Perceptions of history

[DMB]

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?

[DixieGal]

I am very aware that we are living in amazing times. It is always a subject of wonder to me.

[RainingLemur]

Originally Posted by DMB

How do you think people a couple of hundred years in the future will see it?

I imagine that we'll probably eventually have a similar re-telling of history to the one that was told in the movie Idiocracy -

Originally Posted by Time Masheen

We're gonna take you back, to the year 1939 when Charlie Chaplin and his nazi regime enslaved Europe and tried to take over the world...

...But then an even greater force emerged, the U.N. (Pronounced as "Un", not "yoo-en")

... and the U.N. un-nazied the world - forever.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by DMB

Does anyone here see obvious divisions? How do you think people a couple of hundred years in the future will see it?

I expect it will depend on the country you live in...
...and how broad a focus you are willing (emotionally) to take.

In general, it will be easier to identify the "breakpoints" the further back you go as more of the ramifications and indirect effects will have manifested as opposed to more recent events that have yet to play out fully.

For example, looking at the wars of the 20th century, one could just as plausibly argue that they are a collection of nationalistic power struggles or a single planet-wide ideological "debate" on the best way to organize and run a modern society. A debate that some might consider settled, having run from 1910-1989, while others would argue that the question is still open and that a global answer will never be found.

The breakpoints are real and over-abundant; easy to identify and list, *after* you decide what criteria/lens you want to look through. Looking to minimize emotional responses, one might say the major defining breakpoints of the 20th century are all technology driven; the invention of radio which enabled mass media, for one; the development of microprocessors and the still ongoing computing revolutions it has fostered, leading to revolutions in communications, entertainment, and education, which in turn are steadily changing regional cultures and people's way of life. Think: ebooks.

Other people can, and have, take(n) a demographic approach and breakdown change in terms of generational cohorts and the aggregate value systems.

It all depends on where you come from both literally and figuratively so the challenge isn't so much in identifying the breakpoints and the causality cascades that follow them as it is in getting people to agree on their importance and merit.

[RDaneel54]

I'm thinking pre-Star Trek and post-Star Trek.

I find reading about historical events and cultures as described by the contemporaries illuminating. Winston Churchill's books on WWII and William T. Sherman's memoirs are interesting insights.

The multitude of biographies of Abraham Lincoln written over the last 140+ years give insight not only into this president, but also his biographers.

I think people in the future might look back on our time and say, "They thought and did that?" "Why were they so foolish then, Mommy?"

[wvcherrybomb]

I'm constantly amazed at how fast technology has advanced in recent years. When my oldest child turned 18, cell phones where brand new technology and I remember how impressed we all were with the one we got her that year. Most people still had car phones or bag phones.

Now, my youngest child is 18 and most people, him included, have smart phones. These phones do things we could barely have dreamed of back then, and it wasn't that long ago. My oldest and youngest are only 11 years apart. To see first hand the changes that have taken place just as they were growing up is mind boggling.

I've only mentioned cell phones here as a specific example to avoid writing a novel. Looking over the videos of Christmas between 1982 (my first child) and now, really emphasizes how different things are just in the amount of time. Christmas gifts are the best example since that's when my kids got all the good stuff.

In the early videos, the video itself was new technology and the camera was the size that reporters carry. The VCR had to be hooked to the camera while filming so was carried in a shoulder bag. It was huge and heavy, nothing like today's VCRs ... or should I say DVD players. This year Christmas will be filmed with a camera that fits in the palm of my hand and is tethered to nothing.

[SmokeAndMirrors]

Originally Posted by DMB

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?

This is a great question. And thanks for pointing out those books!

I'm still young - I could be your grandkid. But now in my 20's, I'm beginning to see what will soon be "historical." And things have changed.

It's so slow, and you really have to think about it to see it. But even simple things - music, clothes, have changed significantly.

Science has changed drastically. We're inches from curing cancer and AIDS. We're ripping pieces from atoms with freakish precision. We have robots that are smart enough to do basic office work. We can grow body parts, and we're close to being able to use them for transplants, eliminating the need for health-destroying immune suppressant drugs. We have stem cell therapy and bionic limbs. We didn't have any of these things when I was a little kid.

Technology, which I suppose is related, also a drastic change. I remember playing Doom on my dad's computer as a toddler. Computers were monsters then, with only a couple hundred pixels on even the biggest of monitors. Now, I carry around a computer that's a thousand times more powerful than the computer I played Doom on, and it weighs less than 3 pounds. And the internet? Nothing but a geek chatroom, back then.

But there's more than that. This is an important era. Some of the things I've seen will make the history books.

I was in London when the economy collapsed. It happened so fast - Liverpool Street went from bustling to dead in 48 hours. The pound imploded, losing 50 cents of its value pretty much overnight. I stood at street level, looking up, watching frantic people in the financial buildings. And I know that 50 years, 100 years, from now, children in the UK will be learning about what I saw that day.

I went to OccupyMN the other day, as a reporter. It was my second update. My first article beat the Star Tribune by 6 hours. And I know that someday, that will be in the history books too. Probably not my article, but my article will be in the mountains of information about what happened here. It will be one of the first accounts of the movement coming to Minnesota. And I was there.

We live in an era where everything is changing. Apart from the economy, and related to the topic of this site, media is changing. Everything is moving online, and with it, former leviathans are being crushed under the weight of their own resistance to change, and artists are just beginning to find a louder voice, now that the giants are falling out of their way. Art is undergoing a revolution. I see the future as bright for artists. These rocky years are to be expected, and it's going to be uncomfortable for several more years to come. But when the dust settles, the landscape of expression and media will be completely changed.

I'm coming into adulthood at such an important and historical time. This may sound weird, but I was a weird kid who tended to hang out with adults and was fairly current with what was going on around me. I remember as a child, I was sitting in the car with my dad. I was around 8 - it was the mid 90's. I turned to him and said, "Why is there nothing going on? There's all this noise but nothing important happening, no one really doing anything." I didn't articulate it well, but what I was trying to say is that I didn't see your average Joe being involved in any sort of dialogue about the world he lives in.

The 90's were, for your average American, a placid time to live. Something in me enjoys a good fight, and I found that boring. I find that pointless. Life has no meaning to me if there's not something that needs changing, and I'm not doing something to help it along. The 90's was a pointless decade for someone like me.

I had no idea it was the calm before a storm. And I wonder what people will think of the times we now live in when I'm your age.

[bfisher]

I have seen what seem to me to be massive changes over my life (60 years) in Canadian society, but that is from a personal perspective. I do think that sometimes it is possible to see big changes even from the perspective of 200 or 300 years. For example, 200 or 300 years from now, people will probably see a vast difference between the China of 1940 and the China of 2010, but possibly not between the Canada of 1940 and the Canada of 2010.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by RainingLemur

I imagine that we'll probably eventually have a similar re-telling of history to the one that was told in the movie Idiocracy -

That movie sounds awesome! Need to find it somewhere...


OT: I think you can point to certain events in your timeline where you can say: yes, something happened here and from here on, there'll be changes The changes themselves are more easily seen afterwards as changes will take time. Often those points have something to do with war, but it could also be something mundane as a government change to something so different from what you had before.

[HomeInMyShoes]

I don't see obvious divisions, but there are events that occur that demarcate certain eras. While looking at a place event-minus-one-day versus event-plus-one-day doesn't look much different there is that division anyway.

Humans like to classify and categorize. We like to make order. The concept of free-flow time doesn't really mesh with our need for order so we demarcate it. We call people born within certain years baby boomers, or x'ers, or y'ers and we shove things into decades.

I'm sure we'll continue to demarcate things and I think we'll see more splitting of the timeline into bits and pieces then we've seen in the past.

[elizilla]

I read a book called Made In America by Claude Fischer, that takes on some of these questions. I really enjoyed it. The author also has a blog, at http://madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com/ that goes through some of the topics in bite sized articles.

[CommonReader]

Thank you for this thread. I loaded "The Swerve" on my Sony and I am going to start reading it in a couple of days.

Living in Germany I have seen massive changes taking place during the last decades. The collapse of Communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall with subsequent reunification were the most immediate and visible historical changes. It is difficult to find any other period in history when a large Empire collapsed with such a speed for internal reasons only as we saw happening to the Soviet Union. Even though Putin is an autocrat his regime is so much more benign than what could have happened instead. Instead of dealing with Putin we could very well be dealing with some Stalinist dictator now.
As to Germany: when I lived in Berlin I passed every day on my way to work a discreet bar made of brass inserted into the pavement that indicated where only a few years before the wall had separated the city, guarded by armed men who were prepared to shoot and kill anyone taking the same path I was taking to work a few years later. Many positive developments but also negative things like the country's involvement in Afghanistan - something that has no support in the population and would have been unthinkable only twenty years ago.
The EU has also visibly arrived at a crossroads and the next months are probably going to be decisive for its future development. The linear post-war development of the EU has definitively ended, I am sure we can say so much already.
I also believe that we are seeing quite clearly how the historic anomaly of complete dominance of the "West" over the "East" is fading fast. Even though China may very well experience massive upheavals in the near future the "East" is in a position to reassert itself again. When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s the only object "made in China" in my parent's household was a "Mao Bible" printed in China. Nowadays one is surprised when some cheap consumer goods turn out not to be made in China.

[DMB]

I can remember when cheap rubbish came from Japan. Then it was Taiwan. Now China. Who will be next?

[Sweetpea]

Probably South America. Followed by Africa.

[pholy]

Originally Posted by bfisher

I have seen what seem to me to be massive changes over my life (60 years) in Canadian society, but that is from a personal perspective. I do think that sometimes it is possible to see big changes even from the perspective of 200 or 300 years. For example, 200 or 300 years from now, people will probably see a vast difference between the China of 1940 and the China of 2010, but possibly not between the Canada of 1940 and the Canada of 2010.

Maybe not much changed in Ottawa (oops, that belongs in the P&R forum), but Toronto has changed tremendously. In 1940 it was a pretty staid British city, with a (single) Chinatown and a Jewish neighbourhood. Now it is said to be the most diversified city in the world, shops open on Sundays and even on holidays in 'tourist' areas. Canada itself has changed from a mostly rural population to 80% urban.

On the other hand, and to your earlier comment on perspective, Will and Ariel Durrant's _The Story of Civilization_ ended with the French Revolution. They said it was too early to judge anything newer; of course royalist curmudgeons say there is a more obvious reason.