Though most people now have a rough idea of what shape their culture took in any decade of the previous century, it seems slightly absurd to me to imagine an 18th Century Frenchman talking confidently about the way his compatriots were behaving in e.g. the 1640s.

Have people always had this kind of idea of the passing of the times? Have people always felt so intimately connected to the century past (the period from which they could expect to have living ancestors, after all) or have factors such as the development of photography, the moving image and recorded sound made this much easier for us?

• 1910s WWI
• 1920s Gangsters, prohibiton, dollybirds, Charleston
• 1930s Great Depression, rise of Hitler
• 1940s WWII
• 1950s Suburbia, American dream
• 1960s Free love, hippies, drugs
• 1970s Vietnam, Disco
• 1980s Yuppies, greed, synthesisers
• 1990s Grunge, Generation X
• 2000s The Web, social media, Silicon Valley