N.B:
this article contains hyperlinks that are
outdated
TIMES
OF OUR LIVES
:
second
part
/ first part
BY: Professor
M. C. K.
Department of Sociology & Anthropology
Trinity University
715 Stadium Drive
San Antonio, Texas 78212
E-mail
ABSTRACT
A sociological
exploration on the subject of Time with the
thesis that most of the times of our lives have
a cyclical quality.This article takes the reader
just about everywhere, from circadian rhythms to
the implications of historical
ignorance.
taken from
"A
Sociological Tour Through
Cyberspace".,
(for the text
with pictures and full names go to the
source)
.
Time
is the element in which we exist. ... We are
either borne along by it or drowned in
it.
--J. C. O.s,
"Marya"
INTRODUCTION
Much can be
made of B. D.'s "the times, they are a
changin'." According to W.I. T., we're now AT
THE EDGE OF HISTORY, buffeted about by J.
N.'s MEGATRENDS, and with millions
suffering from A. T.'s FUTURE SHOCK. In
the lifetime of one born in 1976, America's
bicenntenial year, the population of the world
has increased by over one and one-half billion
individuals, hundreds of thousands have died in
the name of nationalism or religion, trillions
of dollars have been spent perfecting doomsday
weaponry, and the revolutions in minority,
gender, and old age relations have shaken the
traditional foundations of social life. To make
matters even more interesting, we are told that
the pace of such change is accelerating. And
with people living ever longer, the historical
changes that used to be absorbed by several
generations now must be coped within a single
lifetime. Largely forgotten
are the principles and
values on
which society's oldest members based their
lives.
With the
accelerating push forward generated by
technological and scientific innovations, the
future is supposedly coming closer. However, as
a society, we seem unable to conceive of great
enterprises--like the medieval construction of
the great cathedrals of Europe--that can link
generations together into a common project
spanning several centuries. Simultaneously, the
past--the wake in the water produced by the bow
of the future and the hull of the present--is
growing longer, thanks to technology replacing
personal memories: on celluloid for instance, we
can see and hear G. B. S.--a man born a decade
before the outbreak of the American Civil
War--talk to us about first hand experiences
with the Victorian sexual mores. Ironically, the
extent of our historical
ignorance
is considerable, and by all accounts
growing.
This page is
devoted to the study of time and the
various
timetables and rhythms that shape our behaviors
and thoughts.
Here we will consider such issues as:
- the
different meanings we give to each
day
of the week
and months
of the year.
- the "quality
time" that working parents worry about sharing
enough of with their children.
- the pressure
we feel to be "on time" in the face of dreaded
deadlines.
- the various
social clocks whose tickings seem to govern our
lives, such as the ages at which we believe we
should be married, have children, or be
"peaking" in our careers.
- our cultural
fears of growing old and the meanings we give to
the various stages of the life cycle.
- the
emergence of "flexitime" and four-day weeks in
the world of work.
- the types of
time that religions impose to fortify the
moralities of their members, such as eternity in
heavens or hells, purgatory time, or escaping
the cycle of death and rebirth.
- our sense of
connection with generations long dead and those
yet to be born, including such topics as
timecapsules, intergenerational contracts and
legacies, ancestral worship, and futuristic
themes in amusement parks and cinema.
- history,
too, will be fair game--at least our
interpretations of it. The past, after all, has
passed, and its placement into the present is a
social phenomenon that serves various social
interests. Also of sociological relevance are
individuals' perspectives of social change, for
instance, whether they believe their countrymen
to be happier or better off than they were
twenty years earlier.
Time is the
container of our social activities, especially
in our monotonic
culture
where we have specific times for doing specific
things (as opposed to more
polychronic
cultures, where many different things are done
simultaneously). These time-specific activities
flavor the meanings we associate with the
various times of the day, week, and year. On the
other hand, these time containers have a way of
flavoring their activities as well. An evening
college class, for instance, has an entirely
different feeling than its daytime counterpart
by virtue of the meanings and activities
associated with night hours.
Even though
these times of our lives seem to be as "natural"
as as any physical object in our social
universe, the fact is that most are totally
man-made notions. Why do we have 60 seconds in a
minute and 60 minutes in an hour? Because the
Babylonians had a counting system with a base of
60. Had the British invented time with their
base-10 system, we Americans undoubtedly would
have hours made up of 100 minutes and minutes
divided into 100 seconds.
For
that breed of social scientists known as
temporal
determinists, the big story is how the natural
rhythms historically shaping these social times
are being replaced by artificial
tempos.
And just as the meaning of a funeral dirge is
altered when put to a calypso beat, so
these
new tempos have fundamentally altered the entire
socio-cultural
order. As
a result, many people now find themselves
feeling somehow "out of sync": out of sync with
their bodies (i.e., "jet lag"), with their
families and friends (i.e., the senses of not
having enough time and time conflicts), and with
the broader society (i.e., suffering "future
shock").
Perhaps of all
our taken-for-granted reifications that reveal
"false consciousness," time is the most
ubiquitous and "real." Given our preoccupations
with time, perhaps our species is better
labelled chronos
sapiens.
For a
broadsweeping philosophical analysis of the
history of time's inner meaning and logic see
J.
Z.'s "Time and its
Discontents."
OUTLINE
WHAT
TIME IS IT?
: RESOURCES FOR HOROLOGISTS
THE
NATURAL RHYTHMS OF LIFE
#THE
NATURAL RHYTHMS
#THE
DAY-NIGHT CYCLE
#THE
LUNAR CYCLE
#THE
SEASONAL CYCLE
#THE
MACRO RHYTHMS OF NATURE
#PREDICTING
SOLAR ECLIPSES
#DON'T
FORGET
SOCIAL
RHYTHMS ACROSS CULTURES AND
TIME
#THE
CULTURAL RHYTHMS OF LIFE
#DIMENSIONS
OF CULTURAL TIMES
#MONOCHRONIC
VS. POLYCHRONIC TIM
#CYCLICAL,
LINEAR, AND UNORDERED
#ORIENTATIONS
TOWARD PAST, PRESENT AND
FUTURE
#SACRED
AND PROFANE TIMES
#THE
PACE OF CULTURAL LIFE
#TIME
AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION
#PREINDUSTRIAL
TIMES
#CULTURAL
CONSEQUENCES OF RAPID SOCIAL
CHANGE
#CROSS-CULTURAL
CASE HISTORIES
#ZODIAC
TIMES OF CHINA AND
JAPAN
#
PERSONAL
TIMES
#
LIFE-CYCLE
TIMES
#
GENERATIONAL
TIMES
#
BOOMERS-LINKS
#
GENERATION
X-LINKS
#
TEMPORAL
FACETS OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY
#THE
TEMPORAL WORLDS OF SOCIAL CLASSES
#TIMES
OF THE UPPER CLASS
#GENDER
TIMES
#THE
DOUBLE STANDARD OF AGING
#RACIAL
TIMES
SECOND
PART
#SOCIAL
RHYTHMS, CYCLES, and CLOCKS
#STANDARD
TIMES
#THE
DAILY CYCLE
#NIGHT
TIME
#DAYLIGHT
SAVINGS TIME
#THE
SEVEN-DAY WEEK
#THE
MONTHS
#ANNUAL
SOCIAL CYCLES
#INSTITUTIONAL
RHYTHMS
#RHYTHMS
OF THE "CONJUNCTURE"
#HOW
SOCIAL TIME IMPINGES ON THE
INDIVIDUAL
#SPECIAL
CLOCKS--GAUGING THE SOCIAL
ORDER
#CALENDARS
#NEW
YEARS
#SPECIAL
DAYS
#TEMPORALITIES
OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
#FAMILY
TIMES
#THE
LIFE-CYCLE OF FAMILY
RELATIONSHIPS
#SPOUSAL
TIMES
#PARENT-CHILD
TIMES
#SCHOOL
TIMES
#THE
LENGTH OF THE SCHOOL YEAR ND THE SHIFTING
TIMES OF THE SCHOOLDAY
#THE
LESSON OF SPEED
#THE
SACRED TIMES OF RELIGION
#TIMES
SACRED AND PROFANE
#WORK
TIMES
#LEISURE
TIME
#CONSUMPTION
TIMES
#POLITICAL
TIMES
#CYCLES
OF LIBERALISM AND CONSERVATISM
#DAYLIGHT-SAVINGS
TIME
#TEMPORAL
PERSPECTIVES OF THE SCIENCE
#DEALINGS
WITH THE PAST AND FUTURE
#COLLECTIVE
REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING
#USE
OF HISTORY TO LEGITIMATE SELF
#USE
OF HISTORY TO LEGITIMATE
REGIME
#USE
OF HISTORY BY CITIES &
COMMUNITIES
#RECREATIONS
OF THE PAST
#NOSTALGIA
#FUTUROLOGY
#UTOPIAN
(AND DYSUTOPIAN) ENVISIONMENTS
TIME
TO GET A LITTLE CRAZY
WHAT
TIME IS IT? RESOURCES FOR
HOROLOGISTS
National
Institute of Standards & Technology-- A Walk
Through Time: Evolution of
Timekeeping
Horology
- The Index (The Science of
Timekeeping)
British
Horological Institute Home Page
Directorate
of Time
The
Exact Time Please: Greenwich, "the centre of
time"
The
World Clock
VIBE's World Map
THE
NATURAL RHYTHMS
"..it is
possible that the absolutism of Egyptian
dynasties was dependent on the ability of kings
to determine the sidereal year in relation to
the appearance of the star Sirius. Recognition
of the first dynasty by the Egyptians implied a
recognition of time as dating from it. ...The
power of absolute kings over time and space was
reflected in the pyramids which remain a
standing monument to justify their confidence,
in the development of mummification, a tribute
to their control over eternity, and in the
belief in immortality. The power of the absolute
monarchy may have been weakened by the
priesthood which discovered the more reliable
solar year. Absolutism passed with control over
time into the hands of the priesthood and
checked expansion over space in the Egyptian
Empire."
-H.
I., The Bias of Communication,
1951:66
Although with
modernization the
activities of individuals have become
increasingly divorced from the natural
rhythms--e.g.,
the solar, lunar, and seasonal cycles--that
controlled the behaviors of their ancestors, it
is important to appreciate how human cultures
have overlaid their own symbolic systems of
meanings and timetables atop these times of
nature. Such discoveries of time may well
underlie
the very foundation of
civilization.
Here we will investigate the ways early cultures
sought to synchronize the timing of the
cosmos
with the timing of the
nomos,
between the rhythms of nature and of social
life.
We will also
consider how these natural rhythms still impact
the individual, both biologically and
psychologically. In The Clock of Ages J. M.
likens the body to a clock store. Each cell,
tissue, and organ has its own clock that
determines its lifespan. These clocks, in turn,
become entrained or captured within the rhythms
of nature. Like some Chinese puzzle, there are
clocks within clocks within clocks, which
together shape our everyday
experiences.
Check out what they're up to at the Center for
Biological Timing at the University of
Virginia.
THE
DAY-NIGHT CYCLE
The cycle of
work and rest is evident throughout nature. M.
T. and D. H. ("Our Rhythms Still Follow the
African Sun," Psychology Today, Jan. 1984:50-54)
argue that our afternoon lull in productivity is
a legacy of our African origins, where the hot
afternoon sun put most animals in slumber
beneath the trees of the savanna. Generally, it
is in the morning when we engage in our most
important work of the day, performing those
activities necessary for the group's
subsistence. Midday meals are followed by an
afternoon lull--a nearly universal break time in
preindustrial societies. People resume their
activities in the late afternoon but at a slower
pace. The conclusion of the work day brings a
social time, with some variant of the cocktail
hour occuring in many cultures.
Circadian
Rhythms
Corresponding
to the cycles of light and darkness is the
body's own daily timekeeper, the circadian (from
the Latin "circa," meaning about, and "diem,"
meaning day) rhythm, which is linked to a host
of physiological processes, including hormone
secretions,
jet lag,
and even heart
attacks.
Out of a growing appreciation of such body
rhythms, medical researchers increasingly apply
chronotherapeutic
strategies
to enhance their treatment effects.
THE
LUNAR CYCLE
"From
far-northwest Greenland to the southernmost tip
of Patagonia, people hail the new moon--a time
for singing and praying, eating and drinking.
Eskimos spread a feast, their sorcerers perform,
they extinguish lamps and exchange women.
African Bushmen chant a prayer: "Young Moon! ...
Hail, hail, Young Moon!" In the light of the
moon everyone wants to dance. And the moon has
other virtues. The ancient Greek communities,
Tacitus reported nearly two thousand years ago,
held their meetings a new or full moon, "the
seasons most auspicious for beginning
business."
Everywhere we
find relics of mythic, mystic, romantic
meanings--in "moonstruck" and "lunatic" (Latin
luna means moon), in "moonshine," and in the
moonlight setting of lovers' meetings. The word
"moon" in English and its cognate in other
languages are rooted in the base me meaning
measure (as in Greek metron, and in the English
meter and measure)."
D.
J. B., The Discoverers, 1983:4
Menstrual
Cycle
Of all the
coincidences of personal biological times with
those of the cosmos, the parallel between the
29.5 day lunar cycle with the 29.5 +/-3 day
average menstrual cycle of women is one of the
more intriguing. This "lunar connection" with
fertility has been a nearly universal theme of
folklore and ritual. While the degree of such
phase locking remains a matter of scientific
debate, the synchronization is still
appreciated. F. O.'s WombMoon
Calendar
recommends that it be taken advantage of as a
time for self understanding and appreciation of
women's connection with the natural
order.
THE
SEASONAL CYCLE
Since at least
the time of Hippocrates, scholars have been
intrigued by seasonal influences on human
experiences. Researchers in biometeorology
have noted, for instance:
-
death
rates in northern cultures peak during the
winter;
-
marriages
peak in June and births in late
summer;
-
relatively
high rates of winter
depression;
romantic
relationships between college students tend to
breakup during May/June, September,
December/January, according to research of Z.
R., C. T. H. and L. P.;
suicide rates
and mental hospital admissions rise during
spring and early summer.
THE
MACRO RHYTHMS OF NATURE
Beyond the
rhythms of the day and year, other natural
cycles affecting the course of human activity
(and history) have been detected. For instance,
there are cycles
of glacial growth and
decline,
which have profoundly affected the migrations
and innovative technologies of our species and
its predecessors, which are perhaps caused by a
wobble of our planet's axis. In the early 1980s,
J. S. and D. R., two University of Chicago
paleontologists, reported evidence of
periodic
mass
extinctions
which eradicated upwards of 75 percent of all
species every 26 million years. One theory
accounting for this regularity is the postulated
existence of a dwarf binary sister of our sun.
This death star, called Nemesis (after the Greek
goddess who persecutes the excessively rich and
powerful), is hypothesized to reach its perigee
every 26 million years, when it shakes loose and
hurls a hail of comets from the Oort cloud on
the fringe of our solar system. Some of these
collide with earth, filling its atmosphere with
dust that blots out the sun for months, leading
to global death.
Science has
given us the ultimate of temporal perspectives:
the birth and death of the entire universe.
There are two rival theses about the ultimate
fate of the universe, both originating from the
Big Bang Theory. One thesis, derived from the
Second Law of Thermodynamics, sees the universe
as "open," expanding for eternity and slowly
sinking into a thermal equilibrium that is "heat
death." In other words, the death of the
universe is predestined and inevitable, in 100
billion years the energy needed to sustain life
anywhere in the universe would be so dispersed
as to be unusable. Death is nothing more than
entropic disorder and life nothing more than
entropy reduction. Time
is the loss of disequilibrium between
processes
(such as the dissipation of electrical energy or
radioactive decay).
This
cosmological conception of time is only the most
recent of a long line of speculations. G. was
the first to realize that the
acceleration
of falling bodies was a function of
time,
"that the same increment of velocity was added
to their speed of fall every second." His
predecessors "had tended to think either that
the velocity of a falling object must be
constant, or that velocity was proportional to
distance traveled, not time" (R. M., Time's
Arrows: Scientific Attitudes Toward Time,
Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1985:12). Later,
the Newtonian notion of time existing uniformly
throughout the cosmos was to be overthrown by
A.
E.'s special theory of
relativity.
Here time became but an illusion as "it is
perfectly possible for a distant event to take
place in the 'past' of one observer and in the
'future' of another" (M., 1985:150). Currently
E.'s conception of time is being superceded by
developments in quantum mechanics. According to
Nobel Laureate P., the discovery of the
"irreversibility problem" has led to the new
insight that time
is best understood as a "selection principle"
and that time and uncertainty are closely
related.
Adds one observer, "One bewildering outcome of
quantum theory has led some scientists to
speculate that the entire universe, including
the time in which it exists, may have been
created by a spontaneous quantum fluctuation--a
twitch in the nothingness that preceded it.
Could a twitch in the opposite direction convert
the universe back into nonexistence" ("Reality:
A Grand Illusion?" The New York Times, Feb. 26,
1980)?
PREDICTING
SOLAR ECLIPSES
As can be
gathered, power comes to those able to predict
natural events. Undoubtedly one of the most
impressive of predictions cross-culturally in
the ancient world involved the timing of the
solar eclipse. For the Mayans, the people must
have thought that even the heavens were
controlled by their omniscient rulers, whose
predictions of lunar cycles are off by only a
matter of a few seconds many hundreds of years
later.
DON'T
FORGET
March is
National Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Month;
November is National Alzheimer's Disease Month
(a designation first signed into law in 1983 by,
ironically, victim R. R.).
THE
CULTURAL RHYTHMS OF LIFE
In The Dance
of Life: The Other Dimension of Time (Anchor
Press/Doubleday, 1983), anthropologist E. T. H.
entitles his first chapter "Time as Culture" .
An extreme stance perhaps, especially
given the potency of nature's
rhythms,
but it is instructive of the extent to which
experiences and conceptualizations of time and
space are culturally determined. Unlike the rest
of nature's animals, our environment is
primarily man-made and symbolic in quality. As
B. observed in The Ascent of Man, instead of
being figures of the landscape, like antelopes
upon the African savanna, we humans are the
shapers of it. Geographical space and natural
time are transformed into social space and
social time, around whose definitions human
beings orient their behaviors. For instance,
instead of being governed by the natural rhythms
of the sun and seasons, our behaviors are
governed by such cultural temporalities as work
schedules, age norms, and by the "open" hours of
shopping malls.
Culture
is a shared system of ideas about the nature of
the world and how (and when) people should
behave in it.
Cultural theorists argue that culture creates
minds, selves and emotions in a society as
reliably as DNA creates the various tissues of a
living body. Culture also creates the rhythms of
a society that echo within the very biology of
its members. Observes I. H. ("Temporal
Orientation in Western Civilization and in a
Pre-Literate Society, American Anthropologist
36, 1955), "It is impossible to assume that man
is born with any innate `temporal sense.' His
temporal concepts are always culturally
constituted" (pp. 216-7). A 1974 study by W. C.
and L. S. showed that within a few days, infants
flex their limbs and move their heads in rhythms
matching the human speech around them. By the
time a child is three months old he has already
been temporally enculturated, having
internalized the external rhythms (called
Zeitgeber, meaning "time giver" in German) of
his culture. These rhythms underlie a people's
language, music, religious ritual (the Buddhist
mantra, for instance, is not only one's personal
prayer but one's personal rhythm),
beliefs
about post-mortem
fate,
and their poetry and dance. These rhythms also
serve as a basis of solidarity: humans are
universally attracted to rhythm and to those who
share their cadences of talk, movement, music,
and sport.
Thus
socio-cultural
systems can be likened to massive musical
scores:
change the rhythm-- such as putting a funeral
dirge to a calypso beat--and you change the
meaning of the piece. Cultures differ
temporally, for example, in the temporal
precision with which they program everyday
events (ask any American businessman trying to
schedule a meeting in the Middle East) and in
the ways various social rhythms are allowed to
mesh.
DIMENSIONS
OF CULTURAL TIMES
Temporal
prosperity comes always accompanied by much
anxiety.
--J.D., 1631
MONOCHRONIC
VS. POLYCHRONIC TIMES
In developing
the distinction between what he calls
Monochronic and Polychronic cultural times, H.
writes:
P-time
stresses involvement of people and completion of
transactions rather than adherence to preset
schedules.
... For polychronic people, time is seldom
experienced as "wasted," and is apt to be
considered a point rather than a ribbon or a
road, but that point is often sacred.
...Polychronic cultures are by their very nature
oriented to people.
Any
human being who is naturally drawn to other
human beings and who lives in a world dominated
by human relationships will be either pushed or
pulled toward the polychronic end of the time
spectrum.
If you value people, you must hear them out and
cannot cut them off simply because of a
schedule.
M-time,
on the other hand, is oriented to tasks,
schedules, and
procedures.
As anyone who has had experience with our
bureaucracies knows, schedules and procedures
take on a life all of their own
without
reference to either logic or human
needs.
...M-time is also tangible;
we speak of it as being saved, spent, wasted,
lost, made up, crawling, killed, and running out
(pp.43,50).
CYCLICAL,
LINEAR, AND UNORDERED TIMES
Does social
history unfold, like the sequence of seasons, in
a cyclical way endlessly repeating itself, or is
history linear and increasingly "progressive" or
"degenerative"? With the former, time can be
recuperative as cultural members can escape both
their futures and pasts as they periodically are
given new starts. With
linear time, which characterizes contemporary
Western cultures,
cultural outlooks are either positive (e.g.,
time brings salvation, resurrection, or utopian
social orders) or negative responses (e.g., time
ultimately brings entropy, dissipation, and
death for self, society, and cosmos).
ORIENTATIONS
TOWARD PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
Cultures
differ in their general orientation toward the
future, present, or past. Central to this
orientation is whether the "Golden Years" are
collectively understood to exist either in the
future (hence, time is seen as being progressive
[N., 1979] and evolutionary), the
present (now is the best of times), or in some
golden past (such as Paradise Lost or the "noble
savage" beliefs of Romanticism). This broad
temporal distinction determines such beliefs as
the role of the dead in everyday life and the
extent to which the behaviors of the living are
oriented toward their ancestors or heirs.
Postmodernism
may entail a focus only on the
here-and-now,
with little sense of connection to the past or
future as the only certainty becomes change. R.
D., former budget director in the B.
administration, claimed in 1989 that America
suffers from a cultural "now-now-ism"--a
"short-hand label for our collective
short-sightedness, our obsession with the here
and now, our reluctance to address the future,"
evidenced by rising drug abuse (a sign that
young people care too much about the next two
hours and too little about the next two
decades), the decline in education (reflecting a
society lacking a commitment to future
generations), and capitalism's logic that favors
current consumption over long-term
savings.
SACRED
AND PROFANE
TIMES
Being special
creatures, we tend to attribute cosmic
significance to our activities and are prone to
view supernatural forces at work in our affairs,
particularly those which produce the unintended
consequences of our actions. Traditional Chinese
folklore, for instance, holds that natural
calamity indicates the loss of the "mandate of
heaven," portending the decline of dynasties.
Knowing the potency of variable reinforcements
in shaping our behaviors and beliefs -the
"slot-machine effect," if you will- imagine the
reinforcements to this ancient belief when, in
1976, a massive earthquake killed hundreds of
thousands Chinese in Tangshan and then, shortly
thereafter, Chairman M. t.-t. died. The realm of
such external influences is the sacred cosmos.
Juxtaposed against the "profane," commonplace
world of everyday life, the "sacred" entails the
experience of the mysterious, extraordinary, and
uncontrollable forces that act against chaos and
that underlie the affairs of nature and man
(M.D., Purity and Danger, 1966).
Sacred
time involves the collapsing of the past,
present, and future into an eternal now in order
to, in part, allow heroics of the past be
continuously part of the sacred
present.
Profane
time is
time as wear-and-tear, time as decay and death.
CULTURAL
"GOOD" TIMES AND "BAD"
THE
PACE OF CULTURAL LIFE
It has been
said that in Mexico time walks while in the
United States it either runs or flies.
ZEITGEIST
TIME
TIME
AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION
It's curious
how much technological energy and innovation
cultures apply to their time pieces. Nowadays,
supposedly at the tail end of a linear,
progressive history, the modern individual can
have a deserved smugness about the temporal
precisions of his life. Science has produced
time pieces capable of measuring subatomic
events occurring within billionths of a second
or of gauging from a piece of charcoal when some
prehistoric fire had been lit. But the Olmec
Calendar, recently found near Tres Zapotes,
Mexico, uses symbols to count 1,125,698 days,
thus indicating that it was used to mark off
time continuously for over 3,111 years. Does
modern life somehow engender a quest for
immediacy, precision and speed that leads us to
ignore much longer rhythms originally
experienced by our ancestors? Only in the past
do we find cultures generating projects, such as
the construction of the great cathedrals of
Europe or the Great Wall of China, spanning the
lives of several generations. At Avebury on the
Wiltshire downs of Britain, there is a circular
ditch that covers 28-1/2 acres, encompassing
even a small village. It was a massive
undertaking, built with the most basic of tools
as the trench was dug; the earth, basically hard
chalk, was cut away with primitive spades and
then transported on shoulders in wicker baskets,
up the steep sides of the ditch, to be deposited
on the surrounding mound until the bank was some
thirty or forty feet above them. Some estimate
that the enterprise must have taken some fifty
generations to complete. Questions and
observations such as these have fueled a rich
research tradition in the rhythms shaping the
life experiences of differing peoples of the
world. S. and M. (1937) argue that the only real
determinants of any social time scale are the
needs of society. As these social needs evolved
with the increasing complexities of the social
order and with the higher-ordered needs of its
social actors, new temporalities came into
existence. This
process of social evolution comes very slowly
and new time frameworks are required to even
appreciate the
change.
PREINDUSTRIAL
TIMES
In the Andes,
time is often measured by how long it takes to
chew a quid of coca leaf; sometimes the
destination is so many cigarettes
away.
INDUSTRIAL
TIMES
POST-INDUSTRIAL
TIMES
CULTURAL
CONSEQUENCES OF RAPID SOCIAL
CHANGE
There is more
to life than increasing its speed.
--M. K.
G.
It has become
a maxim that contemporary societies are
experiencing an accelerating rate of social
change. But what, in addition to technological
innovation and the "knowledge explosion," are
these changes and can they be measured? And are
there limits to the amount of change that can be
absorbed by social structure and individuals?
CROSS-CULTURAL
CASE HISTORIES
ZODIAC
TIMES OF CHINA AND JAPAN
It seems
almost obligatory for Chinese restaurants to
feature their zodiac on placemats to engage
customers while awaiting their meal. So you're a
rabbit--lucky you! And so what if the President
is a dog?
RABBIT: 1927,
1939, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1987, 1999
Luckiest of
all signs, you are also talented and articulate.
Affectionate, yet shy, you seek peace throughout
your life. Marry a Sheep or Boar. Your opposite
is the Cock.
TIGER: 1926,
1938, 1950, 1962, 1974, 1986, 1998
Tiger people
are aggressive, courageous, candid and
sensitive. Look to the Horse and Dog for
happiness. Beware of the Monkey.
OX: 1925,
1937, 1949, 1961, 1973, 1985, 1997
Bright,
patient and inspiring to others. You can be
happy by yourself, yet make an outstanding
parent. Marry a Snake or Cock. The Sheep will
bring trouble.
RAT: 1924,
1936, 1948, 1960, 1972, 1984, 1996
You are
ambitious yet honest. Prone to spend freely.
Seldom make lasting friendships. Most compatable
with Dragons and Monkeys. Least compatible with
Horses.
DRAGON: 1928,
1940, 1952, 1964, 1976, 1988, 2000
You are
eccentric and your life complex. You have a very
passionate nature and abundant health. Marry a
Monkey or Rat late in life. Avoid the
Dog.
SNAKE: 1929,
1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989
Wise and
intense with a tendancy towards physical beauty.
Vain and high tempered. The Boar is your enemy.
The Cock or Ox are your best signs.
HORSE: 1918,
1930, 1942, 1954, 1966, 1978, 1990
Popular and
attractive to the opposite sex. You are often
ostentatious and impatient. You need people.
Marry a Tiger or a Dog early, but never a
Rat.
SHEEP: 1919,
1931, 1943, 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991
Elegant and
creative, you are timid and prefer anonymity.
You are most compatible with Boars and Rabbits
but never the Ox.
MONKEY: 1920,
1932, 1944, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992
You are very
intelligent and are able to influence people. An
enthusiastic achiever, you are easily
discouraged and confused. Avoid Tigers. Seek a
Dragon or a Rat.
COCK: 1921,
1933, 1945, 1957, 1969, 1981, 1993
A pioneer in
spirit, you are devoted to work and quest after
knowledge. You are selfish and eccentric.
Rabbits are trouble. Snakes and Oxen are
fine.
DOG: 1922,
1934, 1946, 1958, 1970, 1982, 1994
Loyal and
honest you work well with others. Generous yet
stubborn and often selfish. Look to the Horse or
Tiger. Watch out for Dragons.
BOAR: 1923,
1935, 1947, 1959, 1971, 1983, 1995
Noble and
chivalrous. Your friends will be lifelong, yet
you are prone to marital strife. Avoid other
Boars. Marry a Rabbit or a Sheep.
The Japanese
follow the Chinese cycle but in addition each
year is also named for one of five
elements--wood, fire, earth, metal and water,
yielding sixty possible combinations. Few birth
years are worse than hinoe uma, when fire and
horse fall upon each other. It is widely
believed that women born in this year are
destined to kill their husbands.
Since 1949,
the Japanese have celebrated a national holiday
called Coming of Age Day, honoring those who
turned twenty during the previous year. In 1987,
some 1.4 million young men and women, all born
between Jan. 16, 1966 and Jan. 15, 1967, were
the stars of the day. Their numbers, however,
were 22 percent less than the prior and
following year. Why? Could it be that that was a
hinoe uma year?
MEXICAN
MANANA TIME
PERSONAL
TIMES
Numerous are
the rhythms shaping our life-experiences.
Perhaps the most basic are one of our biological
clocks, our
circadian
rhythms,
which determine such things as whether we are
"morning people" or "night owls." In addition,
there are other biological clocks shaping our
senses of self:
* the
timetables of physiological growth, maturation,
and aging.
These times can have their quirks. For instance,
one's aging can be hyperaccelerated by
Werner's
Syndrome
and progeria.
* the
biological clock experienced by middle-aged
women still desiring children and the
menopausal
deadline;
* of course,
the biological clock whose ticking is
increasingly loud is one's death
clock.
Even though we don't like to admit it in our
death-denying culture, the normal timing of
death is the master shaper of biography. Whereas
for most of human history death came
prematurely- -when "death in the midst of life"
was literal and not figurative--nowadays death
typically occurs upon the conclusion of full,
completed lives (at least given the traditional
biographical lifespan scripts).
In addition to
these internal natural times shaping
individuals' life experiences are the times of
external nature: the rhythms of the day, month,
and seasons. For most of human history these
rhythms dominated human activity. For instance,
humans are not immune to animals' cycles of work
and rest. It has been argued that our afternoon
lull in productivity is a legacy of our African
origins, when the hot afternoon sun put most
animals in slumber beneath the trees of the
savanna. Generally, during the morning we engage
in the most important work of the day,
activities connected with the group's
subsistence. The midday meal is followed by an
afternoon lull--a break that is nearly universal
in preindustrial societies. In the late
afternoon, people resume their activities albeit
at a slower pace. The work day is followed by a
social time, with cross-cultural variations of
the "cocktail hour."
On top of
these natural times are built man-made times,
whose rhythms increasingly shape our experiences
of everyday life. Numerous "social clocks"
determine our daily activities and social
biographies: the timetables of our socialization
(So you are 14 years of age and still in the 3rd
grade? You are behind time. Loser!), courtships
(We harbor doubts about those who become engaged
2 weeks after the first date and smirk at those
engaged for 15 years), family life (with males'
second families, retirement can precede their
children's graduations from high school), and
career.
Out of these
various rhythms emerges a sense of life
structure, featuring longer-tempoed rhythms of
one's career and family schedules, memories and
future plans. The life structure involves the
mental maps individuals have of their
life-cycle, their sense of an orderly
progression of life course changes. As G. E.
(1975, 1978) defines life course, it encompasses
the `pathways' by which individuals fulfill
different roles over their lives, sequentially
or simultaneously. These pathways vary owing to
"variations in the timing, duration, and order
of events; and by the interlocking careers (in
family, work) that vary in synchronization"
(Elder 1985:2).
Some
individuals choose to have other, more mystical
times influence their life activities. These
include biorhythms
(don't venture too far into the real world
during your "critical" days!) and
astrology.
Regarding the latter, a 1993 NORC random survey
of American adults found some 10 percent saying
"definitely true" and another 42 percent saying
that it was "probably true" that astrology has
some scientific truth. Click here to see
Americans
beliefs in astrology by age and
education.
TIMES
OF THE LIFE-CYCLE
Have you ever
studied the family photo album and compared
yourself with your parents, your grandparents,
or perhaps even your great-grandparents when
they were your age? Maybe you noticed how much
older a grandmother looked at age 50 than your
mother did. Not only did the grandmother look
more weathered by time, but she may have dressed
like an older person, wearing black granny shoes
and a baggy black dress instead of mom's Adidas
and pastel jogging suit.
Our pathways
through time are shaped by both the
developmental agendas described by psychologists
as well as by social and cultural factors. For
instance, in Centuries of Childhood, P. A.
develops how
childhood was "invented" in the
West as a
distinctive stage of the life cycle. The
appearance of children as shrunken adults
wearing small adult clothing in Renaissance
paintings, for instance, was not the fault of
the artists but rather how children were
perceived. There was no childhood as everyone
had access to the same information (P. 1982).
Until the 17th century there wasn't even a word
for child in French, English or German: the term
referred to kinship rather than age. A. found
during Middle Ages that not only did every age
group dress indiscriminantly, but that there was
even the lack of distinctive sex-dress for
little people (16th century boys often dressed
as girls). As infant mortality rates declined,
for the first time in human history parents
could expect to raise their children to
maturity. As a result, there appeared novel
cultural conceptions of this neophyte stage of
social life.
And as
childhood emerged with the rise of
industrialism, so now the
old
age stage of the life-cycle is being shaped by
post-industrial, service-oriented economies.
Click here to
see
Americans'
perceptions of the best years of the
life-cycle.
Yahoo
- Society and
Culture:Age:Teenagers
Kearl's
Social Gerontology
Page
GENERATIONAL
TIMES
"It is
demeaning to the nation that within the C.
administration a corps of the elite who never
grew up, never did anything real, never
sacrificed, never suffered and never learned,
should have the power to fund with your earnings
their dubious and self-serving
selves."
--Senator
Bob Dole, Acceptance Speech to the 1996
Republican Convention
According to
A. T. in Future Shock,
time
is replacing space as the major divider of
people in modern
societies.
The intersections between biographical time and
social-historical time in periods of rapid
socio-cultural change are suspected of producing
distinctive outlooks and values among
differently-aged individuals. Such impacts of
social history on identity structures underlies
social science research on generations.
There are
several senses of the
generational
concept.
In Biblical times, generations were units to
demarcate eras. We still use this sense when
referring to some massive historical event (like
the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights era, World War
II, or the Depression) that collectively affects
those age groups early in their life-cycles.
While precisely where in the life-cycle
individuals are most susceptible to such
historical influences is a matter of
debate--child psychologist J. K. argues that
it's the 6-16 group most influenced by such
sociological changes, while sociologist G. E.
claims that the defining period is when a cohort
is first entering the labor market--the
assumption is nevertheless made that an
historical thumbprint is permanently impressed.
A related
notion involves generations as birth cohorts, as
when referring to those born during the 1930s
(which was a relatively small cohort owing to
the grim economics at the time of their birth,
and now that group entering old age) or the
1970s (the beginning of the so-called "baby-boom
echo"). Consider the proposition that one must
be 9 years of age or older before
socio-historical events create lasting memories.
If that be the case:
* 98.5% of
Americans are too young to remember women voting
for the first time;
* 86% don't
remember the ending of World War II (in fact,
77% of Americans were born after
1945);
* 79% cannot
recollect the 1954 Supreme Court ruleing that
began to outlaw racial segregation;
* 73% of
Americans are too young to recall Russia's
launching of Sputnik, the first manmade
satellite;
* 68% cannot
recall the assassination of President
Kennedy;
* 48% cannot
remember the 1974 Arab oil embargo against the
U.S.;
* and 45% are
too young to recollect the nation's Bicentennial
(in fact, slightly less than one-third of
Americans were born since that
anniversary).
Another sense
of the generation concept refers to lineal
generations, involving familial generations and
the tensions over continuities and
discontinuities of socialization. For example,
consider the differences between first- and
second-generation Americans. The
second-generations may well speak English at
school and with friends, but speak their
parents' native tongue while at home.
Generational conflict may well erupt over the
second's enculturation into American society and
their perceived disregard (or even disdain) for
the culture and values of their parents'
homeland. Enter the third-generation, whose
members may not even be able to communicate with
their grandparents.
The sense of
"generation" that perhaps most intrigues
Americans is the notion of
generations
as historically-conscious agents of social
change. As
developed by K. M. in 1920, with modernization
there's an increase in historical watershed
events (such as war, depression, or famine),
that leads to different
social realities experienced by different
generations
within different stages of life development.
Each century may see three or four such
generations, attracting adjacent cohorts as a
magnet attracts magnetic filings. As M. H.
observed in The Collective Memory (1950), these
are the groups "that develop the reigning
conceptions and mentality of a society during a
certain period [and then] fade away in
time, making room for others, who in turn
command the sway of custom and fashion opinion
from new models." Two such generations that have
received considerable publicity are the postwar
Baby Boomers and members of the so-called
Generation X. So how truly different are they?
When comparing these two generations several
factors need to be taken into account: First,
any comparison must control for their location
in the life-cycle, requiring that we look at the
Boomers in the 1970s and Xers in the 1990s.
Second, we must take into account the general
socio-cultural climate when our two snapshots in
time are taken. For instance, if we were to
compare the political leanings of these two
generations when in their twenties, we must
compensate for the fact that the times are more
conservative in the 1990s than they were in the
1970s. Click here to see the
basic trust in others held by Boomers and
Xers
Voice
of the Shuttle's "Generation Wars"
links
THE
S. AND H. MODEL OF GENERATIONS
It was the end
of the century. The world was in chaos. Nations
worked furiously to subvert other nations. Men
and women were confused about their place and
purpose. The country was amidst the ravages of a
deadly, sexually-transmitted epidemic. Myriad
were the double agents, impostors, and traitors
who reveled in the tumult. Even the faithful
were corrupt, producing a moral backlash.
Populism was making a return as the gap between
the haves and have-nots was reaching an
extreme.
Sound
familiar? No, it is not a summary of our times
but rather a description of the ending of the
nineteenth century at the conclusion of the
Guilded Age--a time in the West of great urban
homelessness, of sexual revolutions and
epidemics, and of upheaval in gender roles.
Given the
thesis of these pages that most of the times of
our lives have a cyclical quality, it should
come as no surprise that parallels should arise
in the life experiences of certain generations.
The most notable elaboration of this argument in
recent years is W. S. and N. H.'s Generations:
The History of America's Future (W. M., 1991).
The authors (two Boomer historians who initially
wondered if another generation like theirs ever
existed in American society) contend that four
types of generations, each with its own salient
character traits, have recurred throughout
American history. Causing this four generation
sequence are (a) regular 40-45-year cycles of
secular and spiritual social movements, and (b)
a supposed human tendency of human beings to
correct for the perceived excesses of their
elders by raising their progeny in a manner
opposite the way they themselves were brought
up. The secular crises arise when society
focuses on ways to reorder its institutions and
public behavior; the spiritual reawakenings are
those periods when the social focus is on
altering personal values and private behaviors.
Nurturing styles shift from relaxed to rigid and
then from underprotective to overprotective,
with each style laying down a "peer personality"
matrix for each new generation.
The result of
such social cycles and socialization tendencies
are two dominant generations sandwiched between
two recessive generations. During social
movements the dominant generations are entering
rising adulthood and elderhood while the
recessive generations are entering youth and the
midlife years. So you were born in the
mid-1970s? Your generational clones are the
Cavalier (born 1615-1647), Liberty (1724-1741),
Gilded (1822- 1842), and Lost (1883-1900)
generations.
The
Millennial Files: Synthesizing technological
history and
generations
Wm.
M.'s Time Page
GENERATION
X
Yahoo
- Society and Culture:Age:Generation
X
GenXpage
Generation
X
Gen-X
Welcome
to EmPower X!
The
Alternative
Group
Conservative
Generation X
BABY
BOOM
Boomernet
-- The Baby Boomers'
Surfing
Center
The
Baby Boomers
Boomer
Heaven
Bill's
Baby Boomer
Pages
TIME
AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY
With the
increasing commodification
of time
and given competitive capitalism's production of
"winners" and "losers," it should come as no
surprise that time as well as wealth has become
thoroughly and invidiously
stratified.
To
occupy different positions in the social
hierarchy is to have different temporal
orientations
to everyday life. This involves such matters
as:
* orientations
to the past, present, and future. For instance,
Harvard Professor J, M., director of the Bagnoud
Center for Health and Human Rights (quoted in
the Boston Globe, June 22, 1994), observed "If
you want an inner-city African-American kid in
this country to use a condom, you have to give
him a future."
* rates of
social mobility. For structural reasons, one's
control over mobility diminishes during the
middle years of life and often one realizes that
any further upward climb in an organizational
hierarchy is no longer a function of personal
effort but rather of job vacancies. The timing
and awareness of mobility running out is a
function of social class: the higher one's
social standing the more likely one's role
"peakings" are postponed (the later one
graduates from school, the later the end of
upward mobility, "job burnouts," retirement,
etc.)
* waiting
times. The lower one's social status the longer
one waits, whether in unemployment lines or in
physicians' offices.
* temporal
flexibility. In a 1988 study of office workers
commissioned by the International Council of
Shopping Centers, 38 percent said they go
shopping during the work day. Upper-level
managers are the most likely to shop during
non-lunch hours.
* and
differences
in
life-expectancies.
THE
TEMPORAL WORLDS OF SOCIAL
CLASSES
Upper classes
are a nation's past; the middle class is its
future.
--A. R.,
Russian-born author (1905-1982)
When passing
through one of the most affluent areas of my
city while on my way to work I noticed a milk
truck parked in front of one of the mansions.
Upon seeing a milkman returning to his van with
a load of empty milk bottles I was struck by
childhood memories of when this now-rare morning
ritual was routinely conducted in my own middle
class neighborhood.
There's little
question for why this disappearance of milk
trucks from Levittowns. Inflation of fuel
prices, the aging of the baby-boom (whose
childhood made such rounds cost-efficient as
nearly everyone in the 'burbs had children), the
proliferation of supermarkets and the sprouting
of convenience stores have all contributed to
the obsolescence of the milkman. And yet, here
he still is in the 1990s. Among the upper
classes, individuals can still afford to
maintain such traditional life-styles, including
keeping mom at home. It is
in
the working class that individuals are most
susceptible to the broad currents of social
change.
Here the dual-career and single-parent family
roles were first trailblazed, long before it
became fashionable for a yuppie couple to leave
in their his and her BMWs to their separate
professions. The ability to live in or own the
past has, for the upper middle class and their
highers, become an important dimension of
conspicuous consumption.
Times
of the Upper Class
Some people
are born on third base and go through life
thinking they hit a triple.
--B.
S.
When you think
about, there are some intriguing temporal
underpinnings to the status claims of the upper
class. A universal tactic for convincing others
that their place is at a lower rung of the
stratification order than yourself and therefore
owe special deference to oneself is to establish
one's legitimacy through lineage. You have an
ancestor who was a passenger on the Mayflower?
who fought in the American Revolutionary War?
who was one of the founding settlers in your
state or your community? You are in luck--
especially if your family has maintained its
presence and "good name," and if you are in a
place where tradition and continuity are valued.
Take the richest woman in the world, Queen
Elizabeth: the entire British monarchy depends
her being able to point to a 56- generation
lineage.
Now, with your
genealogy chart and supporting evidence in
order, you are ready to lay claim to your
rightful membership to some of society's most
exclusive clubs and organizations. The
community, of course, must be periodically
reminded of your special status. You may, for
instance, have publicized rites of passage for
your brood, such as a debutante celebration. And
it helps to be part of your community's
historical preservation movement; your
ancestor's deeds need to remain part of the
public consciousness. A new street needs naming?
Let's label it after great-great-great grandpa
Throckmorton.
GENDER
TIMES
The same
passions in man and woman nonetheless differ in
tempo; hence man and woman do not cease
misunderstanding one another.
--F.
N.
During one
cold November week in 1795, M. B. of Hallowell,
Maine, listed among her household chores:
brewing beer, nursing a sick cow and scouring 35
skeins of wool in preparation for weaving. "A
woman's work is never done, as the song says,"
she wrote in her diary that week. "And happy she
whose strength holds out to the end of the
days."
In addition to
age-stratification, the only other cultural
universal by which social roles are allocated is
on the basis of gender. Numerous are the
temporal strategies for keeping women in their
place. The female role has, across cultures and
history, been generally characterized by its
greater temporal demands, greater age
discriminations, and by having to perform a
greater number of rituals of temporal deference
(e.g., being typically being younger than one's
spouse).
So how much
has changed since M, B,'s time? According to a
1989 telephone survey (n=1,025 women and 472
men, cited in A.L. C., "Poll Finds Women's Gains
Have Taken Personal Toll," The New York Times,
Aug. 21, 1989:pp. 1,8; see also M.
B. and G. M.'s "Changes in Gender
Equity"),
not much:
|
|
ALL WIVES
|
ALL
HUSBANDS
|
WIVES WORKING
FULL-TIME
WITH CHILDREN
UNDER 18
|
HUSBANDS WITH
CHILDREN AND
WORKING WIVES
|
PERCENT OF
ADULTS WHO SAY
THE WIFE
|
does the most
cooking
|
78%
|
69%
|
64%
|
56%
|
does the most
housecleaning
|
74%
|
70%
|
66%
|
58%
|
does most food
shopping
|
69%
|
61%
|
62%
|
53%
|
does the most
childcare
|
68%
|
41%
|
56%
|
28%
|
does the most
billpaying
|
57%
|
45%
|
61%
|
42%
|
does the most
household repairs
|
17%
|
8%
|
22%
|
12%
|
PERCENT OF
ADULTS WHO SAY
THEIR SPOUSE
|
does MORE than his
or her fair share of chores
|
11%
|
46%
|
16%
|
51%
|
does his or her fair
share of chores
|
61%
|
48%
|
40%
|
47%
|
does LESS than his
or her fair share of chores
|
27%
|
3%
|
42%
|
3%
|
PERCENT OF
ADULTS WHO SAY
|
they do not get
enough time to themselves
|
47%
|
37%
|
84%
|
49%
|
the men are willing
to let women get ahead, but only if
women still do all the housework at
home
|
57%
|
39%
|
60%
|
38%
|
the women's movement
has made things harder for men at
home
|
53%
|
55%
|
59%
|
65%
|
THE
DOUBLE STANDARD OF
AGING
In the Fall of
1996, "The First Wives Club" was packing women
into theaters across the country. The movie
pushed a common button: aging males trading in
their first wives for younger trophy
brides.
Why are men
allowed to age without penalty while women must
look young and lie about their age or risk
disqualification from the sexual and marriage
markets? Throughout the animal kingdom, the
female is the longer-lived sex and yet for years
the U.S. Department of Labor labeled women as
"old" at age 35 and males "old" at
45?
OK. In
American society, strike one against you if
you're old. Strike two if you are female. And
what if you a a minority member as well? Enter
the so-called "triple- jeopardy" model.
Click
here to see the percent of "very happy"
Americans broken down by age, sex, and
race.
Special times
for women:
*
Women's
History Month.
Out of the educational efforts of the
California-based National Women's History
Project, National Women's History Week was
proclaimed in 1981 to coincide with
International Women's Day, March 8. Six years
later, Congress set aside the whole month to
celebrate the remarkable stories and significant
achievements of women.
*
Take
Our Daughters to Work
Day
* October is
Battered Women's Month.
*
Mothers
Day
RACIAL
TIMES
Over fifty
years ago Swedish economist G. M. argued in An
American Dilemma that the problem of race in the
United States cut to the very core of our
definition as a people. Though founded on the
ideals of individual liberty and personal
dignity, he saw that we could not, through law
or social practice, treat the descendants of
slaves as the equals of whites. But, in 1944, he
could hardly have foreseen what would happen.
Between 1889 and 1918, the NAACP reported that
3,224 black men and women had been lynched. Even
three decades ago, Ronald Reagan opposed the
1964 Civil Rights Act.
In the early
1960s there was, among African Americans, the
sense of time running out for J. C. (much like
the sense of time running out for apartheid in
South Africa). In 1961, ABC television presented
a documentary that presents the blacks' point of
view. It tells of black impatience--not a
popular topic in some quarters of the South.
Some boycotted the show's sponsor, B. & H..
In Louisiana, schools were prohibited from
buying its products. A few years later, NBC had
to cancel the "N. K. C. Show" because sponsors
would not pay for blacks on TV.
In 1976,
Kentucky ratified the 13th Amendment outlawing
slavery. Since 1980, we've seen the first black
Miss America and the first black astronaut. In
1994 marked the 30th anniversary of LBJ's
signing of the Civil Rights Act. This opened
public accommodations to all, began school
desegregation, institutionalized equal
employment opportunities, and extended voting
rights to all. The South of the early sixties is
now as remote as the antebellum
South.
Histories of
the African American Experience
Certainly one
acknowledgement of the history of a people is to
have their memories affixed on a postage stamp.
It was not until 1940, with the issuance of a B.
T. W. stamp, that the United States first so
honored an African American. Since that time, 56
black Americans have been so commemorated.
Yahoo!
- Society and Culture:Cultures:African
American:History
Selections
from The African-American Mosaic: A Library of
Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black
History and
Culture
Isis:
African American Women in
History
Abolition
Ex-Slave Narrative
Collection
366th
Infantry HomePage National
Civil
Rights
Museum
Negro
Leagues Baseball Online
Archives
Other social
groups claiming their own months for historical
reflection include:
Native
American History Month
Hispanic
Heritage Month Asian
Pacific
American
Heritage Month Gay and
Lesbian
History
Month
SECOND
PART