Quote:
Originally Posted by harryc
I'd put the start of the modern era at 1860's - the US civil war, then the Franco Prussian war. When the fate of nations stopped being in the hands of kings and generals and switched to the modern nation state.
several regimes will miss this change - much to their distress - the Confederates, Prussians, later the Japanese.
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I won't disagree with you. Many eras have their claim on "modernity". In some ways, the ancient Athenians and Ionian Greeks were essentially "modern"--their embrace of free inquiry and rationality, philosophy, literature, history, science, limited democracy and the like. The 1600s and 1700s have a claim, with modern science and mathematics, and political revolutions. The late 19th century--the telephone, electricity, railroads, modern total warfare, germ theory, vaccines, and antiseptic medicine and surgery, populism, social trends etc. But the 1920s are also special in my opinion. Dress, customs, radio and mass communications, right of women to vote, liberated women, black migration to the north, founding of NAACP & pushback against KKK, jazz, air conditioning, completely modern science (general relativity, the expanding universe, quantum theory etc.), consumerism and credit, music, airplanes, cars, modern film etc. The pace to "modernity", good and bad, picked up speed I think. You could plant a 1920s person in 2021 and in a few weeks he would feel at home. The 1930s only intensified the push to modernity, with the New Deal and the modern welfare state, with things like social security, and increased government intervention in capitalism.