Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Why do you remove the years 1969-1985 and 2001+? They were good years for many people, peaceful years for most Americans. Vietnam and GWOT were largely minor, political concerns and individual tragedies. Put another way: for my part of Eastern Pennsylvania the last time an invading army got anywhere near threatening was around the 4th of July 1863. The sending of local boys overseas, while occasionally tragic for individual families, never seriously depopulated the young men.
During the Pax Romana or the Five Good Emperors there were border wars, pirates, provincial revolts, etc. But if you lived in certain parts of the empire, things were good and peaceful. Rome wasn't sacked for a long time in between.
So I guess I'm asking how do you define a golden age?
If it's continuous rule without notable wars, I would guess one of the Chinese dynasties had solid staying power.
I would say a golden age is mostly constantly increasing prosperity for the commoner, political stability in the hinterlands and well lack of bad things for big enough parts of the population. A feeling of predictability and security.
I exclude the 70s and early 80s because of the oil embargo, inflation, formation of the rust belt, decay of the urban cores and the start of the cost disease. Not that those processes stopped but the winning the cold war dividends and the IT revolution were so massive that they masked them.
And the USA changed after 9/11. The follies of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Enron and Worldcom scandals, dotcom bust, then the financial crisis - the times were turbulent. In a way after 9/11 the Americans never really felt secure as a whole.
I would argue that ripples like the oil embargo, the rust belt, Vietnam, 9/11 and the GWOT, the great recession, etc. happened in Ming China or the Pax Romana or Victorian England and we mostly don't remember them, we might not even have the written accounts or data to know about them or how important they felt at the time.
I would define a Golden Age, and this might be a values thing, as peace and prosperity combined with high cultural production that has stood the test of time.
Peace can be defined as lack of invasion or the threat of invasion. Sticky point: what level of violence in the transition of power qualifies as a Civil War? And what constitutes core vs periphery? There were probably prosperous provincial cities in Rome that were safe from much of the political violence in the Capital, and were safe enough from invasion for long enough that they had longer safety than Rome itself.
Prosperity can be defined as lack of poverty, Henry IV's "I want there to be no peasant in my realm so poor that he will not have a chicken in his pot every Sunday." [Sticking Point: defining poverty, and the importance of growth vs stagnation and upward or downward mobility]
Cultural Production includes great architecture, literature, philosophy, religion.
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