"In a recent survey, new college graduates listed history as the academic subject whose lessons they found of least use in their daily affairs. In part, this reflects the show-me pragmatism os today's rising generation. Yet as America embarks on the 1990's, people of all ages feel a disconnection with history. Many have difficulty placing their own thoughts and actions, even their own lives, in any larger story. As commonly remembered, history is all about Presidents and wars, depressions and scandals, patternless deeds done by people with power far beyond what the typical reader can ever hope to wield. If history seems of little personal relevance today, then what we do today seems of equal irrelevance to our own lives (and the lives of others) tomorrow. Without a sense of trajectory, the future becomes almost random. So why not live for today? What's to lose?..... ....This book presents the "history of the future" by narrating a recurring dynamic of generational behavior that seems to determine how and when we participate as individuals in social change - or social upheaval. We say, in effect, that this dynamic repeats itself. This is reason enough to make history important: For if the future replays the past, so too must the past anticipate the future."
- William Strauss and Neil Howe, "Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069" (1991)
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