August 6, 2009

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I wrote about Joshua Glenn’s new schema for generations a year ago - basically, Glenn’s MO is to toss out distended categories like “Generation X” for tighter, single-decade groupings with names like “Hardboileds” or “The Net Generation.”

That was at Brainiac, the blog for the Boston Globe. But at Hilobrow, Glenn’s still working back, decade by decade, which is especially awesome for 1) people who are geeks for the nineteenth-century, like me, and 2) all of us, who have a much less intuitive sense of generational changes or continuities the longer we look beyond living memory.

For example, consider the generation born between 1854 and 1863. Glenn calls them “the Plutonians”:

Pluto is the god of the underworld, and members of this generation