A Short Walk through Our Long History

You know, we had an assassination last episode, too, didn’t we?  Well, this one is going to cause a lot more difficulty for the world, especially for Europe.  Things are about to get really crazy.  The first 45 years of the 1900’s were just an amazing, crazy time to be alive.  Someone born in 1900 would have been alive for two world wars, the Great Depression, the invention of nuclear weapons, the cold war, and if they had lived to be 70 years old, they would have seen the first moon landing.  What an amazing time to be alive.  If you survived. But before we can get to all that, we have to talk about a couple of other things first, including the tensions that are about to cause several huge wars.  We need to talk about the crazy web of alliances that crisscrossed Europe that are going to lead to the first world war.  But even before that, we have to talk about one of the most important inventions in all of human history.  No, I’m not talking about the invention of podcasting, not yet anyway.  I’m talking about - the Wright Brothers, human flight, and the invention of the airplane.  Website:  shortwalkthroughhistory.com [http://shortwalkthroughhistory.com/] email:  shortwalkthroughhistory@gmail.com [shortwalkthroughhistory@gmail.com]

Well, welcome to the 20th Century!  I’m sure a fair number of those of you who are listening to this were born in the 20th Century, as I was, and the rest of you were born in the 21st century.  I know I’ve usually tried to refer to the centuries by their actual numbers, like the ‘1900’s,’ but now that we are entering the century that we’ve all lived in, I think it also makes sense to use the common designations that we often hear in the media today.  So right now, we are in the 21st century, but many of us also have lived in the 20th century.  Website:  shortwalkthroughhistory.com [http://shortwalkthroughhistory.com/] email:  shortwalkthroughhistory@gmail.com [shortwalkthroughhistory@gmail.com]

And here we are!  Episode 100!!!  It’s only taken us 100 episodes to cover the first 12,000 or so years of human history.   I have a tentative plan to get us all the way to, well, today.  It’s going to take about 40 or so more episodes.   Since this is our 100th episode, I thought I’d make this a sort of special episode, and instead of covering new ground, we could take a quick look back at everything that has happened so far.  Well, not really everything, but kind of the big highlights.  And maybe a quick peek at what we’re going to cover from here.

Wow, episode 99. I like the symmetry of having episode 99 be a summary of the world in 1899.    Last episode, we looked at the changes in technology, science, and worldview that occurred in the 1800’s, and like I said, there was an enormous amount of change from 1800 to 1899.  This episode, I want to summarize all the big stuff that happened in the 1800’s, and give us a kind of starting point for the world as it goes into the 20th century.  Or, as I prefer to call it, the 1900’s.  I want to sort of set the stage for all the things that are about to happen in the early 1900’s. But first, let’s do some summarizing of what happened in the 1800’s.  I’m going to go kind of regionally, by continent, starting with North America.  Website:  shortwalkthroughhistory.com [http://shortwalkthroughhistory.com/] email:  shortwalkthroughhistory@gmail.com [shortwalkthroughhistory@gmail.com]

Well, look at that.  We’re finally coming to the end of the 1800’s!  Only two more episodes, then we’ll be in the 1900’s.  It only took us 30 episodes to cover that 100 year period.  I honestly have no idea how long it will take to cover the 1900’s, as I haven’t mapped that out yet.  Guess I ought to get started on that, huh.   Next episode, I’ll review some of the history of the 1800’s, and take an overall look at how the events of the 1800’s shaped our modern world, but I felt like I needed to have a special episode just on the massive change in worldview that happened, particularly over the last half of the 1800’s.  That change in worldview was the result of the western world moving from what could be called a mostly Christian worldview to the world embracing what we now call Modernism.   I’ll get into a bit of a definition of that in a minute, but first, I want to make the point that this change of worldview is huge.  It’s a seismic shift of worldviews, perhaps the biggest shift in all of human history.  The only other comparable shifts were the shift of the Roman Empire from paganism to Christianity, or maybe also the Middle Eastern and African shift from paganism to Islam.  Those were big shifts, though they both took longer, and the process was perhaps a bit slower than the shift to modernism.  And part of the story of modernism is exactly that - the pace of change.  Things change over time, but in the modern era, things change much more quickly.  It’s harder for any individual person to adapt, because things are changing so much faster.