I love reading history and am currently shuttling between two books:
this one and
this. They both seem very good as far as I've read.
But I often wonder how people then felt about the times they were living through. They didn't wake up one day and say, "Oh, it's the Renaissance now, let's clear out all that mediaeval dead wood!". They were aware of things changing but saw everything as a continuum.
My husband and I are both in our 70s and have lived through various decades: the 40s, the 50s, the 60s right up to the teens of this century. Decades are in themselves an artificial construct and we can't see huge divisions anywhere along our path. But when I see film of the 1940s now, I'm struck by how different everything looked and how different people's assumptions were.
Does anyone here see obvious divisions? How do you think people a couple of hundred years in the future will see it?