Practice question · Multiple choice
The Romance-language tradition begins contemporary history around 1789, while anglophone usage often reserves "contemporary" for the period since 1945. Why is this more than a difference of vocabulary?
Hints
- Ask what a starting date is claiming about causation.
- If your period starts in 1789, you are saying the world you live in began there.
Show the answer
B. Each boundary asserts a different rupture as the one that produced the present order
Why
A period boundary is a thesis about which change was decisive. Starting in 1789 makes revolution, citizenship and mass politics the founding facts of the present; starting in 1945 makes the world wars, decolonisation and the nuclear order founding instead. The evidence is the same; the argument about what explains what is not.
Practise What "Contemporary History" Is
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