In this discussion, there were the Nat Turner Revolt, the Frederick Douglass era, the Booker T. Washington years, the Marcus Garvey movement, the W. E. B. DuBois years, the Martin Luther King, Jr., years, the Malcolm X years, and the current Jesse Jackson years. But the same principal applies to other historical overviews. A typical history shelf will bear witness to the Jeffersonian Era, the Jacksonian Era, the Lincoln Years, the Wilson years, the Roosevelt years, the Churchill years, the Kennedy era, the Reagan years, the Stalin era, and the Napoleonic period.
Historians do tend, for ease of identification, to append biographical labels to periods of history.
One trouble with this shorthand practice, some students suggested, is that it implies credits to one person, while thousands and even millions of unnamed people go unrecognized for their contributions and work in that person's time-span. Jackson wasn't the only toiler in the vineyard in the middle of the first half of the 19th century, but he gets the billboard name. Lincoln didn't fight the Civil War alone. Equally curious to the class discussants was the fact that almost always names chosen to symbolize an era of history are male. They noted very few eras in history bear the names of women.