Do you guys see any similarities in the three decades? I'll give my input on this later, but I want to see what you guys think. :)

They were pretty similar, but more the 1920s to the 1980s and the 1950s to the 1890s than the 1920s to the 1950s, etc. All were postwar baby booms of prosperity and subtle social change with thriving underground scenes and individual ideas that exploded over the next few decades and remained extremely influential. All were also political shifts from previous decades. I think the 2010s might be similar to the '50s, lots of Generation Yers settling down and having babies and buying suburban houses and there being sort of a revival of liberal politics in a very complacent way, with economic prosperity partially due to adapting manufacturing and other industries to outsourcing, etc. But there will be a thriving underground scene that might explode into some sort of cultural revolution in the 2020s. All had nascent underground groups of "lost generations" lost under a dominant group ready to cause change. Our generation of people born between say the late 1970s and the early 1990s in North America is just destined to become a pretty establishment group by and large. I wouldn't be surprised if Generation Zers and whoever comes after them won't be spouting rhetoric that is basically a new version of don't trust anyone over thirty, the point in 2024 not to trust anybody born before 1994. Especially if the every third or every sixth decade or whatever goes right.

It does seem like the 1920s are pretty well forgotten by now. It does seem to be the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, and the 80s that people get nostalgic over - not the 30s and 40s su much. It's hard to imagine that people in the 2020s would get nostalgic over the 2000s, though.

Well, my grandma gets nostalgic for the 1940s, she was a teenager then. It was sort of a great decade, actually, with the US becoming the top nation in the world. That, and it was the beginning of more racial and women's rights hopes in the aftermath of WWII. And swing and jazz were really good then, and the movies were amazing.

Sarah Jane, you know our generation...I think we'll be nostalgic for the 00s but nobody else will be...this is a HORRIBLE decade.

In the 70's it seemed that everyone was nostalgic for the '50's (remember "Happy Days"," Laverne & Shirley", "Grease", etc.?). Here in the 00's there seems to be quite a lot of '80's nostalgia going on. The 90's were, well, rather unremarkable in that (in my view) there was no signature or trademark that readily defined them. I'm probably missing something obvious, but that's my quick take on it all.

People in the '90s were pretty nostalgic for the '70s. Look at Boogie Nights, Dazed and Confused, That '70s Show. The '80s was portrayed as negative and stupid without the cheesy-cool factor it has now until like 2002. I think '90s nostalgia is set to come back in the 2010s. Alot of it will sort of be a movement away from the more "refined", "hip" 2000s styles and returning to '90s stuff like grungy fashion, logo shirts, piercings, tattoos, '90s-style rap, etc. And also styles in TV and music, and general world outlook that has a more relaxed, fun, less overblown '90s feel.

It does seem like the 1920s are pretty well forgotten by now. It does seem to be the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, and the 80s that people get nostalgic over - not the 30s and 40s su much. It's hard to imagine that people in the 2020s would get nostalgic over the 2000s, though.

As of now it seems that the 90s and 80s get the most nostalgia. It seems that those who have nostalgia for the 50s are mostly those over 65 and I don't see as much 60s and 70s nostalgia as I used to see in the early 2000s. 

You are partially correct. The 1980s were the 1950s back with a vengeance (literally), but the 1920s were the closest thing to the 1960s in the 20th Century. The 20s weren't called "The Roaring 20s" and "The Jazz Age" for nothing. There were Flappers who were quite close in some ways to 1960s hippies.  Even Wikipedia says the era had a "social, artistic and cultural dynamism". Sounds like the 60s to me, baby.

Th 1980s, on the other hand, were the conservative 50s brought back with a vengeance (literally). There were those from the 50s, political figure and otherwise, who embraced conservative 50s values and who had to lay in wait, stewing in their own juices while the glorious 60s and 70s burst out all over, bringing essentially a new world. But at the opportune moment they seized it back (still being in their 50s and 60s age-wise and having a few good years left) with their boy Ronald Reagan (a symptom of 80s conservatism, not the cause), aided and abetted by the newly minted Generation X, eager to rebel against the liberal values of the generation that had just come before, and having no compunction against being "Young Republicans" (a phrase unheard of in the 60s and 70s), resulting in the perfect storm of conservatism in the 80s.

Well, my grandma gets nostalgic for the 1940s, she was a teenager then. It was sort of a great decade, actually, with the US becoming the top nation in the world. That, and it was the beginning of more racial and women's rights hopes in the aftermath of WWII. And swing and jazz were really good then, and the movies were amazing.


For sure. The 1940s saw perhaps one of the best moments of national cooperation in human history as the entire country mobilized to defeat Nazism. It's no wonder the Greatest Generation so stubbornly continued to trust in the government and believe in citizen-to-government efficacy for decades thereafter.

Part of me wishes I had been there to see it.