Oxide equivalents (LREO) make up the bulk of this, mostly in the form of Ce and La that sells for only hundreds of dollars per ton. The valuable Magnetic Rare Earth Oxide equivalents (MREO) discussed above are even more dilute at "only" around 0.08%. However, even these seemingly low levels may be very profitably mined.
Finally on page 4, the total M+I ore tonnage is given as 1.4 billion tons (with a possible additional Inferred 0.9 billion tons of Inferred material). The estimated M+I magnetic oxides contained in this 1.4 billion tons of raw ore is 1.13 million tons (with a possible additional Inferred 0.68 million tons of MREO).
However, not all of this MREO is recoverable. On Page 10 we see an overview of ARE's proposed first-stage processing of raw ore. This initial step would take 100 tons of raw ore containing 0.08% MREO material as input and generate 7 tons of concentrate with 3.5% MREO for further downstream processing. For now, note that 16% of the MREO is permanently lost to tailings at this step. Thus only 84% at most of MREO in a ton of raw ore may be deemed recoverable.
On Page 9 we see the ppm breakout for "average" Halleck Creek ore. The concentrations for the magnetic < Nd / Pr / Sm / Dy / Tb > oxide equivalents are in round numbers < 631 /172 / 98 / 42 / 9 > ppm. Note the Nd:Pr ratio is approximately 80:20 so NdPr alloy will almost certainly be a precursor product to pure oxides at any future Halleck Creek mine. The figure on page 9 also shows 2552 ppm of Light Rare Earth Oxides equivalents (LREO). Other ARE documentation (see last page of ARE Feb 2024 Technical Report ( https://americanrareearths.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/01_Halleck_Creek_Technical_Report_v17-Appendices.pdf ) gives a breakdown showing this LREO material to be very roughly around 65% Ce, 30% La and 5% other. This sets the concentrations of < Ce / La / Other > to be approximately < 1660 / 765 / 127 > ppm.
With all of the numbers presented above, an initial estimate may be made for the value to be found in a ton of Halleck Creek ore. Note that 1 ppm is the same thing as grams per metric ton since there are a million grams in a metric ton. So in a ton of Halleck Creek ore, the component recoverable values are:
Nd recoverable value = 54,250 * ( 631 / (1*10^6) ) * 0.84 = $ 28.75
Pr recoverable value = 54,800 * ( 172 / (1*10^6) ) * 0.84 = $7.92
Sm recoverable value = 2,100 * ( 098 / (1*10^6) ) * 0.84 = $ 0.17
Dy recoverable value = 259,000 * ( 042 / (1*10^6) ) * 0.84 = $ 9.14
Tb recoverable value = 749,000 * ( 009 / (1*10^6) ) * 0.84 = $ 5.66
Ce recoverable value = 960 * ( 1660 / (1*10^6) ) * 0.84 = $ 1.34
La recoverable value = 560 * ( 765 / (1*10^6) ) * 0.84 = $ 0.36
Total rare earth recoverable value in a ton of Halleck Creek ore is thus roughly the sum of the above at around $53.33 per ton. The Nd and Pr magnetic components make up about two-thirds of the total ore value. Even though they are much more dilute, their scarcity results in the Dy and Tb magnetic additives making up more than a quarter of the available value. The lighter Ce, La and other non-magnetic rare earth components make up less than 3% of the ore value. The Sm magnetic component is the least valuable component of all.
The final pieces of the puzzle to evaluate ARRNF are estimates for the costs associated with running a future open pit mine at Halleck Creek. Setup capital expenditures, manpower and ongoing operating costs will be estimated in future official reports released by ARE. For now, some mining rules-of-thumb are available. Historically, open pit mining operation costs range from $10-$40 per ton of ore processed. See: https://www.cruxinvestor.com/posts/analysts-notes-week-11 for a more detailed analysis.
So as a VERY ROUGH INITIAL ESTIMATE, Halleck Creek rare earth ore has the potential to yield an EXPECTED MINIMUM $13.33 PER TON PROFIT even at the highest historical pit mine processing cost of $40 per ton. For high volume / high efficiency operations with operating costs of $10 per ton, this estimate would rise accordingly to an EXPECTED MAXIMUM $43.33 PER TON PROFIT for the ore processed.
Recall from above the total M+I ore tonnage for Halleck Creek is given as 1.4 billion tons (with a possible additional Inferred 0.9 billion tons of Inferred material). Component value of $53.33 per ton and extraction costs ranging from $10 to $40 per ton implies a potential M+I POSSIBLE TOTAL PROFIT OF $18.7 BILLION TO $60.7 BILLION if all ore in the ARE Halleck Creek claim was mined at current market prices. If the extra Inferred tonnage of 0.9 billion also proves to be available, the total profit could go as high as $100 billion in a best-case scenario.
****************************************************
ARRFL STOCK PRICE
****************************************************
So how much is ARRFL stock worth?
https://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/ARRNF/overview
At 446 million shares available and a potential minimum expected total profit value calculated at $18.7 billion above, each ARRNF share is effectively a claim on an expected 18,700 / 446 = $42 of extractable rare earth profit at Halleck Creek. If mining costs can be minimized to $10 per ton and all Inferred ore ultimately proves to be available, each ARRNF share represents be a claim on 100,000 / 446 = $224 of extractable rare earth profit at Halleck Creek.
So at the current share price of US $0.20 per share, an argument can be made that ARRNF is currently undervalued by a factor of 200X to over 1000X based on total future profits.
Obviously ARE has a claim at Halleck Creek, not a mine. A functioning mine is several years away, and mining out all of the claim ore profits is decades away. So...what is a reasonable ARRFL expected value once a stable mine is established in a few years?
One possible evaluation is to compare a hypothetical Halleck Creek open pit rare earth mine to the "average" open pit gold mine. The top 10 gold mining companies in the world have a combined market cap of $190 Billion (see: https://companiesmarketcap.com/gold-mining/largest-gold-mining-companies-by-market-cap/ ). These same top 10 gold miners have a total estimated in-ground reserves of 395 million ounces ( see: https://sprott.com/insights/sprott-gold-report-gold-mining-stocks-a-clear-and-compelling-investment-case/ ). At $2000 per ounce their combined in-ground reserves are worth $790 billion. Thus, the average market capitalization for an operational open pit gold miner is 190 / 790 = 25% of their in-ground reserves.
For Halleck Creek, the value of in-ground M+I recoverable reserves are 1.4 billion tons * $53.33 per ton = $75 billion. A quarter of this value would put ARE market capitalization at 75 / 4 = $18.8 billion. This derated operational mine market capitalization case is virtually identical to the minimum expected profit value case described above. Thus, if an operational Halleck Creek open pit rare earth mine were priced similarly to the average open pit gold mine, the ARRNF share price would be around $42 per share and a 200X multiple of today's stock price.
Roughly speaking, today's US $0.20 ARRNF price results in a ARE market cap of around $100 million. Once the ARRNF price reaches $1, the ARE market cap will reach $500 million and ARRNF will be eligible for discussion on the Reddit Wallstreetbets forum. At that point, it could become a meme stock and its price could "go to the moon" in short order.
So what could get the stock price to $1 before the actual mine is opened on the claim? ARE is following the Australian JORC methodology of evaluating its claim. Its next steps are to generate three separate reports with increasing detail on how mining operations would commence at Halleck Creek with associated financial estimates (see: https://informedinvestor.com.au/news/6175 ).
Next up is the so-called Scoping Study, scheduled by ARE to be released by the end of March 2024. To paraphrase the link above, the Scoping Study provides an early-stage evaluation of a mining project's potential economic viability and is largely conceptual in nature. It provides an order of magnitude estimation of the potential viability of a Mineral Resource to justify moving forward to a Pre-Feasibility Study. The Scoping Study contain details regarding information on pre-production capital costs, life-of-mine sustaining capital, mine life and cash flow, as well as details on processing and production methods and rates. Specifically, the Scoping Study will endeavor to answer how much funding will likely be needed to begin production of the project, how will the mine operate once built, expected annual production and expected mine life, and the overall expected profitability and ROI.
Hopefully, the upcoming Scoping Study will lead to an ARRNF share price increase, as will the follow-on Pre-Feasibility and Final Feasibility studies. We shall see.
​

Many baby boomer Americans historically tended to view Cuba's streetscape, namely the streets of Old Havana, as being stuck in some sort of time warp due to an abundance of late 1940s and 1950s American automobiles, namely Chevrolets, Cadillacs, and Impalas (a number of vintage 1930s British autos still stroll through Havana).
However, many automobiles built by the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact member states during the Cold War are still operational in Cuba despite the high cost of shipping spare parts for these autos. The huge shipping distance from Cuba to ports in the former USSR might explain why Cuban auto mechanics didn't have the opportunity during Fidel Castro's last years in power to repair Soviet-made vehicles even as the Special Period was winding down.
Given the influx of Chinese-made autos and tour buses into Cuba since the early 2000s, have you had the opportunity to ask Americans who traveled to Cuba during the Obama presidency if they've since changed their mind about Havana's streetscape being supposedly stuck in a time warp and gradually come to recognize that the streets of Havana and other cities and towns in Cuba have a diverse array of vehicles shipped to Cuba after 1959, including the ones made by the USSR? When Fidel Castro began consolidating power, he took away the Cuban people's right to import cars so many months before Dwight D. Eisenhower imposed an embargo on trade with Cuba. The COVID-19 pandemic that wiped out Cuba's tourism industry in 2020 caused many 1950s American cars in use as taxis to be taken out of service, and over the past year the Biden administration has granted licenses to a number of companies to sell ultra-modern American cars to private businesses and a few other people in Cuba.
Links:
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/02/26/film-highlights-1st-electric-car-exported-from-u-s-to-private-owner-in-cuba/
https://www.cigaraficionado.com/article/united-states-authorizes-u-s-auto-sales-in-cuba

Journey back to February 17, 1972, a landmark day in automotive history, as the Volkswagen Beetle surpasses Ford's Model T to become the world's best-selling car. This documentary delves into the fascinating history of the Beetle, its unique design, and its enduring legacy. We explore its origins in 1930s Germany, its connection to Adolf Hitler, and its eventual rise to global popularity, especially in the United States. Discover the story behind this iconic car and its impact on the automobile industry.
https://youtube.com/shorts/kbp-Q6jzZeA

Journey back to February 17, 1972, a landmark day in automotive history, as the Volkswagen Beetle surpasses Ford's Model T to become the world's best-selling car. This documentary delves into the fascinating history of the Beetle, its unique design, and its enduring legacy. We explore its origins in 1930s Germany, its connection to Adolf Hitler, and its eventual rise to global popularity, especially in the United States. Discover the story behind this iconic car and its impact on the automobile industry.
https://youtube.com/shorts/kbp-Q6jzZeA

Journey back to February 17, 1972, a landmark day in automotive history, as the Volkswagen Beetle surpasses Ford's Model T to become the world's best-selling car. This documentary delves into the fascinating history of the Beetle, its unique design, and its enduring legacy. We explore its origins in 1930s Germany, its connection to Adolf Hitler, and its eventual rise to global popularity, especially in the United States. Discover the story behind this iconic car and its impact on the automobile industry.
https://youtube.com/shorts/kbp-Q6jzZeA

The 1800’s and early 1900’s were a time of rapid advancement in technology in every field of science. We saw steam locomotives just starting to become cost effective at the start of the era to the first decades of flight by the end of it. What are some of your favorites and why?
​
Some of our answers over here in the Community Team:
CM Pelly:"For me it would be, the rise of cheap and available metal working, which allowed for with the modern shipbuilding coming in with riveting and metal ships.
Though the most interesting thing to me with shipbuilding was copper sheathing the bottoms of ships to prevent fouling, really interesting how the scientific process went to create cathodic protection during the Victorian era (copper sheathing was used widely in the Napoleonic era, but further improved upon later). One of the people assisting in the experiments happened to be Michael Faraday!"
​
CA Sam:"Mine would be refrigeration as it allows us to keep things cool for a time and act as a replacement for ice boxes which was what some people used as a food preservation method"
​
CA Gerald:"Mine would be modern drainage system. Can't imagine doing all the things myself, and this shining system would definitely make everything neater and easier."
​
CA Catherine:"Mine would be the steam powered caautomobile. While they stopped being made in the mid 1930's mostly, cars that ran on steam engines were actually more popular in terms of sales volume in the United States before the invention of the electric starter.
They ran cleaner, had much better speed and torque in their day, and were much quieter. By the time of their decline some models had even found ways of bypassing the long start up process that could take 10-20 minutes during a cold start. They are mechanically interesting and very fun to learn about as they are from a time when the certainty on what the everyday automobile would run on was far from settled."
Did any of ours match yours?

Basically, if you had to choose any other start date for each cultural decade besides the most common starting points:

• WWI
• WW2 end/Spanish Flu start
• Spanish flu end/Roaring 20's
• Black Monday/Great Depression
• WW2 start
• VJ Day/WW2 end
• Eisenhower becomes president
• Rock & roll popularity
• JFK assassination
• The Beatles
• Altamont
• Kent State
• Watergate
• Nixon resignation
• Vietnam war end
• John Lennon death
• Reagan inauguration
• MTV launch
• Thriller release
• Fall of the Berlin Wall
• Nirvana's Nevermind release
• USSR collapse
• Clinton election/inauguration
• Y2K
• 9/11
• Afghanistan
• 2008 recession
• Obama
• Osama Bin Laden death
• 2012 apocalypse
• COVID-19 pandemic
• Russia-Ukraine war

What other option would you choose?
​
I've got many alternatives (many of these are going to be VERY random, btw), starting with the...
1910s

• William Howard Taft replaces Theodore Roosevelt as POTUS (1909)
• Sinking of the RMS Titanic (1912)
• Woodrow Wilson becomes president (1913)
• Federal Reserve is created (1913)
• The carriage industry is decisively overtaken by the automobile industry (~1915)
• Other

1920s

• The Harlem Renaissance begins (1918ish)
• The Treaty of Versailles is passed (1919)
• Prohibition begins (1920)
• Warren G. Harding becomes president (1921)
• USSR begin (1922)
• Calvin Coolidge becomes president after Warren G. Harding's death (1923)
• Other

1930s

• The first silent film with sound, The Jazz Singer, is released in theaters (1927)
• Mickey Mouse is born with the Steamboat Willie cartoon (1928)
• Herbert Hoover becomes president (1929)
• Influenza epidemic occurs (1929)
• The St. Valentine's Day massacre occurs (1929)
• Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany (1933)
• Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes president (1933)
• The New Deal is passed (1933)
• Prohibition ends (1933)
• Other

1940s

• Italy began its World War II offensive when Benito Mussolini ordered his troops into Abyssinia (1935), way too early but this might work for some people.
• Japan invades China, unofficially beginning WW2 (1937)
• Occupation of Czechoslovakia begins (1938)
• The Wizard of Oz releases in theaters, despite not being the first color movie, still revolutionized the use of color in film and set a precedent for future movies (1939)
• Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak begins as the New York Yankee center fielder goes one for 4 against Chicago White Sox pitcher Eddie Smith (1941)
• Pearl Harbor takes place (1941), which is surprisingly not a common start date for the '40s.
• Roosevelt dies and is replaced by vice president Truman (1945)
• Other

1950s

• The United Nations is founded (1945), holding its first meeting not too long after (1946)
• The post-WW2 baby boom begins (1946)
• The Bank of England is nationalized (1946)
• Italy becomes a republic (1946)
• Jackie Robinson signs with the Brooklyn Dodgers (1947)
• The Cold War begins (1947)
• The Central Intelligence Agency is founded (1947)
• Gandhi assassinated in New Delhi by a Hindu militant (1948)
• The Nation of Israel is proclaimed (1948)
• The discovery of another moon of Neptune (1949)
• The discovery of oil under the Caspian Sea (1949)
• NATO is founded (1949)
• Senator Joseph McCarthy gains power (1950) and McCarthyism (1950–1954) begins.
• The Korean War begins (1950)
• The comic strip Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz, is first published (1950)
• NBC airs Broadway Open House a late-night comedy, variety, talk show through 1951 (1950)
• The new United Nations headquarters officially opens in New York City (1951)
• 22nd Amendment, establishing term limits for president, is passed (1951)
• Mutual Security Act is passed (1951)
• The first live transcontinental television broadcast takes place in San Francisco, California from the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference. One month later, the situation comedy I Love Lucy premieres on CBS, sparking the rise of television in the American home and the Golden Age of Television (1951)
• The debut of the Today show on NBC (1952)
• Shah of Iran returns to power in CIA-orchestrated coup known as Operation Ajax (1953)
• Joseph Stalin death (1953)
• Brown v. Board of Education occurs (1954)
• The Civil Rights movement begins (1954)
• The U.S. becomes a member of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (or SEATO) alliance (1954)
• NBC airs The Tonight Show, the first late-night talk show, originally hosted by Steve Allen (1954)
• Disneyland opens (1955)
• Albert Einstein dies (1955)
• Murder of Emmett Till (1955)
• Rosa Parks remains seated on a bus, the incident which evolves into the Montgomery bus boycott (1955)
• Other

1960s

• Vietnam War technically begins (1955)
• Sputnik becomes first satellite in space (1957)
• The Day The Music Died takes place (1959)
• Motown is founded (1959)
• Alaska and Hawaii become the last states in the US (1959)
• The introduction of the birth pill, paving the way for the "free-sex" culture of the '60s and '70s (1960)
• Greensboro sit-ins take place (1960)
• Civil Rights Act of 1960 is passed (1960)
• JFK defeats Nixon in presidential election (1960)
• US breaks diplomatic relations with Cuba (1961)
• JFK becomes president (1961)
• Peace Corps is established (1961)
• The Bay of Pigs invasion occurs (1961)
• Berlin crisis of 1961 happens (1961)
• The Berlin Wall is constructed (1961)
• Vietnam War officially begins with 900 military advisors landing in Saigon (1961)
• Marilyn Monroe dies of apparent acute barbiturate poisoning at 36 (1962)
• Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest nuclear confrontation involving the U.S. and USSR, occurs (1962)
• The comic-book superhero Spider-Man debuts in Amazing Fantasy #15 (August 1962) by Marvel Comics (1962)
• Bob Dylan and Columbia Records release The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (his second studio album), which becomes a classic (1963)
• March on Washington; Martin Luther King Jr. "I Have a Dream" speech (1963)
• Ghetto riots (1964–1969), beginning with the Harlem riot of 1964 (1964)
• President Johnson proposes the Great Society, whose social reforms were aimed at the elimination of poverty and racial injustice. New major spending programs that addressed education, medical care, urban problems, and transportation were launched later in the 1960s (1964)
• Economic Opportunity Act is passed (1964)
• Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing major forms of legalized discrimination against blacks and women, and ended legalized racial segregation in the United States, is passed (1964)
• The Ford Mustang is introduced (1964)
• President Johnson escalates the United States military involvement in the Vietnam War (1965)
• The Immigration Act of 1965 is passed (1965)
• The Voting Rights Act is passed (1965)
• The Medicaid and Medicare enacted (1965)
• The Higher Education Act of 1965 is passed (1965)
• Winston Churchill dies (1965)
• Malcolm X, an African-American Muslim minister, public speaker, and human rights activist is assassinated in Harlem, New York (1965)
• The "Summer of Love" embodies the growing counterculture, with the Monterey Pop Festival and Scott McKenzie's "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" among the highlights (1967)
• Other

1970s

• Walt Disney dies (1966)
• David Bowie's first album is released (1967)
• On March 31, incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson announces to the nation on television that he will not seek re-election. Opposition toward him and the Democratic Party was growing. The escalation of Vietnam was one of these issues (1968)
• Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy (1968)
• Civil Rights Act of 1968, commonly known as the Fair Housing Act, is passed (1968)
• Police clashes with anti-war protesters in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention (1968)
• Mister Rogers Neighborhood premieres on TV (1968)
• U.S. signs Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968)
• "Vietnamization" begins (1969)
• Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the Moon on the Apollo 11 mission (1969)
• Brian Jones dies at 27, beginning the 27 Club of celebrities dying at the age of 27 that happened frequently in this time period (1969)
• The Woodstock Festival in White Lake, New York, becomes an enormously successful musical and cultural gathering; a milestone for the baby-boom generation (1969)
• Sesame Street premieres on National Educational Television (1969)
• The Brady Bunch premieres on TV (1969)
• Scooby Doo, Where Are You! premieres on TV (1969)
• The Jackson 5's first album releases (1969)
• Charles Manson crimes (1969)
• The first Earth Day is celebrated, founded by Gaylord Nelson (1970)
• The Beatles split up (1970)
• Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix die, joining the illustrious 27 Club (1970)
• Jim Morrison dies, joining the illustrious 27 Club (1971)
• The Shaft premieres in theaters (1971)
• Nixon shock takes place, ultimately resulting in a complete separation of the US Dollar currency away from gold (1971)
• A Clockwork Orange premieres in theaters (1971-1972)
• The Magnavox Odyssey is released (1972)
• Roe v. Wade is passed (1973)
• Paris Peace Accords is signed (1973)
• Hip-hop is born (1973)
• The 1973 oil crisis takes place (1973), beginning the early/mid '70s recession as well as stagflation.
• The rise of disco (1974ish)
• The inauguration of Jimmy Carter (1977)
• Other

1980s

• New wave emerges in the UK, when many bands start disassociating themselves from punk (1976-1977)
• Star Wars premieres in theaters (1977)
• The Atari 2600 releases (1977)
• NASA unveils the first group of women astronauts (1978)
• First Test Tube Baby is born on July 25th in England a girl Louise Brown, from in vitro fertilization (1978)
• The Jonestown massacre occurs (1978)
• The first Garfield comic strip debuts in U.S. newspapers (1978)
• Dominica Gains Independence From Great Britain (1978)
• A new constitution is established in Spain (1978)
• Illinois Bell Company introduces first ever Cellular Mobile Phone System (1978)
• Space Invaders Launches Craze for Computer Video Games (1978)
• The first computer bulletin board system BBS is created (1978)
• US and China establish full diplomatic relations (1979)
• Vietnamese take Phnom Penh, China invades Vietnam (1979)
• Sid Vicious dies (1979)
• Magic Johnson and Larry Bird debut in the NBA (1979)
• Margaret Thatcher becomes Prime Minister (1979)
• Disco Demolition Night takes place (1979)
• Michael Jackson truly goes solo with the Off The Wall album (1979)
• New wave starts to rise in popularity in the UK and US (1979)
• Hip hop commercially breaks out with "Rapper's Delight" (1979)
• Iran hostage crisis (1979)
• ESPN launches (1979)
• CNN launches (1980)
• The Rubik's Cube releases (1980)
• Slasher films are now popular thanks to the release of Friday the 13th (1980)
• Ronald Reagan is elected (1980)
• Pac-Man releases (1980)
• Reaganomics is born (1981)
• Olivia Newton-John's single "Physical" hits #1 (1981)
• New wave and synthpop become dominant genres in the US (1982)
• E.T. releases in theaters (1982)
• The Falkland Wars begin (1982)
• Stagflation ends (1982)
• MTV becomes massively popular (1982-1983)
• The Thriller album hits #1 on the Billboard charts (1983)
• Michael Jackson debuts the "moonwalk" (1983)
• Valley Girl and Flashdance release in theaters (1983)
• Hulk Hogan wins first WWF Championship, beginning the Hulkamania era (1984)
• "Morning in America" takes place (1984)
• The Cosby Show debuts (1984)
• The Memphis aesthetic becomes commonplace (1984)
• World Wrestling Federation has its first WrestleMania show, fully kicking off the Rock n' Wrestling era (1985)
• Other

1990s

• Married... With Children and Full House premiere on TV (1987)
• Black Monday takes place (1987)
• The very first Disney Happy Meal tie-in is released as well as the iconic Muppet Babies Happy Meal toys (1987)
• The Simpsons first makes its debut as series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show (1987)
• The Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, became the very first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (1987)
• President Ronald Reagan gives his famous "Tear down this wall!" speech in West Berlin (1987)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles makes its TV debut (1987)
• N.W.A. release their debut album Straight Outta Compton (1988)
• The Land Before Time releases in theaters (1988)
• George H.W. Bush is elected (1988)
• The First Transatlantic Fiber Optic Cable is laid (1988)
• The First Computer Virus happens (1988)
• Sega releases the Mega Drive in Japan (1988), a.k.a. the Genesis over in the US (1989)
• George H.W. Bush is inaugurated (1989)
• AFV, The Simpsons, and Seinfeld premiere on television (1989)
• The Disney Renassiance begins with The Little Mermaid (1989)
• Family Matters and the TGIF block premiere on ABC (1989)
• Nelson Mandela is freed from jail (1990)
• Hubble Space Telescope launches during STS-31, a Space Shuttle Discovery mission (1990)
• Mariah Carey makes her debut with self-titled album (1990)
• The Gulf War begins (1990)
• The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Beverly Hills, 90210 debuts (1990)
• The Gulf War ends (1991)
• The early '90s recession ends (1991)
• Generation X by Douglas Coupland is released (1991)
• Michael Jordan wins first NBA championship (1991)
• World Wide Web launches (1991)
• Nicktoons premieres on Nickelodeon (1991)
• Magic Johnson announces AIDS diagnosis and retires from the basketball court (1991)
• Freddie Mercury dies (1991)
• Larry Bird retires from the NBA (1991)
• LA riots take place (1992)
• The 1992 USA Dream Team plays at the Summer Olympics in Spain (1992)
• Bill Clinton becomes popular during presidential campaign (1992)
• Cheers goes off the air (1993)
• Jurassic Park releases in theaters (1993)
• Grunge fashion takes over (1993ish)
• Kurt Cobain dies (1994)
• Hulk Hogan debuts in WCW (1994)
• Full House goes off the air (1995)
• Windows 95 launches (1995)
• Stone Cold Steve Austin cuts Austin 3:16 promo and Hulk Hogan turns heel (1996)
• Other

2000s

• Windows 95 launches (1995)
• Telecommunications Act is passed (1996)
• DVDs are released worldwide (1997)
• Princess Diana dies (1997)
• FDA approves Viagra for erectile dysfunction (1998)
• The United States embassy bombings take place (1998)
• Google is launched (1998)
• Toon Disney is launched (1998)
• TRL debuts (1998)
• Nu Metal becomes popular thanks to Korn's Follow The Leader album (1998)
• Britney Spears' debut single "...Baby One More Time" is released (1998)
• The Gameboy Color is released (1998)
• Pokemon debuts in the US (1998)
• The Powerpuff Girls premiere on Cartoon Network (1998)
• The United States Congress passes the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which gives copyright holders 20 more years of copyright privilege on work they control. This effectively freezes the public domain to works created before 1923 in the United States (1998)
• Sega Dreamcast releases in Japan (1998) and the US (1999)
• Bill Clinton's presidential impeachment takes place (1998-1999)
• The Sopranos, Family, and Spongebob Squarepants premiere on TV (1999)
• The Columbine shootings take place (1999)
• The Dotcom bubble bursts once NASDAQ hits its peak (2000)
• Eminem releases The Marshall Mathers LP album (2000)
• Nelly releases "Country Grammar" (2000)
• Sony releases the PlayStation 2 (2000)
• The controversial Bush v. Gore election takes place (2000)
• George W. Bush is inaugurated (2001)
• The Dreamcast is discontinued (2001)
• Shrek premieres in theaters, beginning Dreamworks' golden age (2001)
• Democrats gain narrow control of Senate after Jim Jeffords defects from the Republican Party (2001)
• No Child Left Behind Act education reform bill is passed (2001)
• Anthrax attacks kill 5 and infect a further 17 through the U.S. Mail system (2001)
• The Patriot Act, increasing law enforcement agencies' ability to conduct searches in cases of suspected terrorism, is passed. Agencies were enforced (2001)
• American Airlines Flight 587 crashes in Queens, New York, killing 265 (2001)
• The Gameboy Advance, the GameCube, and XBOX are released (2001)
• The Euro is introduced (2002)
• Teen pop dies off (~2002)
• The D.C. Sniper shootings take place (2002)
• The Iraq War buildup begins (2002)
• The Department of Homeland Security is created in the wake of the September 11 attacks (2002)
• Republicans retake narrow control of the Senate following 2002 elections (2002)
• The United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland invades Iraq marking the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003)
• In Iraq, deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein is captured by U.S. special forces (2003)
• The social networking website Facebook is launched (2004)
• Massachusetts becomes the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in compliance with a ruling from the state's Supreme Court ruling in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (2004)
• Hurricane Katrina devastates the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama coastlines killing at least 1,836 people and causing $81 billion in damage, making it the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history (2005)
• Nintendo DS and PSP handhelds release (2004, 2005)
• YouTube launches (2005)
• PlayStation 1 discontinues (2006)
• Other

2010s

• YouTube launches (2005)
• Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles release (2005, 2006)
• The Democratic Party retakes control of both houses of Congress, and gains a majority of state governorships (2006)
• Barack Obama runs for presidency (2007)
• The Sopranos comes to an end (2007)
• The Chris Benoit murder-suicide takes place (2007)
• The first IPhone is released for sale in the U.S. (2007)
• The Big Bang Theory and KUWTK debut on TV (2007)
• The late-2000s recession officially begins in December (2007)
• The 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike takes place (2007-2008)
• Breaking Bad premieres on TV (2008)
• The Wire ends (2008)
• Iron Man premieres in theaters, beginning the MCU era of films (2008)
• A global financial crisis begins as the stock market crashes. In response, U.S. President George W. Bush signs the revised Emergency Economic Stabilization Act into law to create a 700 billion dollar Treasury fund to purchase failing bank assets (2008)
• U.S. presidential election, 2008: Senator Barack Obama of Illinois is elected president, and Senator Joe Biden of Delaware elected vice president (2008)
• The "Electropop era" of music begins thanks to Lady Gaga and Katy Perry (2008)
• Barack Obama becomes the 44th president, Joe Biden becomes the 47th vice president. Obama is the first African-American to hold the office (2009)
• The first of a series of Tea Party protests are conducted across the United States, focusing on smaller government, fiscal responsibility, individual freedoms and conservative views of the Constitution (2009)
• The late-2000s recession officially ends in June (2009)
• U.S. President Barack Obama obtains Congressional approval for the $787 billion stimulus package, the largest since President Dwight D. Eisenhower (2009)
• Pop icon Michael Jackson dies, creating the largest public mourning for an entertainer since the death of Elvis Presley (2009)
• The Obamacare act is passed (2010)
• In the 2010 Midterm elections, the Republicans retake the House of Representatives as the Democrats lose 63 seats (2010)
• The Wikileaks scandal takes place (2010)
• Arab Spring begins (2010)
• The 3DS and PS Vita handhelds release (2011, 2012)
• Iraq War comes to an end (2011)
• Trayvon Martin's death occurs (2012)
• A gunman kills 12 and injures 70 at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado (2012)
• Hurricane Sandy strikes the Eastern Seaboard (2012)
• A gunman kills 26, including 20 children, at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut (2012)
• Wii U releases (2012)
• Reddit co-founder Aaron Schwartz dies (2013)
• Edward Snowden leaks highly classified documents from the National Security Agency (2013)
• Terrorists attack the Boston Marathon by detonating two bombs at the finishing line of the race, killing three and injuring 283 runners and spectators (2013)
• GTA V releases in stores (2013)
• PlayStation 4 and Xbox One releases (2013)
• Black Lives Matter emerges as a political movement, protesting against widespread racial profiling, police brutality, and racial inequality in the United States criminal justice system (2013)
• Great Recession's effects significantly die down as the economy starts to really improve (2013ish)
• BLM kicks off with the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner (2014)
• Donald Trump runs for president (2015)
• U.S. presidential election, 2016: Donald Trump elected president, Mike Pence elected vice president (2016)
• Donald Trump becomes the 45th president, Mike Pence becomes the 48th vice president. Trump is the first person without prior military or government service to hold the office (2017)
• Other

2020s

• Russian annexation in Crimea takes place (2014)
• Donald Trump runs for president (2015)
• TikTok is launched in China (2016) and then worldwide (2018)
• U.S. presidential election, 2016: Donald Trump elected president, Mike Pence elected vice president (2016)
• Donald Trump becomes the 45th president, Mike Pence becomes the 48th vice president. Trump is the first person without prior military or government service to hold the office (2017)
• Film producer Harvey Weinstein is accused of sexual harassment in a New York Times expose, marking the beginning of the Me Too movement (2017)
• A gunman kills 17 people and injures 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which popularized by the "Gen Z" term and acknowledging that a new generation was coming of age that were not the Millennials (2018)
• Financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is found dead in his prison cell under mysterious circumstances. It was declared a suicide by hanging, although the ruling is widely disputed (2019)
• Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announces the House of Representatives would begin an impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump (2019)
• Kobe Bryant, along with his daughter, Gianna, and 7 others, perish in a helicopter crash (2020)
• The Trump administration formally announces Operation Warp Speed, a public–private partnership for accelerating the development of a COVID-19 vaccine (2020)
• George Floyd, an African-American man living in Minneapolis, is murdered by Derek Chauvin, who kneeled on his neck during an arrest. Subsequently, nationwide protests ensued (2020)
• The controversial Trump v. Biden election takes place (2020)
• The first doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine are given out in the United States (2020)
• Trump-supporting rioters storm the United States Capitol, forcing Congress to evacuate and interrupting the Electoral College vote count that certified Joe Biden's victory (2021)
• Trump becomes the only president to be impeached for a second time. Ten Republicans join all Senate Democrats in voting to impeach Trump (2021)
• Joe Biden becomes the 46th president and Kamala Harris becomes the 49th vice president. Harris is the first woman to hold her office (2021)
• Juneteenth National Independence Day Act is passed, making Juneteenth a federal holiday (2021)
• The United States withdraws its remaining troops from Afghanistan, ending its 20-year involvement in the War in Afghanistan (2021)
• Roe v. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court (2022)
• Former president Donald Trump is indicted and arraigned (2023)
• Israel-Hamas war begins (2023)
• Over 115 attacks occur on U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria (2023-2024)
• The first person takes Elon Musk's Neuralink chip (2024)
• The Trump v. Biden election will take place (2024)
• Other, or it has not started yet.

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These are a lot of events to choose from.

This is a follow up to a previous post made in the last month which further emphasizes on a specific type of generation that can be read here for further information if interested: Analyzing the Three Types of Generations and Current Day Age Groups (as of 2023/2024) : generationology (reddit.com)
In this post, I will be discussing the concept of a social generation, such as what it is and how one is modeled, including a breakdown of each generation covered by sources and media. Keep in mind that this will be analyzed from an American perspective, using the K-12 education system.

What is a social generation?

A social generation is a collective of individuals born into and raised under a similar historical period of a shared society. Usually, this form of generation is country or areal specific due to cultural variance among different places and they are given official names by researchers and sociologists used for multiple purposes, whether it be analyzing the history and formative experiences of cohorts, conducting surveys and polls among unique age populations or using them as tools for marketing to certain demographics. Furthermore, a social generation is bound to be interpreted in numerous forms depending on the source, with several ways of measuring them through cultural markers such as historical events, technological adoption and biological life stages. There is no consensus on the birth year ranges, lengths or even naming of each social generation due to the concept's susceptibility to personal interpretation and weighing of different markers or defining aspects.

Standard Generation Model

A social generation can be best followed by a generic 18-year formula, consisting of roughly two 9-year waves and six 3-year age groups. Social generations are 18 years long as an encompassment of all children, aged 0-17, at a particular point in time, while the two waves differentiate between the elder and younger portions of each (big kids and little kids in the case of children), the younger side being closer in line with the next generation and the older side with the previous generation. A further differentiation into age groups of three years focuses on the individual and direct life stages of each mini cohort, consisting of everyone sharing a similar age, with the standard generation model having three age groups within each wave, which could potentially be divided into an early/core/late system. This syncs with the developmental progression of childhood that follows in three-year life stages (ex. 0-2 babies/toddlers, 3-5 preschoolers, 6-8 & 9-11 elementary schoolers, 12-14 middle schoolers, 15-17 high schoolers).

Identifying Social Generations

Among mainstream media and sources, there are seven major (or eight separate) generations that have been widely identified and covered, with the majority of them having strict birth year ranges of slightly (or for a few others, more greatly) deviating areas or spans, but all tend to unanimously support the existence of each generation with a general idea of when they were born and what formative experiences shaped them. All commonly labeled social generations were born and lived within the last 130 to 140 years, most of them being relevant to the current day as the living population, albeit the older ones are becoming scarcer as they pass away from old age. In this simple breakdown, each major generation along with the two waves that come with them will be explained, including their origins and what important markers or formative events ultimately shaped their childhood and coming-of-age experiences.
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The Lost Generation (early 1890s - early 1910s)
The oldest widely identified generation, The Lost Generation was born right around the turn of the 20th century and came of age into World War I and the following Roaring Twenties. The name was originally coined by writer Gertrude Stein to refer to the new generation of youths that grew up or fought as young adults during the first war and were disillusioned by the horrors that they endured. This generational trauma resulted in a literary movement among American writers in the 1920s, who often settled abroad in Paris, to tell the story of their experiences and promote a rejection of the glorification of war.
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• First Wave Lost Generation (early 1890s - 1900)
  • Born in the 1890s late Victorian years during the period between the Panic of 1893 and the assassination of President William McKinley (or death of Queen Victoria), they are the last generation that was alive in the 19th century and are fully ancestral since the late 2010s. They grew up during the height of the progressive era with the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt and the Edwardian era and came of age either slightly before or around World War I, being the main age group of 18–24-year-old youths that served during American involvement in the war.
• Second Wave Lost Generation (1901 - early 1910s)
  • Frequently called the 'Interbellum Generation' due to being sandwiched between two major conflicts, they were born from the beginning of the 20th century until around 1910 upon the concluding of the Roosevelt presidency and Edwardian era (with sources alternatively extending births to the beginning of WWI), grew up as kids during the war era and entered adulthood during either the Spanish Flu pandemic or Roaring Twenties and Jazz Age post-war period, a prosperous decade that saw immense growth and adoption of new technologies such as automobiles, radios and electricity in middle class American homes along with the advent of mass media, celebrities and homogenized pop culture.

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The Greatest Generation (early 1910s - late 1920s)
Born around World War I and the Roaring Twenties and coming of age during the two biggest crises in history, the Great Depression and World War II, the Greatest Generation (or GI generation, often including the Interbellum Generation by various sources) is appropriately named so by writer Tom Brokaw in his 1998 novel as one that faced and persevered through the unthinkable of both the worst recorded economic decade and the deadliest war of all time. Members of this generation were the most likely to be on the front lines in the second war and grew up as children during the period between the two world wars, making up the population of individuals in their mid 90s to early 110s, most of them centenarians, whom are among the oldest living people today.
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• First Wave Greatest Generation (early 1910s - 1920)
  • They were born in the 1910s from the end of the Edwardian/Roosevelt era until either the end of World War I or the Spanish Flu, growing up as kids during the post-war Roaring Twenties era before eventually coming of age into the Great Depression following the stock market crash of 1929, shattering an optimistic future that was seemingly guaranteed in their childhood. Within their youth, they would have witnessed the golden age of radio, the Dust Bowl, the rise of Hitler and the presidency of FDR (extending into the war) as the Depression hit its initial phase in the early 1930s before leveling off in the coming years, the Social Security Administration and New Deal being created in this time frame.
• Second Wave Greatest Generation (1920 - late 1920s)
  • They were born in the 1920s between the end of World War I or Spanish Flu until around the 1929 market crash, where birth rates decreased due to less economic security among the general population, who grew up as kids during the depression as the first wave of Disney shorts (and later films) were released and marketed to children. This generation was the prime fighting force of young people in the second world war as they turned 18 throughout the war years and faced the issues of the Holocaust, the Japanese Internment Camps and the Axis Powers, experiencing the height of the swing era of music as teenagers.

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The Silent Generation (late 1920s - mid 1940s)
As a smaller, more outnumbered generation due to lower fertility rates during the depression and war, the Silent Generation can be considered a sandwich between two more major generations, being the middle children that witnessed the transition of the war and post-war eras of American society. Coined by Time Magazine in 1951, the name was initially labeled to the group of young adults in their 20s at the time, who were perceived as conformists that sought not to rebel against their elders, thus called the "Silent" generation. Although the former age group this name was applied to were born around 1923 to 1933 (ages 18 to 28), the term later became reidentified to describe those born in the 1930s and early to mid 1940s, with the original group now being known as the younger years of the Greatest Generation and elder years of the Silent.
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• First Wave Silent Generation (late 1920s - late 1930s)
  • This generation was born during the years of the Great Depression, mostly between the stock market crash of 1929 and the outbreak of World War 2 in 1939, grew up as kids during the war years, and came of age during the immediate post-war era of the late 1940s and early 1950s, which saw the issues of McCarthyism, the newly emerging Cold War conflict and American involvement in the Korean War, of which many members of this cohort fought in as young adults. This was the time period that saw the direct aftermath of the war, of which society had a winding down of turbulence, but with nuclear weapon tests peaking following its invention and first ever execution at the end of the war.
• Second Wave Silent Generation (late 1930s - mid 1940s)
  • Sometimes uniquely referred to as the 'War Babies', they were born during World War 2 and were the first group of kids to grow up after the war, who came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s during the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation, the dominance of Rock n Roll music and the widespread adoption of new technology such as the television, along with a major restructuring of American culture with the development of interstate highways, suburbanization and rise of sugar production with fast foods such as McDonalds. Presidentially, they came of age during either Eisenhower or Kennedy and in what is often considered the golden age of American capitalism, where the economy was more stable than it had ever been, and the typical middle-class citizen could be guaranteed a comfortable life.

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Baby Boomers (1946-1964)
The most well-known generation of them all, the Baby Boomers are named so as the generation born during the mid 20th century baby boom where birth rates hit a historic high (over 4 million annual births) due to the prosperity of the post-war era, many of them born to Greatest Generation parents that came home as young soldiers after the war and settled into family lives. The name was first applied to this generation in a 1963 article written for the Daily Press by Leslie J. Nason as the oldest boomers were on the cusp of heading to college, leading to a dramatic increase of enrollments due to the higher number of people graduating, with the modern meaning of the term becoming established by the 1970s per the Oxford English Dictionary. An official range for this generation stems from the US Census Bureau citing mid 1946 to mid 1964 as the period of birth rates surpassing 4 million per year, thus being statistically part of the boom.
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• First Wave Baby Boomers (1946-1954)
  • As the first generation fully born in a world after the turmoil and conflict of the early 20th century, elder boomers enjoyed a 1950s and early 1960s childhood during the golden age of America and capitalism, who were also the first to grow up with television becoming widespread in homes among a suburbanized society with an established middle class. They would have their childhood shattered with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in late 1963, of which they began to come of age after into the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s, during the presidencies of Lyndon B. Johnson and Nixon, with several youth movements such as the British Invasion, the Hippies and the anti-war protests pertaining to the controversial Vietnam War involvement, of which many members of this generation were forcefully drafted into.
• Second Wave Baby Boomers (1955-1963 or 1964)
  • Often differentiated from their elder counterparts as 'Generation Jones', this generation was born in the second half of the boom, from approximately the initiation of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War until the assassination of Kennedy (a potential major catalyst to busting the boom due to loss of morale and optimism among Americans), and birth rates began to dip within this cohort although remained above 4 million annual births. With Generation Jones being coined by critic Jonathon Pontell in the 1990s to describe a generation "jonesing" for the past economy, they grew up as children during the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and early 1970s before coming of age into the 'malaise' era of the mid 1970s to early 1980s stagflation, which saw a declining economy and the peak of Disco music, after the Watergate scandal, the resignation of Nixon and the abolition of enforced military conscription following the end of Vietnam involvement in America.

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Generation X (1965-1981)
As another 'middle child' of two major generational behemoths, Generation X was born into a period of lower fertility rates following the baby bust and are an outnumbered generation just like the Silent Generation, who comprise the majority of their parents. Although the name has been used various times previously through instances of describing alienated individuals and more famously through the punk rock band by Billy Idol from 1976 to 1981, it wasn't until Douglas Coupland published his book 'Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture' in 1991 that it became applied to the next generation after Boomers and gained widespread recognition, with 'X' indicating the undefinable, like a variable in algebra. During their childhood years, it was common for Generation X kids to run latchkey with a free-range style of (or lack of) parenting, due to this period being a time when both two parents working became the norm and before childcare services or daycares became more readily available.
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• First Wave Generation X (1964 or 1965-1973)
  • Born during the early bust years of the 1960s and early 1970s from the assassination of Kennedy until the end of Vietnam involvement and conscriptions, they grew up as kids during a considerably less prosperous time compared to the prior few generations, where stagflation, the oil crisis and the 'malaise' era of automotives (where energy cuts to ensure less pollution decreased quality of vehicles) took hold. They later came of age into the Reagen years of the 1980s, where new technologies such as computers and video games became commonplace, MTV released and reshaped pop culture, synth pop and hair metal dominated music, the AIDS crisis emerged, and a new trickle-down economy came into effect following the procedures of the Reagen administration. These were also the final years of the Cold War, which by the time the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union collapsed, all members of this generation were of age.
• Second Wave Generation X (1974-1981)
  • Originally identified as Generation Y by Ad Age and various sources with most members often included as part of the 'Xennial' microgeneration, but later reidentified as the younger portion of Generation X, this cohort was born between Watergate or Vietnam and the election of Reagen or launch of MTV, who grew up in the 1980s Reagen era as the first generation to have computers and video games as a part of their childhood, as well as the last generation to experience the Cold War as kids and come of age in the 20th century and the traditional analog pre-internet world, primarily in the 1990s Clinton era after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but before the turn of the Millennium, with grunge, Eurodance, alternative, Britpop and gangster hip hop being some of the defining culture of their teenage years musically.

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Millennials (1982-2000)
Sometimes referred to as 'Echo Boomers' due to higher birth rates in the 1980s and 1990s along with many being the children of Boomers, and 'Generation Y' as an initial placeholder name for the generation after X, the Millennials are best known as the first that came of age in the new millennium and the last to be born in the old millennium, thus forming a generation that grew up around the turn of the Millennium and witnessed the transition from the traditional analog world of the 20th century to the modern day, digital world of the 21st century. Millennials were first named in 1987 by authors William Strauss and Neil Howe as the eldest members were entering Kindergarten, who would go on to become the Class of 2000 as the first graduates of the new millennium, and later on they would cover this generation deeper through several books of their own, including 'Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation' (issued in 2000).
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• First Wave Millennials (1982-1990 or 1991)
  • Part of the original 'Generation Y' grouping and with some members being labeled part of the 'Xennials' microgeneration, they were born from the election of Reagen, end of stagflation and launch of MTV until the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet Union, growing up as kids between the Cold War and 9/11, a period referred to retroactively as the 'Holiday from History' as the United States became the only superpower in the world after capitalism fully prevailed over communism, leading to no more major conflicts among the west up until the September 11th attacks, dramatically shattering the childhood of this generation. In their youths, several new groundbreaking forms of technology such as the internet and cell phones became widespread (albeit both were in the earlier stages of dial up and features) as they came of age into teen pop, nu metal and crunk music, the Bush administration and the new issues of the war on terrorism with the Invasion of Iraq following 9/11 up until the onset of the Great Recession, which this cohort struggled in as 18-24 year old young adults in a tanking economy, leading to the election of the first black president, Barack Obama.
• Second Wave Millennials (1991 or 1992-2000)
  • With this cohort frequently referred to as 'Zillennials' and with some members lumped as Generation Z, they were born between the fall of the Berlin Wall or end of the Cold War and the turn of the Millennium or 9/11, growing up mostly in the 2000s as the children of Bush, the war on terror, the early days of the internet and the analog to digital transition, later coming of age after the Great Recession and into the Obama administration, during the era of electropop, indie and hipster music where several social changes such as the legalization of gay marriage and the ushering in of late stage capitalism as well as the technological changes of a more advanced successor to traditional tech such as smartphones, social media, tablets, streaming and Wi-Fi became widespread (all of which Zillennials adapted to as youths) took place. Many social issues that emerged throughout this time include the rise of Black Lives Matter, the Occupy Wall Street movement, Gamergate, ISIS, Ebola, increasing climate awareness, and a growing distrust of a neoliberal status quo (leading to the election of Trump in 2016), with the advents of influencers and streamers in the 2010s generating a new wave of internet culture due to the prominence of social media and constant connectivity technology.

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First Post-Millennials (2001-2019)
With this generation still in development in terms of name, markers and identity, they are the first to be born entirely in the new millennium and grow up in the modern technology world of the digital and smart age from the start of their lives, with common placeholder names such as 'Generation Z' and 'Generation Alpha' being ascribed to this cohort. Although not much can yet be said about the Post-Millennials, births begin with the start of the Millennium and end with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, an event that has currently shaped this generation the most so far as children and youths, with possible ramifications on their development being pronounced now and in the coming years.
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• Generation Z (2000 or 2001-2009)
  • As the first generation born after the turn of the Millennium and September 11th attacks (and last before the Great Recession and launch of the iPad), Generation Z has never lived in a world before the internet or digital technology's widespread dominance, and were young children during the rise of social media, smartphones, tablets and other 21st century technologies, growing up as Obama kids witnessing a semi-optimistic era of innovation and economic recovery following the recession until the shift into a politically polarized and isolated era, following the election of Trump, the outbreak of COVID-19 and quarantining, and rise of streaming services as they approached their youths. Today, they are teenagers and young adults that have so far come of age into the Trump and Biden administrations along with the COVID-19 pandemic (which they experienced as teenagers), during an excessive period of culture clashes between political entities with several widespread hot topics including the climate crisis, mental health awareness, the Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine conflicts, LGBTQ+ culture and identity, the rise of fascistic practices with rollbacks of certain protections, cancel/callout culture, the impending AI revolution and the effects of short form media content (such as Tik Tok) or digital technology addiction, with trap and revivalist music dominating the mainstream.
• Generation Alpha (2010-2019)
  • Born in the 2010s Obama years between the Great Recession and the Covid-19 pandemic, they are currently the youngest fully living generation (with other sources often extending births to 2024) and grew up with all current day technology such as tablets, streaming, pervasive internet, WiFi, social media and smartphones from the beginning of their lives. Today they are the main group of children, ranging from preschool or elementary school to middle school, who were stunted by the COVID-19 pandemic in early childhood as they shifted to remote learning for a year or two, and will be among the first wave of kids to utilize AI technology in later childhood and adolescence among the impending revolution over the next few years, with their youth/coming of age era having yet to be seen, but will likely manifest itself throughout the later 2020s and 2030s.

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The next generation, born in 2020 and beyond (after the COVID-19 pandemic began, with quarantines affecting birth rates) is still being born, and has yet to be identified or labeled in any such way by the media for at least a few more years to come as they begin to reach an age old enough to impact generation discourse, despite the living portion of them being lumped as part of Generation Alpha for now. What can be said, though, is that change among the generational, social or technological perspective is constant and that this breakdown is only fully relevant as of 2024, with reidentification of the youngest generations (especially Post-Millennials), including their names or ranges, almost certain as new events and markers emerge that will ultimately shape their experiences and generational image.

Helena was one of the first cities in Montana to get streetcars. They rose up from the horse-drawn Helena Street Railway, which had started in September 1886.
Streetcars came to Missoula in May 1892, but only went through August 1897 because “re-planking of the Higgins Street Bridge necessitated the removal of the tracks.”
Missoula had its streetcars back by 1910, for William A. Clark had started the Missoula Street Railway Company the year before. His dream was to have a trolley running from Great Falls to Missoula, an astounding 165 miles.
He managed instead to get a loop route from Fort Missoula to the University of Montana, through the business district, and then out past the Northern Pacific Railway Station to Bonner, 4 miles away.
The trolley ran twice a day and by 1912 more than 2.5 million passengers had ridden it and the system had logged more than 1 million miles.
Streetcars Nationally
Things continued to grow in the 1920s for the interurban transport network. It was estimated that 90% of all rail trips in the country were taken on 1,200 different electric and urban lines. Just 10% of people owned a car in 1920.
So popular were the trolleys and street cars that steam locomotive businesses were feeling the pinch. In 1926 alone, 500 interurban trains were moving in and out of the Indianapolis Traction Terminal each day. They carried more than 7 million people that year alone. In the United States overall, there were 65,000 railroad passenger cars in 1929. It was an immensely popular network with the people, but the problem was that it wasn’t profitable for Big Oil and the banks. At least, it wasn’t as profitable as the car was. That would be the biggest hit to the interurban networks – the rise of the automobile.
By 1910 there were around 500,000 motor vehicles in America. The Ford Motor Company alone had 3,500 dealers across the country to sell cars to a hungry public. It was clear that more automobile roads were needed, especially since ownership of cars had soared and more people were taking them out for longer trips.
In the early 1910s there were 2.2 million miles of roads in America. Most were funded by local interests, primarily business interests. Many times local governments were blocked by law from funding infrastructure improvements, such as roads. Still, it was clear that there was demand for roads and travelling upon them.
Cars Win Out
The popularity of the interurban rail network of streetcars fell off by the 1930s. Interurban transportation fell out of favor with the public, and the reasons can primarily be traced to the rise of the automobile and poor management on the part of the interurban transportation companies. Cities and counties were also to blame, as were the machinations of the auto industry.
In 1926 counties began to pave their roads at a faster pace than they had before. This was typically done with brick, and the immense loads of the freight going over the interurban rails caused much of this to crumble. Car and truck drivers got angry at this, and eventually the interurbans lost out.
William A. Clark’s involvement with the Missoula streetcars ceased early on, and by 1924 the Missoula Public Service had bought up the system. In 1928 Montana Power Company had gained control. Even that large interest couldn’t hold back the pace of modernity, however, or the insatiable appetites of Americans for all things car. The Historical Museum at Fort Missoula’s website gives us a good idea of what this was like:
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“War and post-war inflation, along with the proliferation of internal combustion engines powering cars and buses throughout Montana, cut into street railway revenues and eventually undermined the state’s systems. Billings, Bozeman and Helena street railway systems collapsed. On January 24, 1932, Missoula’s beloved cars made their last run.”

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Helena saw its streetcars fade away when the bus service took hold in January 1928. Bozeman’s streetcars ran from 1892 to 1921. Butte’s had started in 1886 with horses before becoming electric in 1890. They ran until 1937. In Great Falls streetcars went from 1891 to 1931. Billings saw battery-powered streetcars from 1912 to 1917. Anaconda held out the longest, with its streetcars running from 1890 to 1951.
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