Baby boomers
Baby boomers are the generation born between 1946 and 1964, the years of the great postwar population surge that reshaped nearly every country on earth. Sylvia F. Porter was among the first to name it: in a column published on the 4th of May, 1951, in the New York Post, she described a "boom" driven by an increase of 2,357,000 people in the U.S. population between 1940 and 1950. The term "baby boomer" itself followed more than a decade later, first appearing in a January 1963 article in the Daily Press by Leslie J. Nason, who wrote about the massive surge in college enrollments as the oldest members of that cohort came of age. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the modern meaning of the term to a the 23rd of January 1970, article in The Washington Post.
Who are these people, and why did their sheer numbers change the world? They came of age in the shadow of nuclear fear and in the glow of an unprecedented economic expansion. They inherited a world rebuilt by their parents, then proceeded to upend much of it. Their political divisions, their cultural rebellions, and their demographic weight continue to ripple through every society that produced them. What follows is the story of that generation: its fractured definitions, its economic inheritance, its education, its rebellions, and the long demographic reckoning it has set in motion.
Landon Jones laid out the now-standard 1946-to-1964 frame in his 1980 book Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation, and that definition has since been adopted by institutions ranging from the Pew Research Center to the U.S. Census Bureau to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. But scholars and demographers have contested the boundaries ever since.
William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their 1991 book Generations, drew the lines at 1943 and 1960, arguing the cohort was defined by those too young to remember World War II but old enough to recall the postwar American High before John F. Kennedy's assassination. David Foot, writing in Boom, Bust and Echo: Profiting from the Demographic Shift in the 21st Century (1997), defined a Canadian boomer as someone born from 1947 to 1966, the years when more than 400,000 babies were born annually in that country. In France, Jean-Francois Sirinelli, in Les Baby-Boomers: Une generation 1945-1969 (2007), extended the span to 1969, while his compatriot Michele Delaunay, writing in 2019, placed the French boom between 1946 and 1973 and the Spanish boom between 1958 and 1975.
Within the United States, the generation splits into two broadly defined halves. The leading-edge boomers, roughly 38,002,000 people born between 1946 and 1955, came of age during the Vietnam War and civil rights eras. The trailing half, often called Generation Jones and numbering around 37,818,000, were born between 1956 and 1964 and entered adulthood during the Watergate scandal and the economic "malaise" of the 1970s, shaped by the 1973 oil crisis and energy shortages. Politically, early boomers in the United States have tended toward the Democratic Party, while later boomers have leaned Republican, a divergence rooted in the very different historical moments each group encountered on their way to adulthood.
Full employment was reached on both sides of the Atlantic by the 1960s. After the Second World War, the United States poured enormous financial assistance into Western European nations through the Marshall Plan, while the Soviet Union channeled equivalent resources eastward through the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. Both blocs rebuilt at a pace that astonished even optimistic projections.
Items once considered luxuries, such as the laundry machine, the dishwasher, the refrigerator, and the telephone, entered mass production for the average consumer. Technological advances from before, during, and after the war, including plastics, television, magnetic tape, transistors, integrated circuits, and lasers, drove dramatic improvements in living standards. Globally, agricultural output doubled between the early 1950s and early 1980s, more than that in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia, while the fishing industry tripled its catches. Average life expectancy in the West increased by about seven years between the 1930s and 1960s.
This abundance proved double-edged. The enormous cohort flooding into the workforce depressed wages; by the mid-1980s, younger boomers could only expect to make about a third of what their fathers earned as new entrants to the labor force. Members of the Silent Generation, entering the workforce in the 1950s, had found an abundance of jobs and could expect parity with their fathers' wages at the entrance level. The "Golden Age" began to falter in the 1970s as automation ate away jobs at low to medium skill levels and as Generation Jones entered the workplace en masse. Western capitalist nations slid into recessions during the mid-1970s to early 1980s, and in the European Community, the average unemployment rate stood at 9.2% by the late 1980s, despite the deceleration of population growth.
In China, the economic story unfolded in a starkly different key. Chairman Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward replaced monetary income with six basic services: food, healthcare, education, haircuts, funerals, and movies. The subsequent Great Famine of 1958-1961 killed up to 30 million people. People who experienced the famine as toddlers were noticeably shorter than those who did not, a human measure of its severity. China had a population of around 830 million in 1970, but by the mid-2010s, many of its neighborhoods were, according to journalist Howard French, disproportionately filled with the elderly, whom the Chinese themselves called a "lost generation."
In 1950, American institutions of higher learning enrolled 2.6 million students. By 1970, that number had reached 8.6 million, and by 1980, it climbed to 12 million. In Europe, between 1960 and 1980, university enrollment grew by a factor of four to five in West Germany, Ireland, and Greece, and by a factor of seven to nine in Spain and Norway. The total number of universities worldwide more than doubled in the 1970s.
In West Germany, the number of university students grew steadily through the 1960s, reaching 400,000 by 1966, up from 290,000 in 1960, even as the Berlin Wall prevented East German students from attending. In South Korea, the share of the population enrolled in university grew from around 0.8% to 3% between 1975 and 1983. Because the baby boomers pressed so hard for higher education, costs began to rise, making the Silent Generation the last cohort to benefit from tuition-free public universities anywhere in the United States.
What was being taught inside those expanding universities became its own battleground. In France, a commission headed by Andre Lichnerowicz undertook sweeping reforms of mathematics education, replacing Euclidean geometry and calculus in the curriculum from elementary school through the Baccalaureate with set theory and abstract algebra, following the austere style of the Nicholas Bourbaki school. The same government mandated these highly abstract courses for all students, whether they aspired to pure research or planned to leave school early to join the workforce. Critics multiplied. Mathematicians, physicists, and industrial leaders attacked the reforms as being suitable for neither teachers nor students. Lichnerowicz resigned and the commission disbanded in 1973.
In the United States, the Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 triggered a national education emergency. Life magazine reported that three quarters of American high-school students took no physics at all. On President Dwight D. Eisenhower's direct orders, science education underwent major reforms, with the federal government pouring large sums into research and development. One result was the Berkeley Physics Course for undergraduates, influenced by MIT's Physical Science Study Committee. Among its most enduring volumes was Electricity and Magnetism by Nobel laureate Edward Mills Purcell, which remained in print well into the twenty-first century.
Quantitative historian Peter Turchin identified a compounding problem he called elite overproduction: the number of graduates was larger than the economy could absorb, which he argued contributed to political polarization, social fragmentation, and even violence. About a quarter of baby boomers ultimately earned at least a bachelor's degree.
Journalist Tom Wolfe coined the phrase "Me Decade" to describe the 1960s, a label that captured the generation's turn toward self-expression and away from communal obligation. By the early 1960s, elements of counterculture had already entered public consciousness on both sides of the Atlantic, but were not yet viewed as a threat. West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer acknowledged that the "most important problem of our epoch" was what many young people saw as the empty materialism and superficiality of modern life. By 1968, the Central Intelligence Agency reported to the President that counterculture was a highly disruptive force both domestically and abroad.
LSD, synthesized in 1938 by chemist Albert Hoffmann during research aimed at curing migraine, was promoted as a psychedelic drug in the 1960s by psychologist Timothy Leary. Attempts to ban it in 1966 made the substance more popular rather than less. A significant cultural event of the era was the Woodstock Festival in August 1969, which drew enormous crowds despite bad weather and a general lack of facilities; the actual attendance figure proved difficult to determine even with aerial photography.
In West Germany, the Extra-parliamentary Opposition (APO), primarily student-backed, sought reforms to the university admissions system. One of its most prominent figures, Rudi Dutschke, declared "the long march through the institutions" as a strategy for the civil service. A more violent offshoot, the Red Army Faction (RAF), a militant Marxist group most active in the 1970s and 1980s, looted stores, robbed banks, and kidnapped or assassinated businessmen, politicians, and judges. The RAF disbanded in 1998, having outlasted its American counterpart, the Weather Underground.
In France, massive youth protests in May 1968, combined with a simultaneous general strike by labor unions, created general mayhem described by observers as resembling a civil war, especially in Paris. Charles de Gaulle stepped down as president in 1969. Yet no major government was overthrown by the protests and riots of the decade. Political scientist Raymond Aron dismissed the upheaval as no more than "psychodrama" and "street theater." Sociologist Todd Gitlin characterized the counterculture as self-indulgent, childish, irrational, and narcissistic. The backlash proved substantial: in U.S. counties that saw riots rather than peaceful demonstrations, the Republican Party gained votes by appealing to desires for security and stability, a dynamic that shaped American politics through at least the 1990s.
A new doll named Barbie Millicent Roberts came to market in the United States in 1959 and became an icon of girlhood for the boomer generation. The television set became commercially available right after the Second World War and quickly dominated family life. Soap operas, a genre named after its sponsorship by soap and detergent companies, migrated from radio to television in the 1950s and found enormous audiences; many viewers from that era grew old with their favorite programs and introduced them to their children and grandchildren.
In comics, a moral panic over juvenile delinquency led to Fredric Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent in 1954, which helped drive the creation of the Comics Code Authority that same year to regulate violence in the medium. The resulting Silver Age of American comics, which lasted until the early 1970s, introduced characters who have remained cultural fixtures for decades, including Batgirl (Barbara Gordon), Spider-Man (Peter Parker), and the X-Men.
In literature, J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951) attracted adolescent readers even though it was written for adults, and its themes of angst and alienation became synonymous with young-adult fiction. S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders (1967), written during high school when Hinton was only 16, presented a darker side of adolescent life and remains one of the best-selling young-adult novels of all time. Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (1970) broke ground by addressing masturbation, menstruation, teen sex, birth control, and death.
The music industry made a fortune in the 1960s and 1970s selling rock records to people between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five. That era produced Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin, among others, artists whose lifestyles left little room for longevity. Blue jeans, made popular partly by actor James Dean, became a common sight across the Western world, even outside college campuses. In France, the fashion industry discovered in the mid-1960s that trousers could outsell skirts. A striking feature of this youth culture was its internationalism: whereas earlier generations had typically preferred cultural products from their own countries, young people in the 1960s and 1970s readily consumed music and fashion from elsewhere, above all from the United States.
In May 1960, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first contraceptive pill. Invented by Gregory Pincus in 1956, it marked the first time in human history that sexuality and reproduction could be reliably separated. Yet the revolution it enabled was slower than legend suggests; it was not until the 1980s that the pill became widely available across the United States and other Western nations. Outside of marriage, contraception remained illegal in the U.S. into the 1970s.
Alfred C. Kinsey's two books, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1958), used confidential interviews to argue that sexual behaviors previously deemed unusual were far more common than generally believed. Despite triggering a storm of criticism, the Kinsey Reports earned him the nickname the "Marx of the sexual revolution." In the United Kingdom, the Lady Chatterley trial in 1959 and the first long-play album by the Beatles, Please Please Me in 1963, began altering public perceptions of sexuality in ways that young people subsequently amplified.
The sexual revolution brought with it measurable social costs alongside the freedoms it created. Illegitimate births increased sharply, as did sexually transmitted diseases. Public health officials raised alarms about an epidemic of gonorrhea and the emergence of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). Many young people also faced peer pressure to enter relationships they felt ill-prepared for, with serious psychological consequences.
Women's access to higher education grew in parallel. More women earned university degrees than ever before and entered the professions at unprecedented rates. In Roman Catholic countries such as Ireland and Italy, the 1960s and 1970s saw a deep schism between the Church and young people on issues including divorce and abortion. The contraceptive pill, antibiotics that could cure venereal diseases, and the broader challenge to traditional authority created the conditions for the second wave of feminism, with which leading-edge boomers are closely associated. That wave would carry forward into the 1980s, long after the counterculture that had partly inspired it had faded.
In 2019, the Pew Research Center estimated that 71.6 million baby boomers were living in the United States, using U.S. Census data and the 1946-to-1964 definition. By 2018-29% of Americans aged 65-72 were still active in the labor force, according to the same organization, a rate higher than earlier generations had maintained. Those who chose to keep working tended to be university graduates, white, and residents of large cities. The longer they postponed retirement, the more Social Security benefits they could ultimately claim.
Statistics Canada reported in 2015 that for the first time in Canadian history, more people were aged 65 and over than people below the age of 15. One in six Canadians was above the age of 65 in July 2015. In 2018-19.70% of the population of the European Union were 65 or older. The median age across the EU was 43 in 2019, up from about 29 in the 1950s. By 2017, the median age in Monaco had reached 53.1 years; in Germany and Italy it was 45; in Greece, Bulgaria, and Portugal it stood at 43.
Japan's population peaked in 2017, and forecasts at the time suggested the elderly would make up 35% of the population by 2040. As of 2018, Japan was already a super-aged society, with 27% of its people older than 65. In China, as boomers retire from the late 2010s onward, the people replacing them in the workforce constitute a far smaller cohort, a direct consequence of the one-child policy. China's central government has faced what one analysis described as a stark trade-off between "cane and butter": how much to spend on social welfare programs for the elderly and how much to invest in military capacity.
Peter Turchin predicted that the 2020s would see the same pattern of political polarization and social fragmentation that the 1960s produced, driven again by a surplus of university-educated young people entering an economy unable to absorb them all. Whether that prediction holds will partly depend on how societies manage the cost of supporting a generation that is now, in most developed countries, the single largest age cohort in their history.
Common questions
Who coined the term baby boomer and when was it first used?
Journalist Sylvia F. Porter used the term "boom" in a column in the New York Post on the 4th of May, 1951, describing the postwar population surge. The specific phrase "baby boomer" first appeared in a January 1963 article in the Daily Press by Leslie J. Nason. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the modern meaning to a the 23rd of January 1970, article in The Washington Post.
What years define the baby boomer generation?
The most widely accepted definition covers those born from 1946 to 1964, as used by institutions including the Pew Research Center, the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Some scholars use different ranges; William Strauss and Neil Howe defined the cohort as 1943 to 1960, while French politician Michele Delaunay placed the French boom between 1946 and 1973.
How large is the baby boomer population in the United States?
The Pew Research Center estimated 71.6 million baby boomers were living in the United States as of 2019, using U.S. Census data and the 1946-to-1964 definition. The leading-edge group, born 1946-1955, numbered roughly 38,002,000 people, while the trailing cohort, Generation Jones, born 1956-1964, numbered around 37,818,000.
What was Generation Jones and how did it differ from early baby boomers?
Generation Jones refers to the trailing half of the baby boom, born roughly between 1956 and 1964, comprising about 37,818,000 people in the United States. Unlike leading-edge boomers who came of age during the Vietnam War and civil rights movements, Generation Jones entered adulthood during the Watergate scandal, the 1973 oil crisis, and the economic difficulties of the 1970s. Politically, early boomers in the U.S. have tended toward the Democratic Party while later boomers have leaned Republican.
How did baby boomers' college enrollment change American higher education?
American institutions of higher learning enrolled 2.6 million students in 1950, a number that rose to 8.6 million by 1970 and reached 12 million by 1980. Because so many baby boomers pursued higher education, tuition costs rose and the Silent Generation became the last cohort to benefit from tuition-free public universities anywhere in the United States. About a quarter of baby boomers ultimately earned at least a bachelor's degree.
What was the Red Army Faction and how did it connect to the baby boomer counterculture?
The Red Army Faction (RAF) was a militant Marxist group in West Germany that was most active in the 1970s and 1980s, emerging from the student protest movements of the late 1960s. Its members believed the West German economic and political systems were inhumane and fascist; they looted stores, robbed banks, and kidnapped or assassinated businessmen, politicians, and judges. The RAF disbanded in 1998, having outlasted its American counterpart, the Weather Underground.
All sources
215 references cited across the entry
- 1bookBorn at the Right TimeDoug Owram — University of Toronto Press — December 31, 1997
- 2journalBoom, Bust & Echo: How to Profit from the Coming Demographic ShiftBruce Little et al. — 1998
- 3bookThe Big ShiftBernard Salt — Hardie Grant Books — 2004
- 4newsThe Echo Boomers – 60 MinutesRebecca Leung — September 4, 2005
- 5newsHow good are generational boundaries at actually capturing generations?Philip Bumb — February 23, 2023
- 6bookBorn at the Right TimeDoug Owram — University of Toronto Press — 1997
- 7bookGreat Expectations: America and the Baby Boom GenerationLandon Jones — Coward, McCann and Geoghegan — 1980
- 8bookThe Better Angels Of Our NatureSteven Pinker — Penguin — 2011
- 9newsOpinion | Mr. Jones and Me: Younger Baby Boomers Swing LeftJennifer Finney Boylan — 23 June 2020
- 10newsThe unprecedented aging crisis that's about to hit ChinaJudy Woodruff et al. — August 1, 2016
- 11bookThe Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World without AmericaPeter Zeihan — Zeihan on Geopolitics — 2016
- 12webMillennials overtake Baby Boomers as America's largest generationRichard Fry — Pew Research Center — April 28, 2022
- 13webHow Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials Got Their NamesMay 1, 2018
- 14newsBaby Boomers, Grown Up, Storm Ivy-Covered WallsLeslie J. Nason — January 28, 1963
- 15newsbaby boomer1974
- 16newsThe modern family size is changing. Four charts show how.Aria Bendix et al. — NBC News — January 12, 2023
- 17encyclopediaDefinition of Baby Boomer
- 18newsDefining generations: Where Millennials end and post-Millennials beginPew Research Center — March 2018
- 19webThe labor force and unemployment:three generations of changeJessica Sincavage
- 20webYounger baby boomers and number of jobs heldDomingo Angeles
- 21newsDistribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System — December 23, 2019
- 22newsPopulation by Age and Sex, Australia, States and TerritoriesAustralian Bureau of Statistics — December 20, 2018
- 24webYouGov Ratings FAQ
- 25webBarbeques and black armbands: Australians' attitudes to Australia DayDarren Pennay et al. — Social Research Center — January 25, 2019
- 26webThe Baby Boom Cohort in the United States: 2012 to 2060Sandra L. Colby et al. — United States Census Bureau — May 2014
- 27newsHere Is When Each Generation Begins and Ends, According to FactsPhilip Bump — March 25, 2014
- 28newsHow 'baby boomers' took over the worldLandon Y. Jones — November 6, 2015
- 29bookGenerations: The History of Americas Future, 1584 to 2069Neil Howe et al. — William Morrow — 1991
- 30newsBy definition: Boom, bust, X and whyCanada — June 24, 2006
- 31bookLe fabuleux destin des baby-boomersDelaunay, Michèle VNV — 2019
- 32bookLes Baby-Boomers: Une génération 1945-1969Sirinelli Jean-François — Hachette Littératures — 2007
- 34webThe Big ShiftBernard Salt — November 2003
- 35encyclopediaBaby boomer definition | Open Education Sociology DictionaryKenton Bell — October 8, 2013
- 36webOpinion The Baby Boomer WarJames Wright — April 11, 2017
- 37webA Generation Goes to WarClaire Barrett — October 17, 2017
- 38webBaby Boomers Are Opening Their WalletsJohn Fleming — January 30, 2015
- 41webHow to tell if you're part of 'Generation Jones'May 28, 2020
- 43bookMarketing to Leading-Edge Baby Boomers: Perceptions, Principles, Practices, PredictionsBrent Green — Paramount Market Publishing — 2006
- 44webNot My GenerationJeffrey J. Williams — March 31, 2014
- 45webSeniors moving forward in reverseAdam Avery — December 19, 2008
- 46newsIn Obama, many see an end to the baby boomer eraJocelyn Noveck — January 25, 2009
- 47newsPopulation decline might start sooner than forecastCrystal Hsu — August 31, 2018
- 48newsMOI: Taiwan officially becomes an aged society with people over 65 years old breaking the 14% markGeorge Liao — April 10, 2018
- 49newsSeven countries with big (and small) population problemsJuly 16, 2020
- 50newsTaiwan's population could start shrinking in four yearsIsabella Steger — August 31, 2018
- 51newsWhy the world now has more grandparents than grandchildrenFernando Duarte — April 8, 2018
- 53webMedian Age of the Population in Every CountryJeff Desjardins — April 18, 2019
- 54webDid South Korea's Population Policy Work Too Well?Carl Haub
- 55newsSouth Korea's fertility rate set to hit record low of 0.96Benjamin Haas — September 3, 2018
- 56bookWhither the Child? Causes and Consequences of Low FertilityEric Kaufmann — Paradigm Publishers — 2013
- 57journalShall the Religious Inherit the Earth?Eric Kaufmann — Winter 2010
- 58newsTwo new books explain the Brexit revoltNovember 3, 2018
- 59newsFertility rate drop will see EU population shrink 13% by year 2100; active graphicSinead Barry — June 19, 2019
- 60newsModels of aging: How Japan, Denmark, Germany are riding out their senior waveLara Fraser — September 30, 2015
- 61newsMore Canadians are 65 and over than under age 15, StatsCan saysSeptember 29, 2015
- 62journalBook Review: The Rise and Fall of Anglo-AmericaAllison Varzally — 2005
- 63bookThe American Nation: A History of the United StatesJohn A. Garraty — Harper Collins Publishers — 1991
- 64bookThe American Nation: A History of the United StatesJohn A Garraty — Harper Collins — 1991
- 66newsEconomy faces bigger bust without BoomersEmily Kaiser — January 31, 2008
- 67newsEnd of the road for the BeetleJune 6, 2003
- 68bookEssential Visual History of the WorldNational Geographic — National Geographic Society — 2007
- 69bookThe Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics: A Math-free Exploration of the Science that Made Our WorldJames Kakalios — Gotham Books — 2010
- 70bookGenerations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What The Mean for America's FutureJean Twenge — Atria Books — 2023
- 71bookWomen Work & FamilyLouise Tilly et al. — Rutledge — 1988
- 72bookLIFE: Our Century in PicturesBulfinch Press — 1999
- 73journalA guide to vaccinology: from basic principles to new developmentsAndrew J. Pollard et al. — December 22, 2020
- 74journalEconomic vs. Epidemiological Approaches to Measuring the Human Capital Impacts of Infectious Disease EliminationCaroline Chuard et al. — National Bureau of Economic Research — July 2022
- 75journalReduce to SeduceKimberly Chrisman-Campbell — August 2025
- 76bookThe Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991Eric Hobsbawn — Abacus — 1995
- 77newsBaby booms and busts: how population growth spurts affect the economyDiane J. Macunovich — September 8, 2015
- 78bookThe Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991Eric Hobsbawn — Abacus — 1996
- 79webWhat happens when we run out of food?Richard Gray — March 20, 2019
- 80bookThe Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991Eric Hobsbawm — Abacus — 1996
- 81journalThe cognitive impact of the education revolution: A possible cause of the Flynn Effect on population IQDavid P. Baker et al. — March 2015
- 82webL'enseignement des mathématiques au XXe siècle dans le contexte françaisHélène Gispert
- 83bookWhy Johnny Can't Add: The Failure of the New MathMorris Kline — St. Martin's Press — 1973
- 84bookPrecalculus Mathematics in a Nutshell: Geometry, Algebra, Trigonometry: Geometry, Algebra, TrigonometryGeorge F. Simmons — Wipf and Stock Publishers — 2003
- 85journalNew Textbooks for the 'New' MathematicsRichard P. Feynman — 1965
- 86journalAn Interview with Vladimir ArnoldS.H. Lui — 1995
- 87journalElectricity and MagnetismH. Henry Stroke — August 1, 2013
- 88newsThe Common Core is today's New Math – which is actually a good thingKevin Knudson — 2015
- 89bookThe Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the AtomGraham Farmelo — Basic Books — 2009
- 90bookThe American Nation: A History of the United StatesJohn A. Garraty — Harper Collins — 1991
- 91newsAre Liberal Arts Colleges Doomed?Eliza Gray — October 21, 2019
- 92newsYounger Americans feel their voting weightSeptember 12, 2020
- 93bookThermodynamics and an Introduction to ThermostatisticsHerbert Callen — John Wiley & Sons — 1985
- 94webThe Effects of 'Youth Bulge' on Civil ConflictsBeehner — 2007
- 95journalPolitical instability may be a contributor in the coming decadePeter Turchin — February 3, 2010
- 96newsDecline of soap operas: Was OJ Simpson to blame?Sarah Shaath — March 27, 2019
- 97newsFor 70 Years, the Soap Opera Has Shaped American Pop CultureLorraine Ali — March 2019
- 98newsWhy the soap opera is in terminal declineHugh O'Donnell — February 17, 2015
- 99webIt's No Joke: Comic Books May Help Kids Learn to ReadJoe Mooney — April 19, 1987
- 100journal'The Night Gwen Stacy Died': The End of Innocence and the Birth of the Bronze AgeArnold T. Blumberg — Fall 2003
- 101bookFrom Girls to GrrrlzTrina Robbins — Chronicle Books — 1999
- 102bookDC Comics CovergirlsLouise Simonson — Chartwell Books — 2016
- 103webIn Defense of Superhero ComicsTimothy Callahan — August 6, 2008
- 104bookWonder Woman: The Ultimate Guide to the Amazon WarriorLandry Q. Walker — DK — 2017
- 105bookSuperheroes!: The History of a Pop-Culture Phenomenon from Ant-Man to ZorroBrian R. Solomon — Applause — 2023
- 106journalDeveloping a love of reading: why young adult literature is importantMary Owen — Mar 2003
- 109webThe OutsidersPenguin Random House
- 110news'The Outsiders': 40 Years LaterDale Peck — 2007-09-23
- 111magazineJudy Blume's Magnificent GirlsAnna Holmes — March 22, 2012
- 112newsTime 100April 13, 2023
- 113webPen Pals with Judy Blume in conversation with Nancy PearlFriends of the Hennepin County Library — 2015
- 114web1996 Margaret A. Edwards Award WinnerYoung Adult Library Services Association (YALSA). American Library Association — 1996
- 115bookSpies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and WestCalder Walton — Simon & Schuster — 2023
- 116webBetty Friedan: The Three Waves of FeminismSally Ann Drucker — April 27, 2018
- 117webThis Election Is the Baby Boomers' Last HurrahLandon Jones — Time — August 24, 2016
- 118webGoodbye to all of thatAndrew Sullivan — The Atlantic — November 6, 2007
- 119newsShushing the Baby BoomersJohn M. Broder — January 21, 2007
- 120webEconomic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?Isabel Sawhill, Ph.D — 2007
- 121webLost Generations? Wealth Building Among Young AmericansEugene Steuerle — Urban Institute — 2013
- 122webThe Whys and Hows of Generations ResearchAbigail Geiger — September 3, 2015
- 123newsChinese millennials aren't getting married, and the government is worriedGan Nectar — January 30, 2021
- 124bookCold War: An Illustrated HistoryJeremy Isaacs et al. — Little, Brown and Company — 1998
- 125journalThe Rise and Fall of an International Counterculture, 1960-1975Jeremi Suri — February 2009
- 126journalAnother Side of the Sixties: Festive Practices on College Campuses and the Making of a Conservative Youth MovementCaroline Rolland-Diamond — 2016
- 127webThe Legacy of the CountercultureJason George — Columbia University — 2004
- 128webThe selling of the counterculture (Book Review: The Rebel Sell)The Economist Newspaper Limited — May 6, 2005
- 129bookMathematics in BerlinH. G. W. Begehr — Birkhäuser Verlag — 1998
- 130newsNew Study Shows Riots Make America ConservativeJonathan Chait — May 21, 2015
- 131magazineWhen Americans Lost Faith in the NewsLouis Menand — January 30, 2023
- 132bookThe Cold War: A New HistoryJohn Lewis Gaddis — Penguin Books — 2005
- 133bookThe American Nation: A History of the United StatesJohn A. Garraty — HarperCollins Publishers — 1991
- 134bookAn Equation for Every OccasionJohn M. Henshaw — Johns Hopkins University Press — 2014
- 135news12 Things You Didn't Know About The Infamous Charles SobhrajAbhishek Saksena — May 28, 2015
- 136newsThe 'bikini-killer' linked to murders throughout AsiaAugust 12, 2004
- 137webA Brief History of the Hippie TrailRichard Gregory
- 138webThe PillAmerican Experience — February 24, 2003
- 139bookThe Story of Sex: A Graphic History through the AgesPhilippe Brenot et al. — Black Dog & Leventhal — 2017
- 140journalThree Papers on Going SteadyThomas Poffenberger — Jan 1964
- 141bookYouth and sexuality in the twentieth-century United StatesJohn C. Spurlock — 2016
- 142bookThe American Nation: A History of the United StatesJohn S. Garraty — Harper Collins — 1991
- 143newsOne Legacy of the Pandemic May Be Less Judgment of the Child-FreeSamhita Mukhopadhyay — August 5, 2020
- 144bookGenerations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X and Silents—and What The Mean for America's FutureJean Twenge — Atria Books — 2023
- 145bookPopulation Decline and Ageing in Japan - The Social ConsequencesFlorian Coulmas — Routledge — May 11, 2007
- 146bookLow Fertility in Advanced Asian Economies: Focusing on Families, Education, and Labor MarketsShigeki Matsuda — Springer Nature — January 3, 2020
- 147bookThe Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991Eric Hobsbawm — Abacus — 1996
- 148newsHow the biological clock — and its ticking — became shorthand for a woman's fertilityLisa Bonos — May 24, 2016
- 149newsThe foul reign of the biological clockMoira Weigel — May 10, 2016
- 150newsWhy family-friendly policies don't boost birth ratesJohn Burn-Murdoch — March 29, 2024
- 151newsThe Nuclear Family Was A MistakeDavid Brooks — March 2020
- 152journalAssortative Mating by Cultural and Economic Occupational StatusMatthijs Kalmijn — University of Chicago Press — September 1994
- 153journalFive Decades of Educational Assortative MatingRobert D. Mare — February 1991
- 154newsMarital choices are exacerbating household income inequalitySeptember 21, 2017
- 155newsSex, brains and inequalityFebruary 8, 2014
- 156newsPopulation: Babies Mean BusinessAugust 9, 1948
- 158webHow the Baby Boomers Destroyed America's FutureAlex Planes — June 29, 2013
- 159webLed by Baby Boomers, divorce rates climb for America's 50+ populationRenee Stepler — March 9, 2017
- 160webThe Return of PatriarchyPhillip Longman — October 20, 2009
- 161newsChina's Twilight YearsHoward French — June 2020
- 163newsCan Gen Z Save Manufacturing from the 'Silver Tsunami'?July 24, 2019
- 164newsThe Labor Shortage Will Get Worse and May Last for DecadesMegan Cassella — September 2, 2022
- 165newsThe new retirement is no retirement: Baby boomers are keeping jobs well into their 60s and 70s because they 'like going to work'Alicia Adamczyk — April 4, 2024
- 166webBaby Boomers are staying in the labor force at rates not seen in generations for people their ageRichard Fry — July 24, 2019
- 167newsThe Global Population Is Aging. Is Your Business Prepared?Jennifer D. Sciubba — November 18, 2022
- 168newsMore Americans over 65 are working — here's whyEmily Peck — December 14, 2023
- 169newsWelcome to the "hipsturbia" eraKim Hart — September 25, 2019
- 170newsMillennials, seniors are fleeing cities in search of affordable housingJessica Guerin — March 26, 2019
- 171webAre You Smarter Than Your Grandfather? Probably Not.Megan Gambino — December 3, 2012
- 172newsPlan to raise China's retirement age sparks angerNovember 20, 2020
- 173bookThe coronavirus pandemic and older workersRowena Crawford et al. — September 30, 2020
- 174webThe pace of Boomer retirements has accelerated in the past yearRichard Fry — November 9, 2020
- 175newsRobot orders by companies surge as labor shortages lingerBrett Molina — November 13, 2021
- 176newsGermany has a plan to tackle a rapidly aging workforce: recruiting robotsHannah Ward-Glenton — May 1, 2023
- 177webBeijing Welcomes Its New Robot Coworkers: China's Aging Crisis and AutomationSam Meacham — March 31, 2023
- 178newsAn ageing world needs more resourceful robotsFebruary 16, 2019
- 179newsConversations with Alexa: How robots are helping Canada's aging population connectCraig Lord — December 22, 2022
- 180newsStudy: As a population gets older, automation acceleratesPeter Dizikes — September 15, 2021
- 181journalDemographics and AutomationDaron Acemoglu et al. — January 2022
- 182newsRobotics and automation, employment, and aging Baby BoomersKenneth Anderson — January 23, 2014
- 183newsBritain's class problem comes down to "assortative mating"Lianna Brinded — December 30, 2017
- 184newsThe Great Wealth Transfer in 3 chartsDom DiFurio — WFTV (Orlando, FL, US) — April 23, 2025
- 185webThe average amount in U.S. savings accounts – how does your cash stack up?Karen Bennett et al. — February 27, 2026
- 186journalThe Wealth of Generations, With Special Attention to the MillennialsWilliam G. Gale et al. — National Bureau of Economic Research — May 2020
- 187newsHow baby boomers got so rich and why their kids are unlikely to catch upShannon Najmabadi — November 18, 2025
- 188newsThe 'great wealth transfer' isn't $72 trillion but $129 trillion, BofA says—and the government gave most of it to baby boomersHillary Hoffower — October 28, 2023
- 189web50% of Boomers Leave Estates to KidsSusanna Kim
- 190bookIn Search of the Perfect Health SystemMark Britnell — Palgrave — 2015
- 191newsMillennials and boomers: Pandemic pain, by the generationDan Sewell — July 13, 2020
- 193newsThe Jackpot GenerationKatrina Onstad — September 12, 2024
- 194webMedia nations: UK 2019August 7, 2019
- 195webHere's the Median Age of the Typical Cable News ViewerJanuary 19, 2018
- 196webBaby boomers are less likely than millennials to order groceries onlineMatthew McNulty — November 13, 2019
- 197newsBaby boomers show concerning decline in cognitive functioningAugust 3, 2020
- 200bookNational Populism – The Revolt Against Liberal DemocracyRoger Eatwell et al. — Pelican Book — 2018
- 201journalAgeing and generational effects on vote choice: Combining cross-sectional and panel data to estimate APC effectsJames Tilley et al. — 2014
- 202bookGeneration Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and CultureKevin Munger — Columbia University Press — 2022
- 203newsU.S. Still Leans Conservative, but Liberals Keep Recent GainsLydia Saad — January 8, 2019
- 204newsThe myth of the 2017 'youthquake' electionJanuary 29, 2018
- 205newsWill UK provide light bulb moment for US Democrats?Jon Sopel — December 15, 2019
- 206newsYoung people are outnumbered and outvoted by older generationsStef W. Kight — December 14, 2019
- 207journalGenerations and Collective MemoryHoward Schuman et al. — June 1989
- 208newsMan Of The Year: The Inheritor6 January 1967
- 209magazineWhen Young Americans Were Time Person of the Year, This Man's Face Helped Inspire a 'Portrait of a Generation'Olivia B. Waxman — December 11, 2019
- 210bookThe End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of GlobalizationPeter Zeihan — Harper Business — 2022
- 211bookBeyond Generation XClaire Raines — Crisp Publications — 1997
- 213bookAmerican Dreams: The United States Since 1945H. W. Brands — Penguin Press — 2010
- 214bookGenerations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X Boomers, and Silents—and what They mean for America's FutureJean Twenge — Atria Books — 2023
- 215newsPsychedelic Drug Use in United States as Common Now as in 1960s GenerationAshik Siddique — April 23, 2013
- 217newsAll the people: what happens if humanity's ranks start to shrink?Michael Safi — July 25, 2020
- 218newsOne region is growing older a lot faster than anywhere else in the worldDan Kopf — November 9, 2017