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Project and Historical Overview
The Generations project was an extremely deep dive into many different facets of a generation. My group and I explore the Baby Boomer Generation (1946-1964). During this project, we split the generation up into thirds and each of us took one of those years to focus on. We dubbed those our "focus years". In the project, we researched the political climate, mindset, pop culture, and different artifacts that influenced and made up our generation in order to get the most complete understanding of the people born in those years. My focus years were from 1946-1951, Leslie's were from 1952-1957, and Maya focused on 1958-1964.
Generational Portrait
Generational Portrait
Characterized by its hard work ethic and value for family. They took all aspects of life very seriously.
This generation was born with their parents setting the expectations that they would live a good life.
Nationalism was major.
Progressive because of policies implemented in 60s as result of cultural shift/change
They grew up rebellious as noted in the change in music and style.
For our generational portrait, rather than focusing on making it as concise as possible, we tried to focus on touching on all the aspects that characterize our generation in the clearest way possible. We included the primary values, how they lived their life at the time, and the political atmosphere that heavily shaped much of their behavior and ideologies. In doing this, we were able to create five all encompassing statements to form our generational portrait for the Baby Boomers.
Timeline
Timeline
We used our timeline as the most in-depth part of our project. In the timeline, we included over 30 different events, artifacts, and people that had the biggest impact on the boomer generation.
Historical Context
Our historical context acted almost as the highlights of the timeline. We took the most important and influential pieces of history and went in-depth into each topic explaining the context behind them as well as how they were able to shape our generation. These were some of the biggest factors that answer those "why?" questions that so many people as about the boomers. such as "why are they so stuck in their ways and stubborn?", "Why do they all seem to be such hard workers?", and many more.
The pop culture artifacts used in our presentation allow us to see into the past. From an outside standpoint, it just makes look like an old or "retro" advertisement or item. But when you really examine all the different aspects of what was going on at the time the pieces of the puzzle start coming together. For example, we have the Jeep Willy, which was an extremally popular car at the time, and had advertisements all over magazines and newspapers. If one stops to wonder why, you can put two and two together and realize, that many of the people that are of the car buying age served in World War 2, which the Jeep Willy was one of the primary modes of transportation used by the men in Europe when we won the war.
Reflection
I personally learned much more than I thought I would have learned in doing this project. Everyone knows the boomer stereotypes from internet memes at this point. But through this project, I was able to not ionly understand why they are the way they are, but I also developed a huge amount of respect for people born during those times. For, our life as the boomers always say has been handed to us on a silver platter. And, while I know everyone has their own problems and issues to deal with, we never had to get put through much of what they did. Not to mention technology has massively facilitated much of our lives.
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