Neil Howe Books

A generation is more than an age bracket; it is a social personality formed by history. Strauss and Howe argue that across American history, generations tend to reappear in four recurring archetypes: Prophet, Nomad, Hero, and Artist. Each archetype is shaped by the social environment of childhood an...

From Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069

Societies do not merely drift; they pass through recurring moods. Strauss and Howe claim that American history unfolds through a cycle of four “turnings,” each lasting roughly two decades: High, Awakening, Unraveling, and Crisis. Together, these four phases form a saeculum, an approximately eighty- ...

From Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069

The deepest claim in Generations is that America’s recurring rhythms began long before the modern United States existed. Strauss and Howe trace the pattern back to the colonial period, arguing that early settlers did not simply build institutions from scratch; they also began reproducing a long cycl...

From Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069

America’s great upheavals are not isolated explosions; in Strauss and Howe’s telling, they are recurring climax points in a larger civic rhythm. The Revolutionary era and the Civil War era, though separated by generations and circumstances, both function as crisis periods in which institutional brea...

From Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069

One of the book’s most provocative contributions is its application of the generational cycle to modern American history. Strauss and Howe connect the Progressive era, the world wars, the postwar boom, and the cultural revolutions of the late twentieth century into a coherent sequence rather than a ...

From Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069

Strauss and Howe became especially well known for applying their framework to living and emerging generations. In Generations, they identify Generation X as a cohort shaped by institutional neglect, rising divorce, economic uncertainty, and cultural fragmentation. As a result, they portray this gene...

From Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069