What is "Modernity" to a Historian?
And why it matters...but doesn't.
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This is a riff on a “History Today” Head-To-Head feature in the January 2025 issue.
“Everyone knows,” of course, what a “modern era” means: the now, the happening, the ever-eternal present…except of course that “present” is now the ever-persistent past (get that segue?) “Modernity” is a ubiquitous phenomenon defining an age, usually the one we are living in, a phenomenon heralding “progress” and “enlightenment.” It is also a sociological/technological phenomenon that declares dial telephones and mailboxes old-fashioned in the 21st Century. That definition of modernity I will not explore here.
Modernity remains a perplexingly moving target.
Peter Marshall, Professor of History, University of Warwick
For historians in Great Britain, “Modern History” begins with the Romans’ departure from their islands in the early 5th Century. For scholars in modern China, it often begins with their 1949 Revolution. In the US, some historians say “modern US history” starts in 1900…at this writing. In the 19th Century, it began in 1776, when they called it anything. Periodization might be necessary for teaching, but it is a problematic process involving carving the past into manageable, definable chunks with common elements, and it has a problematic history of its own.
“History” as an organized, quasi-scientific activity has a brief history, regardless of what period it studies.
Awareness of living in a modern age was strong among humanists in what we call the Renaissance; a term invented in the 19th Century to denote a 15th- and 16th-Century scholarly movement seeking to restore Greek and Roman philosophy. Renaissance humanists, particularly the Italian scholar Leonardo Brundi, called the long and gloomy period between the collapse of classical (read Roman) “civilization” and its supposed rebirth in their own time, the Middle Ages or medieval period, the names we’re stuck with now. Francesco Petrarch named the Dark Ages a century before Brundi. Petrarch used this label to describe the vaguely defined period for what he thought was a lack of quality in the Latin literature of his day. Modern historians don’t regard the Dark Ages handle to be accurate or helpful, aside from being vague.
Rounding and splitting don’t help.
Historians have a tendency taking off around the middle of the 20th Century to insert an early modern era (the 16th, 17th, and sometimes 18th Centuries) between the Middle Ages and modernity proper, which also encompasses the Renaissance (That term—”rebirth”—was first used by Giorgio Vasari in the 16th Century, and popularized by Jules Michelet in 1858). Early modernity is deeply ingrained in university courses, and in the working practices and identities of some historians. However, doing that it exhibits worryingly teleological (explaining the beginning as a function of the end) aspects, raising change above continuity and claiming these centuries to be more emphatically some age of transition than those.
Is Modern now, or a distinct historical period that started…sometime?
Or does it end….now? Then what’s post-modernity, or the contemporary era? Buildings made of white boxes; furniture with no ornaments; paintings of lines or abstract forms; fast communication; the codification of law; massive factories. The term modernity is usually associated with a hard-to-define cluster of changes which sped up from the 18th Century, sometimes earlier. Is this a useful way to draw the line for a “modern” period?
Um…well…that depends…
When I was in high school, an English exchange student referred to everything since the Norman Conquest in 1066 as “current events.” He took issue with the American schoolbook definitions of “current events” as the American involvement in Vietnam, the Space Race, and the Cold War. “Current,” he used to say, “but not complete.” Where he came from—Putney, a part of London—he could walk down his street and see buildings that had foundations if not entire structures that predate the American Constitution. He could take a train and visit structures older than any building on this continent. But now, most students of that same age in America don’t live in homes built before I was born in the 1950s.
It matters where you are…
All the monikers we use as shorthand to group epochs for our convenience threaten to flatten out centuries of dynamic development, and imply a pejorative contrast with a recognizable ‘modernity’ starting at some arbitrarily designated historical moment, like Gutenberg’s invention of printing, Columbus’ voyage to the New World, Luther’s defiance of Rome, or the Declaration of Independence. My classmate from London lived in a place steeped in history, albeit with lousy plumbing—more than once, he praised suburban Detroit’s water pressure. Our plumbing is younger, but municipal water pressure is a matter of gravity, not necessarily age.
In part of the world, the modern age arrived as a fully formed composite from Europe in the centuries before WWII.
If modernity is an explosive expression of European socio-political and philosophical development, modernity can be strongly associated with colonization and capitalism. For 19th Century Japan, modernity included learning and importing established dynamics, technologies and ways of thinking from the industrial West into their medieval society, dragging their people kicking and screaming out of the Middle Ages and into…um….
Here’s the rub…
Following the creation of Heaven and Earth, the primordial gods Izanagi and Izanami created the Japanese archipelago by stirring the ocean with a spear. The matter that dripped off solidified and became an island. They also gave birth to many gods (regrettably, Japan had no Bishop Ussher to tell us exactly when). One of these gods was Amaterasu, the sun goddess of the Shinto faith and the great-great-great-great ancestor (these deities were genderless or gender-fluid, depending…) of Jimmu. The Emperor Jimmu traditionally founded the Japanese Empire in 660 BC, according to the Gregorian calender. Where does a modern era start for Japanese scholars? With Perry in 1854, before they adopted the Western calender? With the calender in 1873? When Japanese or western scholars refer to “modern Japan,” they usually mean somewhere in the mid-19th Century, but was there a trigger? Did nationalism or technology usher in Japan’s modern era? Was it the Meiji Emperor’s reforms in the 1860s, or his Constitution that introduced political government in 1889? World War One and its very modern, hyper-destructive warfare is often pointed to as ground zero for modernity worldwide, and Japan took part as far west as the Mediterranean. Did “modern Japan” thus start in 1914, with Japan’s declaration of war on Germany? Or when it went to war against China in 1894, or Russia in 1904?
Anyone remember the Atomic Age? The Space Age? How about the Age of Aquarius?
I do. In the 1960s, the Atomic Age came in 1945; the Space Age in 1957. These two were post-1945 pedagogical inventions to get kids interested in history. But those who are supposed to know all about the Age of Aquarius can’t agree on when it starts—or started—because it a two millennia-long period that starts every 24 thousand years or so, and is based on the imprecise gyroscopic precession of Earth in space, and the positioning of the constellation Aquarius in relation to the vernal equinox. Babylonian astrologers drew it in their catalogues two thousand years before Christ; Ptolemy listed it in the 2nd Century AD. No matter what anyone does or says, nobody will use the Age of Aquarius in any history books, except maybe those about music.
Some historians spend a lot of time trying to figure out when a modern age arrived in different places.
Once fashionable, the modern age idea is fading. Debated within an inch of its life, the concept has become, for many of the reasons given here, somewhat meaningless, a verbal tic or editorial hiccup, a red herring/distraction that serves very little function in historical work. We should always regard periodization as a tool, not as a goal of meaningful historical analysis. Continuing to ask matters more than agreeing on an answer. The term may be unhelpful to the working scholar, and debating it may sound like a bad “who’s on first?” riff because the answers are confusing and contextually meaningless. The concept of modernity in history has become a laser pointer on a wall for historians to chase, but we’ve come to ignore it. For everyone else, it’s like turning points: a nice-to-know, handy hook where we can stop—or start—reading.
The Persistent Past: The Steele Diaries
The persistence of the past is a recurring theme for The Persistent Past. It keeps returning because, as many have observed, the past is always with us in some form or another.
Curtis and Maria are still working on this one. It should come out early next year.
And Finally...
On 24 May:
1686: Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit is born in Danzig, Poland. Fahrenheit, an instrument maker and scientist who lived in the Netherlands almost his entire life, invented the alcohol thermometer in 1709, the mercury thermometer in 1714, and created his famous scale in 1724.
1941: German battleship Bismarck sinks battlecruiser HMS Hood in the Denmark Straights. Together with heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, Bismarck’s mission was to ravage Allied shipping in the Atlantic. Because of the British force’s interception, that mission had to be abandoned. Hood would be the only ship Bismarck would ever sink.
And today is AVIATION MAINTENANCE TECHNICIAN DAY, almost certainly not related to the opening of the first auto repair shop in Boston, Massachussets on this day in 1899.