France's birth rate is a bit higher TTL than OTL, though that's a low bar to clear, admittedly.I wonder how strong the France of this TL would be if it didn't have any problems with low birth rates... the British would certainly be scared to death, since France has a much greater capacity to project power across the globe than the German Empire OTL.
But, yes, France would be an even bigger problem then, especially with Bonapartes in charge. It may even bring Britain into a continental alliance.
This all lines up sort of with my thinking (or at least what I've thought through haha); a "Greatest/Lost Generation" in that 1879-97 bracket, then you've got the "Forgottens" 1898-16 (a play on Silent), and then the Baby Boomers from 1917-34ish. For simplicity I'd probably just call them Boomers with "Postwar" probably being used, too.Reading a very interesting book called "Generations" by Jean Twenge in anticipation of a workshop I'm running later this spring. It is a large book but chock-full of cool charts, graphs, and data - I'm enjoying it a lot so far.
I'm curious how generations are defined and labelled in the 20th Century USA ITTL. You'd have the Greatest Generation from circa 1880 to 1895 (the people who actually fought in trenches and worked in factories during the GAW), a generation correlating to our Silents/Traditionalists from circa 1896 to 1916 (the people alive during the war who were too young to fight/work) and a Boomer analogue from 1917 to roughly 1934 or so. I think there was a mention in an update to a post-war baby boom anyway so that last part does check out.
So yes, spot on.
Tech both is and isn't the same; my thinking was that certain innovations in physics and medicine (thanks to Germany not getting gacked twice) are probably ahead of OTL, while without the pivot to mass cheap consumer electronics through Asia you probably have a few years delay in certain mobile products (iPhone/Droid type smartphones launching in 2011-12 rather than 2007-09).Obviously, everything after the mid 1930s is completely scrambled from OTL. It feels like technology is more or less the same level ITTL as opposed to OTL so you'd presumably have some sort of dot com boom in the late 1990s and the handheld revolution in the 00s/10s, which means our Xers, Millenials, and Zers could be mapped out ITTL if you want to go that way.
One thought I'd had was large generations coming in waves thanks to the Boomers (in part due to birth rates staying higher longer, and falling more gradually). So there'd be a smaller 1935-49 cohort, then a big 1949-67 cohort, a smaller 1968-83ish cohort, then a big 1983-99 millennial equivalent, and a smaller 2000-onwards Gen Z analogue
That's correct - the "right-wing backlash decade of the 1960s" will be more of a European phenomenon than a USA one, but it has echoes across the Atlantic nonetheless. Moreso just that the 1960s hold a connotation in our cultural firmament not unlike the 50s or 80s do OTL.But there's no chance of the vast social upheaval in our 1960s and early 1970s in this USA - a civil rights movement for Blacks won't really be a thing here for reasons we've discussed. Not sure about this timeline's second-wave feminism and gay rights movements either. I thought I saw somewhere our author wanted this timeline's 1960s to be reactionary as opposed to progressive like ours, but I could be dead wrong and I don't have time to look through the archives anyway this morning.
Anyway, just some random thoughts. Looking forward to seeing how it all unfolds!
As for our more radical upheaval decade... well, the EU thread's notes on "campus activism" in 1983-84 was our hint haha. The idea of TTL 1984 as OTL 1968, culturally, was just a bit too juicy not to use, considering how very much not like that it was here on Earth 1.