Common Location in History
Common location refers to where a generation finds itself, at any given age, against the background chronology of trends and events. Location in history gives shape to a generation.
At critical moments in history, members of each generation tend to occupy a single phase of life. At the end of World War II, the Silent, G.I., Lost, and Missionary Generations each fit snugly into the age brackets of youth, young adulthood, midlife, and elderhood age. The same close fit between generations and phases of life occurred in the late 1920s (just before the Great Crash), or in the early 1960s and early 1980s (just before and after an era of cultural upheaval). These phase-of-life alignments are generational crucibles. A peer group therein acquires what Mannheim called “a community of time and space, …a common location in the historical dimension” in which members encounter “the same concrete historical problems.” Ortega refers to them as “zones of dates” which make members of a generation “the same age vitally and historically.”
At any given moment, history inevitably touches a generation’s oldest and youngest cohorts in different ways. The Vietnam War put far more pressure on Boomers born in 1945 than in 1955, for example, and World War II put far more pressure on G.I.s born in 1920 than in 1910. Yet within each generation, a few special birth cohorts can pull on older or younger people and gravitate them into a sense of common location. Cheryl Merser observes in Grown Ups that for Americans born in the 1950s (like herself), their “sixties took place in the seventies.” This “sixties” experience felt authentic enough to bind Merser and her peers to older Boomers who knew the genuine article. But no one could have their “sixties” in the fifties or eighties. People born in 1944 and 1954 thus share a common age location, while those born in 1954 and 1964 do not.
Generations can be separated at exact birth dates by paying attention to what Marías defines as the “social cartography” of successive birth cohorts. “In this analogy,” he suggested, “each generation would be the area between two mountain chains, and in order to determine whether a certain point belonged to one or the other, it would be necessary to know the relief.” Sometimes the watershed is obvious, sometimes subtle. Occasionally, even a split-second can be decisive in binding and separating adjacent generations. In contemporary America, a one-minute delay in birth can mean the difference between kindergarten and first grade six years later. Down the road—depending on the conscription laws—that can mean the difference between gliding through college just ahead of a controversial war, or belonging to a class that feels real pressure from a wartime “draft.” A one-minute difference did in fact separate the newborn babies of December 31, 1942, from those of January 1, 1943—a critical tick of the clock that later helped ignite the fiery college Class of ’65 and create a lasting cohort boundary between the Silent and Boomers.
