Modern era - Topics

The Great Depression broke something in capitalism that never fully healed The 1918 influenza killed more people than the war and is barely remembered Why did the Industrial Revolution start in Britain and not in France? Why did China's self-strengthening movement fail where Japan's succeeded? What did Spengler mean by the decline of the West? Did positivism promise more than science could deliver? Why did the anti-globalization movement fade after the 1990s? How did Gorbachev's reforms bring the Soviet Union down? What is behind the European habit of taking long summer holidays? What actually separates the modern era from everything before it? Does anti-Western sentiment usually mean anti-modernity too? Why did Atatürk ban the fez and replace the Arabic alphabet? How did Japan westernize so quickly during the Meiji Restoration? What was daily life like in a Victorian industrial city? What made Cubism so shocking to viewers in 1910? Why did the Dadaists think art should be anti-art? Was Napoleon the heir of the revolution or the man who ended it? Did South Korea westernize or just modernize? How did two world wars end Europe's run as the world's center? How did existentialism become a postwar mood rather than a doctrine? How did Impressionism go from rejected to beloved? How did the Iraq War change global attitudes toward the West? Why did faith in progress collapse after 1914? Why were there anti-Western riots in Japan in the 1880s? Is the special relationship between Britain and America still real? What was the Frankfurt School actually attacking? Why did the Iranian revolution turn so fiercely anti-American? What did the postwar baby boom do to Western suburbs? How did public sanitation change life expectancy in Western cities? What actually happened on the day the Bastille was stormed? Why does every generation believe Western civilization is collapsing? How close did the world really come to nuclear war in 1962?