Some call it the Postmodern Age, others: Age of Affluence. This post goes from 1945 to the 1990s and puts people in their historical and cultural contexts with little comment. The church is also included in the outline. At the end, however, is a conclusion section that asks what the Western world is about. Let’s preserve it.

Some people call it the Age of Late and Postmodernism.

Click on What Is Postmodernism?

Please click on the Timeline of the Age of Affluence for more information (a lot more information!).

If you’re in a hurry, use the ctrl-f search to find your key term.

Let’s get started.

I. Introduction

A. Timeframe:

1. End of WWII and Start of Cold War

2. 1990s

History

I. 1945-1961

A. Cold War

1. Harry S. Truman (1948-1953)

a. Korean War (1950-1953)

2. Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961)

3. Nikita Khrushchev (1956-1964)

4. Crises of 1956

B. NATO (1949)

1. U.S.

2. Great Britain

3. France

4. Spain

5. Portugal

6. Italy

7. West Germany

8. Greece

9. Turkey

10. Norway

11. Denmark

12. Belgium

C. Warsaw Pact Members (1955)

1. Soviet Union

2. Poland

3. East Germany

4. Czechoslovakia

5. Hungary

6. Bulgaria

7. Romania

D. America

1. Prosperity / Affluence

a. Building, Highways

b. Business growth

2. Civil Rights Movement

a. Brown v. Topeka Board of Education

1)  Unconstitutional to segregate blacks and whites, separate is not equal

b. Bus Boycott in Montgomery, Alabama (1955)

c. by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

E. Church

1. Civil Rights Movement (see above)

2. World Council of Churches (1948)

3. National Council of Churches (1950)

4. Revivalism

a. Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (1950)

5. Evangelicals

a. Christianity Today (1956)

6. Pentecostalism

a. Healing evangelists

II. 1961-1969

A. President Kennedy (1961-1962)

1. Berlin Wall (1961)

2. Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)

B. Civil Rights Movement

1. March on Washington in 1963 and MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech

2. Civil Rights Act of 1964, which desegregates public accommodations

3. Voting Rights Act of 1965

C.  Vietnam War (1961-1973)

1. 600 troops and advisors in early 1961

2. 16k by late 1963

3. 1964 Amer. ship attacked in Tonkin Bay

4. 500k by 1973

5. April 30, 1975 Saigon falls to N. Vietnam

D. War on Poverty

1. Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1968)

E. Sexual Revolution

1. The “Pill” (Introduced in 1956)

F. Church

1. Vatican Council II (1962-1965)

a. Pope John XXIII (r. 1958-1963)

b. Pope Paul VI (r. 1963-1978)

2. Charismatic Movement

a. Lutherans and Episcopalians (1960)

b. Missouri Synod Lutheran (1967)

III. 1970-1989

A. Watergate Scandal (1972-1974)

1. Richard M. Nixon (1968-1974)

B. Financial Turmoil

1. Gerald Ford (1974-1977)

2. Jimmy Carter (1977-1981)

C. Ronald Reagan (1981-1989)

1. Conservatism

a. Limited government

b. Lower taxes

c. Laissez-faire economics

d. Peace through strength

2. Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-1992)

a. Perestroika (“Restructuring”)

b. Glasnost (“Openness”)

D. Church

1. National Catholic Pentecostal Conference: 10,000 (1972)

2. First International Lutheran Conference on the Holy Spirit: 10,000 (1972)

3. Vineyard Movement (1977)

4. Jesus Movement (late 1960s and 1970s)

5. Pope John Paul II (r. 1978 to 2005)

6. Pentecostalism

a. Trinity Broadcasting Network (1973)

7. Religious Right

a. Moral Majority (1979)

b. Christian Coalition (1989)

Philosophy

I. Structuralism and Deconstruction

A. Structuralism

1. Sign is signifier (word on page) and signified (definition)

2. Tree is the word on page and concept is definition (a woody perennial plant having a single usu. elongate main stem generally with few or no branches on its lower parts)

3. Referent is actual, physical tree

4. Arbitrary Connection between Signifier and Signified

5. Impoverished (or bloated?) symbol of referent

B. Deconstruction

1. Arbitrariness of language

2. Disconnect between referent and language

3. Metaphysical referent

a. What is it?

b. Is its definition fixed?

c. Does it even exist?

d. Can it exist without language?

e. If it does, how do we know?

              4. Deconstruction

a. Use sign to destroy privileged meaning

b. Sign is under erasure

Click on post Deconstruction: The Language Games People Play

Literature

I. Late Modernism (1945-1970s)

A. Theatre of the Absurd (1950s-1970)

1. Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

B. Beat (1950s)

1. Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

2. Allen Ginsburg (1926-1997)

II. Postmodernism (1970 to present)

A. Continuity with Modernism

1. Alain Robbe-Grillet (b. 1922)

2. Jose Luis Borges (1899-1986)

a. Magic Realism

B. Diversity and Globalization

1. Alice Monro (b. 1931)

2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez (b. 1928)

3. Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1948)

4. Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 1948)

5. Naguib Mahfouz (b. 1911)

6. Chinua Achebe (b. 1930)

Click on What Is Postmodernism?

Visual Arts

I. Late and Postmodernism

A. Abstract Expressionism in Painting (1945-1970)

1. Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)

2. Mark Rothko (1903-1970)

3. Helen Frankenthaler (b. 1928)

4. Jasper Johns (b. 1930)

5. Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925)

6. Willem de Kooning (1904-1997)

B. Pop Art in Painting (1960s)

1. Andy Warhol (1927-1987)

2. Robert Rauschenberg (see above)

3. Roy Lichtenstein (b. 1923)

4. Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929)

C. Minimalism and Conceptualism (1960s)

1. Donald Judd (b. 1928)

2. Sol Le Witt (b. 1928)

3. Christo (b. 1935) and Jeanne-Claude (b. 1935)

II. Architecture

A. International Style (1932-1970)

1. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1887-1969)

2. Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret, 1886-1965)

3. Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)

CONCLUSION

Western world, you’re too sleepy! Wake up! Take back your good heritage, like your true, biblical Christian faith, rather than empty religion, and leave the bad past behind. And don’t allow communism or Islamism to erode your freedoms. Even postmodern art has a right to keep going.