The most basic question the authors had to address in the development of this treatise is exactly WHO are the members of the Defining Generation. As this book progressed it seemed that the term was subject to expansion beyond what we initially expected, e.g. that The Defining Generation was the young men and women who "came of age" (in their teens or early twenties) during that period often called the "turbulent 60s" and briefly into the 1970s. Generally, these young are identified by the single most prominent and divisive event of our period, the Vietnam War (1960 - 1975).

These young men and women have often also been described as "Baby Boomers", children born of the Greatest Generation in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Even here, historians of the period have difficulty pinpointing the exact start and end dates of the unprecedented birth of children in America. Perhaps the most-widely accepted standard is that the Baby Boomers are those 78 million children born between 1946 and 1964, although even that is subject to considerable disagreement.

Some who have studied our history believe the baby boom began three years earlier, in 1943, when the mid-war rotation of men in military resulted in the return of many soldiers from overseas posts on furloughs or reassignment. Some ascribe the end of the baby boom as early as 1958, when the spike in births reached its peak and began to decline measurably.

Historian Steve Gillon, author of Boomer Nation, refers to children born between 1959 and 1964 as Shadow Boomers. "I think in order to be a genuine baby boomer, you have to have some recollection of the Kennedy assassination," he told CBS News in 2006. "The Kennedy assassination is, it's the first event of national significance that people experienced simultaneously and through television.[i]"

Perhaps more importantly than describing The Defining Generation as "those who were conceived during the Baby Boom," whatever period of time one ascribes to the term, is identifying the MOVEMENT that this generation witnessed, participated in, and ultimately made history as a part of. The 60s movement (which extended into the mid-'70s) is generally seen as a revolution of the young, the questioning of authority, and ousting of the status quo as the determinant standard for life in the United States.

While the most dramatically vivid event of that period was no doubt the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, ours was a revolution that had already been launched through the sweeping changes of the early 1960s: Kennedy's Commission on Women's Rights, introduction in Congress of the Civil Rights Act, establishment of the Peace Corps, and expansion of the space program, among other developments. Thus we have come to believe that the "shot heard round the world" of the 60s revolution most likely was the January 20, 1961, inauguration of John F. Kennedy. The youngest man ever elected President of the United States, he came to represent a break from the old ways and then illustrated it through a brief two and a half years in the Oval Office.

Ironically enough, it was perhaps the yearning for something new that propelled Kennedy to victory over the sitting vice president who despite his own uncommon youth (for a Presidential candidate) had come to represent the OLD. Richard M. Nixon would reemerge during the latter years of the 1960s, finally attaining the political office he lost in 1960 but forced as President to confront Civil Rights Protests, a women's movement demanding an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and an American public at odds with American involvement in the war in Vietnam. Ironically, though all of these issues were still unresolved and continued to ferment turmoil in America, the revolution that began in 1961 ended thirteen years later on August 9, 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned as President of the United States.

History can not blame the revolution of the Defining Generation on President Nixon; he was a victim of that revolution as surely as events in his life marked both its beginning and its end. Those events however, do give us a relatively specific time in American history to pinpoint an era of sweeping change. For our purposes, the Defining Generation is those young men and women in their teens and twenties, including some who were born in the early years of World War II as the Defining Generation.