17 April 2012, Space Shuttle Discovery circles Dulles airport on its last mission as it prepares to land for permanent display
at the the James S. McDonnell Space Hangar at the Steven F. Udvar-Házy Center, photo credit Jack Roth.
Here is a great timeline, created by J. Hawk, T. Olson and B. Doran, on key events in the development of the personal computer. And while you are at it, please have a look at this excellent narrated, online presentation by Christopher Cleveland on the History of the Integrated Circuit. Is there a more important technological development than the smartphone? See this great timeline by Jameson Collins and Gabriel Cao.
It is extremely difficult to write about recent history; it is far too easy to make all kinds of mistakes.
- (1) You don't really have access to all the relevant sources yet, and that makes writing an accurate history difficult, and it makes interpreting and understanding what happened even more difficult. It might surprise you, but there is still a relatively large amount of information about events that happened 25, 50, 75 years ago that is still considered secret and not available to historians. (This does not even consider all the documentary materials that simply disappear over time.)
- (2) The other problem with writing recent history is that we usually do not have any idea of the ultimate outcome of the course of events that we are writing about. So, for example, if you are working on a history of Syria in the first decade of the twenty-first century, your history is not going to be able to be conclusive since the Syrian outcome has yet to be established. That outcome will certainly serve to help determine the history that you have written about Syria. (It's not really the facts that change; it's our understanding of what happened that changes--let's just leave it at that.)
- (3) It comes back to perspective, the ability of a historian to evaluate all of the sources and materials to (1) establish what exactly happened and (b) what is important about that happened. To do that you need perspective, usually best brought with some time distance; you really need some personal distance.
If we go back to the first decade of the twentieth century, there was a general sentence of progress in the western world as countries industrialized, urbanized and modernized (although that it a value-laden term); people poured into cities; and universal primary education became widespread. Things were being invented all the time.
- First air flight in 1903
- The Model T in 1908
- Einstein's 1905 paper on special relativity
- 1901, Marconi's radio transmission
- 1902 the air conditioner.
- 1907the first synthetic plastic
These all became fixtures of the twentieth-century world.
Now along with the signs of "progress" there were other events that perhaps called into question the idea of "progress"; these events tended to be a bit overlooked.
- the bloody war between Russia and Japan
- the Boer wars
- the Boxer rebellion
- the Spanish-American war
- the scattered colonial revolts
But since everything that happened in those first years of the century were later superseded by the First World War, that war left a much different interpretation of what was going on in the world than if there had not been a war. OK, let me try and explain. If you wrote the history of 1900-1914 in May 1914, that history would have been much different that if you wrote the history of 1900-1914 in 1919 (not to mention if you wrote the same history in 1929, 1949 or 2014). Historical perspective changes over time as historians reinterpret what happened in light of new information and in light of what happened later. And, that is the cautionary tale of writing recent/contemporary history. It was only much, much later (after the war) that historians examined 1900-1914 and saw the seeds of World War I being sown in that first decade.
I could write more about the first decade of the twentieth century, but let's now turn our attention to the first decade of the twenty-first century. Here's a list to think about.
- Ipads
- smartphones
- Netflix
- world wide web
- social media
- human genome
- genetic modifications
- solar power
I'm sure that you could come up with some other things, but notice any resemblance to the list from 1900-1914?
Now let's look at some of the signs of difficulties.
- 11 September 2001
- If I had asked people ten, twenty, or a hundred years ago, there is no one who would have predicted that Russian and Ukraine could be locked in a war.
- fighting at numerous locations and at various times in North Africa and the Near East
- flesh-eating bacteria
- rising sea levels
How do we balance our knowledge about recent events and achieve an understanding of that recent history? Are these just current events? How do they aid in our study of history, remembering that predictions are not really the scope of historians?
Well, one thing that we can do as historians is to try and establish an exact record of what happened. Is that any easier in this electronic age?
Now as the century 21 unveils itself, there is a striking resemblance to the first decade of the twentieth century the mix of positive achievements along with war and turmoil remains pretty much the same, but that does not mean that we can assume we'll have a worldwide calamity in the current century such as World War I was in the past century.
As historians, this is something that you should reflect on. What is the meaning of events as they unfold? How should they be understood in light of the historical record? Do they really have importance?
References
- Still working on these