Make your case for the most interesting generation in human history. I'll start:
It's 1847 to 1872.
-A moment of technological advance unrivaled before or since. Communication across the Atlantic goes from 10 days on a fast clipper to instantaneous telegraph by undersea cable (and people nowadays think moving their phone from the wall to their pocket is progress!). Railroad and steamships lay the groundwork for a global economy.
-Lots of important conflicts and uprisings: 1848, Paris Commune, Sepoy uprising, U.S. Civil War, and the Taiping Rebellion (one of the five deadliest wars in human history)
-The core texts of most of the most important ideologies of today were written then (communism, fascism and many flavors of nationalism, for starters)
-The formation of many of the most important countries of the present day: U.S. becomes a continental power in the Mexican American War, Russia finishes its conquests in Central Asia and settles its borders with China, Germany and Italy are formed, Japan adopts a unitary state after the Boshin War, etc. etc.
Could go on forever, honestly... would love for one of you to convince me I'm wrong.
Some other possibilities I considered: middle of the eighth century, early-mid 17th century
Fair, maybe more accurate to say that German and Italian fascism find their origins in the writings of ultra-nationalists and anti-Semites from this unification period. The burst in supremacist ideology was also arguably enhanced by 1859's On the Origin of Species and evolution's almost immediate application to societies and races.
A little more than 25 years, but the collapse of the Soviet Union until the '08 financial crisis would be a decent contender in the modern era. Still a bit close but it feels like a real point of departure. Looking farther back, the French Rev through the end of the Napoleonic wars might be another good one.
I think the contemporary period fails on grounds of technological stagnation... it's all just incremental increases in convenience, nothing genuinely new. Consider live sports as an example of something much older than you may think... in 1872 New Yorkers at a bar could receive live coverage of away baseball games, complete with play by play details by telegraph, color commentary by an in-person announcer, a score board kept in exactly the same configuration as the real board, and depictions of the plays with puppets. The product has gotten better and much easier to access, but it is not new.
I like the revolutionary period--my only concern is that it's somewhat boring outside of Europe. Particularly in China, which out of sheer size must be the driving force behind any global historiography. Besides the White Lotus rebellion (which was pretty small by Chinese standards), the Qing dynasty was humming along quite nicely in really boring way. Maybe if we had a longer period and could capture both the initial French revolution and Latin American independence...
Yeah I guess I keep running into the 25 year problem because I was totally grouping Latin American independence movements in there but they are totally outside that window aren't they.
I probably wouldn't vote it top, but a contender would be the years leading up to Julius Caesar's taking over a emperor. I think that would be 74bc to 49bc. Something like that. I know a lot has been written about the collapse of the greatest democracy the world had ever seen into a dictatorship, and how we see similarities to that period today. And I haven't read any of it. But I really should. I found it fascinating in school, and would love to revisit it now. Especially, if we could magically get the full story.
1945-1970. The birth of nations, when the colonial powers decided to leave multiple nations after the wake of WW2. although colonialism has been replaced with neocolonism, it was still a step in the right direction. One day neocolonalism will end too inshallah.
