History turns in seasons, once a long lifetime.
A saeculum spans eighty to a hundred years. Each passes through four turnings, a High, an Awakening, an Unraveling and a Crisis, and each turning shapes a generation with its own archetype. Here are seven saecula of Anglo-American history, from the Wars of the Roses to the present.
{{ fv.name }}
{{ fv.lede }}
{{ s.lede }}
Spring
Summer
Autumn
Winter
{{ rp.name }}
{{ rp.lede }}
Rings run from the Late Medieval (inner) to the Millennial (outer). Each quarter is a turning. The open dot marks the present.
{{ sv.name }}
{{ sv.lede }}
{{ tv.name }}
{{ tv.lede }}
{{ e.d }}
Each generation’s phase of life at the turning’s midpoint.
{{ tv.mood }}
{{ a.v }}
{{ ev.name }}
{{ ev.bio }}
{{ ev.ctx }}
Each generation is cast by the season of its childhood.
Strauss and Howe argue that the turning a generation is born into shapes its collective persona. Four archetypes recur in a fixed order, so the same alignment of elders, midlifers, young adults and children returns roughly every eighty years.
{{ a.desc }}
Follow a diagonal to trace one generation through life. Hover a cell to highlight it; scroll sideways through time.
Solid bars are birth years; the lighter tail follows each cohort to about age eighty. Background bands are turnings.
The Millennial Crisis in pictures.
Drag along the timeline, or use the arrow keys, to step through the events that have defined the Fourth Turning since 2008.
{{ vtCap }}
{{ vtWhat }}
{{ vtRel }}
Your workbook
Collect events and people from across the atlas, ask the analyst what connects them, and play out the next saeculum.
{{ wbSelName }}
Nothing saved here yet. Use “Save to workbook” on any event in the Crisis Tracker or on any page in the atlas, or search below.
The analyst reads the items in this folder and your current scenario in Next Saeculum.
Pick a folder and a question on the left, or ask your own. I look for patterns across your saved events, compare them with past Crises and offer forecasts, which are speculation.
{{ p.t }}
The next saeculum
{{ l.t }}
A calendar for the seasons of history
Saeculum is an atlas of the generational theory of William Strauss and Neil Howe, who argued that history moves in cycles about as long as a human life.
The saeculum
The Etruscans and Romans used the word saeculum for the span of the longest human life, roughly eighty to a hundred years, the time it takes for everyone alive at a given moment to have died. Strauss and Howe borrowed it for the rhythm they saw in Anglo-American history.
Each saeculum passes through four turnings of about twenty years, which they compared to the seasons. A High follows a crisis, when institutions are strong and people trust them. An Awakening brings a revolt of the spirit against that order. An Unraveling weakens institutions as individualism grows. A Crisis then destroys the old order and builds a new one, often through war or revolution.
The turnings shape the generations born into them. Four archetypes, the Prophet, Nomad, Hero and Artist, recur in the same order, so that when a Crisis arrives each archetype stands in the same phase of life it held in the last one. The previous Crises in this atlas came with the Wars of the Roses, the Armada, the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War.
Strauss and Howe
William Strauss (1947–2007) was a writer, playwright and co-founder of the political satire troupe the Capitol Steps. Neil Howe (born 1951) is a historian and economist. They met in Washington in the 1970s and spent the rest of Strauss’s life writing together.
In Generations (1991) they traced American history as a sequence of generations going back to 1584. In The Fourth Turning (1997) they set out the cycle of turnings and predicted that a new Crisis would begin around 2005 and reach its climax in the 2020s. Their 2000 book Millennials Rising gave the Millennial generation its name. After Strauss’s death, Howe carried the work forward in The Fourth Turning Is Here (2023), which dates the current Crisis from the financial crash of 2008 and expects it to end in the early 2030s.
The theory has many critics, among historians especially, who argue that history is too varied to follow a fixed cycle and that the pattern fits Britain and America better than the rest of the world.
Why this site
Saeculum maps the theory onto nearly six centuries of history, from 1435 to the present. The atlas lays out each saeculum and its turnings. The archetypes and players show who was born into each generation and the roles they went on to play.
The Crisis Tracker follows the turning Strauss and Howe foresaw, counted here from 2008, and collects its events as they happen: the wars, uprisings, elections and new technologies of these years. The aim is to set the news against a longer pattern, to ask whether the present resembles the Crises of 1773, 1860 and 1929, and to let readers judge the fit for themselves.
The site presents the cycle as Strauss and Howe described it, not as settled fact.
The Millennial Crisis, day by day.
A running record of the Fourth Turning as it unfolds, drawn from Wikipedia’s daily Current Events portal and set beside what happened on this date in earlier turnings.
{{ d.noteText }}
The same date in earlier turnings, back to 1435.
Consulting the almanac…
Sources: Wikipedia Portal:Current events and Wikipedia’s On This Day feed, fetched live. Player tags are matched automatically by name.
Major players
People, generations, institutions and nations, arranged by the saeculum in which they first appear.
Nothing matches that filter.