The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny

by William Strauss

The saeculum is a seasonal cycle of history, roughly the length of a long human life, that explains the periodic recurrence of Awakenings and Crises throughout modernity. The Anglo-American saeculum dates back to the waning of the Middle Ages in the middle of the fifteenth century. There have been seven saecula: Late Medieval (1435-1487) Reformation (1487-1594) New World (1594-1704) Revolutionary (1704-1794) Civil War (1794-1865) Great Power (1865-1946) Millennial (1946-2026?) America is presently in the Third Turning of the Millennial Saeculum and giving birth to the twenty-fourth generation of the post-Medieval era. On each of the following seven page pairs, the turnings are shown on the left and the generations on the right. Each generation is shown next to the turning in which it was born. (The birth dates typically precede the turning dates by about two to four years.) For any turning, the constellation of generations includes the children shown to its right, plus the three prior generations. The chart on page 138 displays the seasons of Anglo-American history. Turnings A turning is a social mood that changes each time the generational archetypes enter a new constellation. Each turning is roughly the length of a phase of life. The First Turning is a High—an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays. (Nomads enter elderhood; Heroes, midlife; Artists, young adulthood; and Prophe...

Turnings and saculums