Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Decades end, not with a date, but with a feeling.We collectively agree that they are over, and then we argue later about what event marked the finale.When did the decade page finally turn?Historian Arthur Schlesinger, who gave the commencement address at my college graduation on a very hot day in May 1987 wearing a pink bow tie, wrote that the '50s ended with a bullet fired from the Book Depository in Dallas on November 22, 1963.I grew up hearing from my older cousins that the '60s ended at the Woodstock festival in August 1969, but the massacre at Kent State happened on May 4, 1970, and Jim Morrison died July 3, 1971, so who can say for sure when the decade ended.Did the '70s end on January 20, 1981, with Ronald Reagan's inauguration or on February 4, 1980, when Studio 54 closed its doors?You see my point."Decades are about cultural perception," wrote Chuck Klosterman, author of The Nineties, "and culture can't read a clock."For me, the '90s ended on August 16, 2001, at a Radiohead concert in Liberty State Park, New Jersey, just as the sun was going down and the lights were coming up on the skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan across the Hudson River.That was the last day I can remember the feeling of living in the '90s.It was also the last time I saw the Twin Towers still standing.That night, they were looming over the entire Manhattan skyline as they had for as long as I could remember, like two great pillars holding up the sky.I was thirty-five years old and living in a small town on the Delaware River.In three weeks, I would start a new teaching job at a Catholic high school in Middlesex County, not far from where the concert was being staged that night.I didn't know this
Author: Daniel Vollaro
Institution: Georgia Gwinnett College
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4412361253