The Strange History of the Decade: Modernity, Nostalgia, and the Perils of Periodization

At the root of all historical inquiry is time. "In truth," Fernand Braudel once observed, "the historian can never get away from the question of time in history: time sticks to his thinking like soil to a gardener's spade."1 The omnipresent character of time, though, does not necessarily dictate confusion for those who would consider aspects of its story. Generally speaking, humans have character? ized time as being linear (flying like an arrow shot from a bow) or cyclical (the repeating patterns ofthe seasons, for instance) in its flow.2 The decade, however, does not fit easily into either of these broad characterizations. Rather, the con? cept ofthe decade represents thinking about time in a punctuated, discontinuous manner. Discontinuous time encourages viewing history not as a seamless web of events, but as discrete, temporally fragmented snapshots. Of course, to the extent that the decade is representative ofthe practice of periodizing history, it is hardly novel. After all, periodization has its own long history?for example, Kant saw his time as an "Enlightened" new age, Tocqueville wrote of a divide in his world between an age of aristocracy and one of democracy, and late nine? teenth and early twentieth century sociologists conceived of society undergoing a transition from traditional, personal relationships to modern, faceless organi? zations. Unlike these conventional sorts of periodizations, however, the decade represents a different strain of discontinuous time, one that has been neglected by historians.3 Historians, to be sure, have generated a rich literature on conceptions of time in American culture, but this body of work has focused on the compression of daily time that took place during industrialization, ignoring units of periodized time.4 While this approach has taught us much about understanding the differ? ent ways in which work and leisure time have been organized, it has slighted the ways in which longer-term notions of time have themselves changed and developed. As a result, many journalists, cultural critics, and historians have been left perplexed when it comes to reckoning with distinct periods, with one scribe recently moved to wonder, "What's in a decade, anyway? And how is it that this arbitrary and slim crosscutting of time, a mere ten years, has grown and flourished to the point that we all walk around in a self-conscious haze about what a new decade represents even before the previous one has tolled its last?" Unlike experience-orient ed chronological markers, such as wars, famines, dynasties, depressions, and the Renaissance, to name but several, the decade? much like the century?is a decimal-oriented chronological marker that is said to possess distinctive cultural characteristics, a category that is often legitimized simply because the calendar year ends in a zero. This is an important distinction, and one worth emphasizing. Years ago, Marc Bloch called atten? tion to the "insidious" and irrational practice of treating history as a progression of centuries, noting "we appear to assign an arbitrarily chosen and strictly pendulum-like rhythm to realities to which such regularity is entireiy alien. It is