ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author indicates that it is to the 1950s that contemporary commentators now refer when they variously lament or celebrate the breakup of a perceived stability, a social order in which the social classes, women and various other unruly Others knew their place. In economic terms the death knell of the old era came a few years later, with the oil crisis and the recession which also punctured the optimism of the new age as well as marking the automatic assumption of growth in post-war western democracies. The first wave of postmodernism emerged around 1960 in America's universities and Bohemian enclaves. It sprang from the people who invented happenings, assemblages, environments and the art that would come to be called Pop – people who without knowing it were inventing the 1960s.
