Football

UCLA beat USC in football tonight, 38-20.  The cross-town rivals first played on September 28, 1929 - about a week after the first warnings in the stock market, in particular a sudden drop on September 18, and about a month ahead of Black Thursday. Which puts it right at the end of the exciting days of the Third Turning. A fair number of significant rivalries - though by no means all football rivalries - can be traced to that time:

• Notre Dame - USC (1926)
• The Old Oaken Bucket (1925)
• Maryland-Virginia (1919)
• TCU-Texas Tech (1926) 
•  Or if you prefer: Texas A&M-Texas Tech (1927) or Texas-Texas Tech (1928)

(Knute Rockne was the Notre Dame football coach from 1918 to 1930, which happens to be mostly the Third Turning and also when it started up most of its rivalries.)

Some from other periods:

• Michigan-Notre Dame (1887)
• Harvard-Yale (1875)
• Army-Navy (1890)
• Berkeley-Stanford (1892)

That Third Turning was a distinctive time for college nostalgia, from raccoon coats to the various references that can be seen in the Marx Brothers' film Horse Feathers. No small part of that nostalgia appears to be simply the excitement of the time - the stock market was up, education was a way to get involved in the money-making that was happening, life could only get better. It's one of the nostalgic periods that makes the generational model because it's so clear that the time then was very much like the dot-com era of the most recent Third Turning - that these very similar periods keep coming back.