When Did the 'Modern Era' Begin?

Great Debates
21

In ancient Athens 9 out of 10 people farmed to feed everyone and to provide other agricultural products. In 1760 the same was true. The technology had improved and there were probably somewhere between twice to three times as many humans on the planet but the rhythms and pace of life hadn’t changed much. There were few clocks and time was strictly local. News traveled no faster than people. As John Mace points out there were important things we hadn’t come to understand yet. The ancient Athenian definition of a democracy as a relatively small domain where citizens voted on laws directly was the same definition used in colonial America. Societies were still structured with the lower orders owing deference to their betters. That’s too early for me to consider modern.

At least, that’s just my subjective view as an American. I’m not sure where I would draw the line to be frank. 1859 might be as good a place as any.

22

My own preference is for 1825, with the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway; but this railway was opened in a landscape that was already heavily industrialised, and there were innumerable stationary steam engines throughout the Western world. But the construction of the first railways was a phase-change in the connectivity of human society.

23

Context is everything. When a sportscaster speaks of “the best 3rd baseman of the modern era” you can be sure baseball before, say, 1895 (when the infield fly rule was adopted) is excluded. I’m not sure what “warship of the modern era” means but it certainly does not include the sail-powered USS Constellation!

I don’t think “modern era” is often applied to science. Major advances occurred shortly before the time of Galileo and since then science has accelerated and accelerated faster and accelerated some more. Much of the science taught when I was a youth would hardly be called “modern science” today. Key milestones in science were fast and furious. Gutenberg? Galileo? Newton? Don’t forget Lavoisier’s key discoveries in chemistry shortly before he was unheaded during France’s Reign of Terror.

I mostly agree with this. Human life in 1700 A.D. had perhaps much more in common with life in 500 B.C. — or even 2500 B.C. — than it has with today’s life.

Nitpick: “Five to eight times” is probably a better estimate than “twice to three times” of the planet’s total population ratio for 1760 to Athen’s Periclean Golden Age.

And, while “news traveled no faster than people” was true in 99.99% of cases, don’t forget that the sighting of the Spanish Armada off Lizard Point of Cornwall was relayed along England’s southern coast faster than automobiles can travel that route today. They used essentially the same method that had been used much earlier to summon the Rohirrim to the defense of Minas Tirith.

24

I’d say 1863-ish, when medical doctors stopped being church officials and started being scientists. This is approximately when the Four Bodily Humours fell out of fashion and got replaced by Cell Pathology and palliative medicine as the dominant mode for diagnosing and treating illnesses. And if you needed surgery, they’d send you to another doctor instead of to a barber.

In terms of art, I’d start with the Impressionists.

25

This will depend on the field. “Modern” means something completely different if you’re talking about basketball than if we’re discussing, say, warfare. Language, medicine, music, politics, technology – each has a different definition and timeline for “modern”.

26

In terms of paleontology, my understanding is that 1950 is a dividing line, in that it marks where distictively man-made radio-isotopes will first appear in sediment layers worldwide. (An actual paleontologist may correct me).

27

The problem is the traditional division of history into three era: the classical era, the medieval era, and the modern era. If you try to follow it strictly, it leads to some strange results.

For example, let’s say you define the start of the modern era as the beginnings of the industrial revolution (a reasonable premise). That’s going to have the modern era starting some time around 1800.

So events before then must, by default, be part of the medieval era. Which means that George Washington, among others, was a figure from medieval history. And that seems absurd.

The same thing happens if you go the other way. If you pick an early event for the start of the modern era, like the European discovery of the Americas or the invention of the printing press (also reasonable premises) you move the start of the modern era back to around 1500. But now you’re saying the Aztecs were part of modern history and that also seems absurd.

28

I’d say 1585, as that seems to be when the use of the word “modern” is first attested.

29

October 31st, 1517, when Luther posted his theses, unwittingly destroying Christendom and giving Nationalism a major boost, breaking the dam of medieval mental disciplines, eventually allowing the rise of the scientific mindset.

Or not. But if I had to name a specific date, 10-31-1517 is a stronger candidate than others. Again, depends upon your definition of “modernity”, etc.

30

Let’s just be clear that we’re talking Western Civilization here. Other regions have different histories.

So if I were to divide history into broad strokes, we’d have:

Pre Homo sapiens sapiens. Goes back a couple million years.

Anatomically modern humanity. Something like 200,000 years ago, but going farther back the more we discover.

Behaviorally modern humanity. Something like 50,000 years ago. Now we start seeing an explosion of art, new tools, new behaviors. It’s still not clear what this was all about, why earlier anatomically modern humans didn’t seem to have the full panoply of modern human physical culture. Is it an artifact of taphonomy? Black monoliths?

The Neolithic. The first farmers. An obvious behavioral change from the hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic. But this wasn’t some radical new discovery, hunter-gatherers knew seeds and roots grew into plants, they just mostly didn’t bother to do anything with the knowledge. They tended wild plant patches. So agriculture isn’t anything radically new, it’s just an intensification and elaboration of previous practices, which is the whole history of technological advance. Almost nothing comes out of nowhere, it’s always prefigured earlier, it’s just that nobody understood it, or could make it work, until for some reason when the time was ripe everyone started doing it.

The Ancient Era. This is all the history of the first city-states and small empires. Could also be called the Bronze age.

The Classical Era. The Persian, Hellenic, and Roman empires. Around 600 BC there’s this wave of empire-building. It’s happening over in China and India as well. I think the Persian empire doesn’t get the attention it deserves as the prototype for these empires, it’s all on the Hellenic world that replace the Persians. But without the Persians to conquer, Alexander couldn’t have left behind the Hellenic world. He “conquered the world”, if you define “the world” as “the Persian empire”. The existence of the Persian empire to conquer was a precondition of his conquering it. As for the Romans, that’s so well known not much needs to be said.

The Medieval Era. Western Roman empire falls, the Easter Empire decays into just one state among many. Of course this conflates that chaos of the Early Medieval period with the developed and stable states of the High Middle Ages.

The Renaissance. Here we get another shift. Gunpowder changes from a toy to the standard. Sailing ships head all over the world. Extracontinental empires appear. Population grows. Banking and commerce explodes. But sailing ships and horses are still the only methods of transportation.

The Industrial Age. Starting in the 1800s, we start to see steam engines, which are put to work on the existing water and wind powered factories. Railroads, steamships, telegraphs, coal power. But this also includes the age of revolutionary government. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, the South American revolutions

Now, the Modern Era. I’ll just give the transition as World War I. Again, most of the technologies that transformed the world In WWI already existed, but in WWI they ran rampant. Airpower, radio, IC engines, political organization, mass media, and the famous destruction of various monarchies. Of course we had to go through the depression and WWII, which transformed everything yet again. 1914-1945 is the transition period, everything after that is fully modern.

31

I don’t know. I sort of feel this was more an effect than a cause. There had always been anti-papal protesters. Luther was just another in a long line. His protest succeeded because the times had already changed. The invention of the printing press was a major factor in why Luther succeeded while past protesters had failed. Another was the dissemination of classical texts after the fall on Constantinople. And another was the discovery of new lands that were unknown to the Bible.

As evidence, I’ll offer Calvin and Zwingli - they were leading similar protest movements at the same time as Luther’s. I think it’s hard to argue that these three men independently succeeded due to some aspect in their characters that previous protesters lacked. My belief is that they were just the individuals who happened to lead protest movements when the times were right for protest movements to succeed.

In short, Luther didn’t create the modern age; the modern age created Luther.

32

I also like that date because we’re coming up on the 500th anniversary, so what better answer than “the modern world began 500 years ago, today!” :wink:

33

Another possibility: 1735, the year of the Witchcraft Act, in which it became no longer illegal to practice witchcraft, but instead it became illegal to claim to practice witchcraft. A symbol of the enlightenment leading toward the acceptance of the scientific method which started to reap its fruits from the early 1800s onward.

34

We could look at future archeological fingerprints. Fusion byproducts appeared very suddenly and globally in the 40s.

I don’t know how the spike in atmospheric CO2 looks.

35

Fission byproducts

36

Hmm

38

August 9th, 1995 is the date you want:

Netscape IPO
Jerry Garcia died

39

I don’t know about science as a whole, but the label “modern physics” is often used to refer collectively to relativity (special and general) and quantum mechanics. Which meshes well with my notion that the “modern era” began in the early 20th century.

40

So we’ve narrowed it down to somewhere between the battle of Bosworth Field, and the Netscape IPO, well that’s that settled :slight_smile:

It was as if a thousand cardigan wearing early-modern history professors cried out in despair…

41

No, sun tans started becoming fashionable in the nineteen-twenties.