• What is the Contemporary Age?
• Characteristics of the Contemporary Age
• Stages of the Contemporary Age
• Most important facts of the Contemporary Age

We explain what the Contemporary Age is, when it began, its characteristics and stages. Also, your most important facts.

The Contemporary Age radically changed the world.

What is the Contemporary Age?

The history It is subdivided into numerous stages, of which the Age or Contemporary Era or contemporaneity is the most recent, that is, it is the Age closest to today.

It is considered that the beginnings of the Contemporary Age lie in the end of the Modern age, that is, it begins with the Declaration of Independence of the United States in 1776 or in the French Revolution 1789. These events shook the political and social order of the world at the time and anticipated what was to come later. Its culmination is the present itself.

The Contemporary Age is one of those that has most intensely and rapidly changed the world since the origins of the humanity. Already in its beginnings, in the so-called Era of Revolutions, from the end of the 18th century to the mid-19th century, a profound transformation was observed in the economic, social and political, compared to the inheritance medieval and modern.

It can be said that contemporaneity is the triumph and exacerbation of many of the processes that began after the fall of the Middle Ages, such as the emergence of the bourgeoisie and the fall of the Old Regime, that is, of the absolutism of the feudal monarchy.

Democratic and republican values ​​were prioritized, at least in the West, as the aspiration of the peoples. That New Regime was born in the heat of the Industrial Revolution and the capitalism.

However, the contemporary age also presents its challenges and difficulties: socioeconomic inequality, the rise of totalitarianism, the automation of work and the environmental catastrophe are just some of the inconveniences that afflict the society. Mankind for the first time is faced with the possibility of causing its own extinction as species.

Characteristics of the Contemporary Age

In the Contemporary Age, art became part of the consumer society.

The Contemporary Age is one of the most complex to describe, given the enormous volume of changes that have occurred in less than three centuries. Therefore, it is preferable to summarize its characteristics very roughly, according to your specific area of ​​interest:

• Sociopolitical characteristics. What the Modern age predicted, in the Contemporary had its place from the beginning: the fall of the powers traditional, associated with the nobility and the clergy, who controlled the world from the Middle Ages, in favor of the newly created middle class, lacking blue blood but possessing capitals. Thus, the bourgeoisie displaced its traditional rivals, taking over the leadership of the destinies of humanity and establishing its values ​​of Liberty, equality, fraternity and property. Thus, the values ​​of the Illustration French spawned the Liberalism, and the possibility of following a republican and democratic agenda, with separation of powers and legal equality, although not socio-economic. Thus was born the society of social classes, separated no longer by their birth but by their ability to consumption and money generation: capitalism. With it arose a new historical rival of the ruling bourgeoisie: the proletariat, the result of the transformation of the medieval peasantry into workers urban.
• Geopolitical characteristics. With the fall of the Old Regime, a new matrix of global powers slowly emerged, as military, economic and commercial competition became internationalized. The great colonial extensions of the European empires saw their decline in contemporaneity, finally succumbing to wars of independence. In other cases, they agreed to a consensual release when it was more convenient for them to trade with their former colonies than to continue managing them. This led to a complex process of decolonization throughout the world, but not before going through the most cruel and destructive conflicts that humanity has had in its history, given the new technological level reached. The First Y Second World wars shook the foundations of the world and toppled the old powers, leaving the United States and the Soviet Union in a "Cold War" around the world, until the latter collapsed in 1991. New poles of power emerged after what seemed like the total victory of Western capitalism, with the European Union and especially with China, US trade rivals in the actuality.
• Economic characteristics. Capitalism triumphs and consolidates during the Contemporary Age. It faces a new rival born of industrial society itself: the Communism or Socialism, conceived as working-class. Two poles were formed, that of a liberal consumer society, organized around the notion of free market and its supposed self-regulation (the “invisible hand of the market”), and that of the society of economy centrally planned, that is, in which the Condition it imposes the order that the market lacks. Both models stress the different stages of the contemporary age, especially in the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the rest, contemporary economy privileges the urban and the factory as the place where production occurs, leaving the generation of raw material in the hands of the least developed countries. At the end of the 20th century, the integration of markets and the emergence of a globalized economy were advancing, which allowed the economic interests of one hemisphere to invest without problem in the other.
• Cultural characteristics. The culture it flourished and diversified enormously in the Contemporary Age, hand in hand with the newly acquired human freedoms. For the most part he also freed himself from the moral yokes of the religion, extremely weakened after the work evolutionist by Charles Darwin. The separation between Church and State occurred entirely in almost the entire world, and bourgeois art abandoned the academic or religious spheres, to become part of the consumer society. This meant getting in touch with the new ways of mass communications (press, radio, TV, Internet) and subjected them to a deep identity crisis, from which many have not yet managed to overcome. Besides, the philosophy contemporary period went through periods of nihilism and pessimism, especially after the World Wars. In the case of the West, there was talk of an existential impasse. Later, the arrival of the global society was in charge of spreading new oriental philosophies and tendencies in a western public eager for new ways of thinking.
• Characteristics technological. No other period in human history has represented a technological race as accelerated and unbridled as contemporaneity, especially the final stages of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Industrial Revolution supposed the automation of work and therefore the maximization of its effectiveness, being able to produce at massive levels and thus allow the emergence of the consumer society. The enormous advances in medicine and pharmacology extended the life expectancy of the human being to its greatest historical limits. The appearance of computer gave us the most powerful tool ever achieved, thanks to which the telecommunications could multiply and towards the end of the 20th century the so-called society of Information. Also, the displacement land, aerial Y maritime They were just the prelude to the exploration of outer space, but all at the terrible cost of environmental damage sustained, whose effects are only beginning to be perceived at the beginning of the 21st century.

Stages of the Contemporary Age

The economic crisis of the 1930s in the US affected the world economy.

Broadly speaking, contemporaneity could be divided into the following stages:

• The "Era of the Revolution" (1776-1848). A time of changes drastic. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the technique and the industry they prepared to take a great leap forward. The French Revolution and the Independence Revolutions occurred in Latin Americaas well as other cycles of violent change around the world.
• The Age of Capital or Empires (1848-1914). Established capitalism as a system, the big powers Europeans proceeded to divide the world, in search of raw material with which to feed its incipient industrial machinery. In this framework, the philosophy of "positivism" prevailed, which posits technical and scientific progress as the way of salvation for humanity.
• The Crisis of the Thirties (1914-1945). Colonial aspirations and rivalry between the powers, within the framework of the nascent mass society led to times of economic crisis and of enormous conflict. The First World War (1914-1918) took place, then the Great Depression (also called the Crisis of 29 or 30) and the rise of totalitarianism, especially in the eastern world. Then the Second World War (1939-1945) occurred, with its concentration camps and its two atomic bombs. Humanity plunged into discouragement.
• The Iron Curtain (1945-1991). In this period there was an extensive series of bloody conflicts during the Cold War (1945-1991), fueled by the opposing sides: the USSR and the United States.Among them there were gigantic massacres in Vietnam, Cambodia, Central America, the American South Cone, etc. It was a passive confrontation between nuclear powers, which made many think about the possible end of humanity.
• The globalized world (1991-onwards). After the fall of the USSR and the Berlin Wall, the victory of capitalism over its alternatives was proclaimed. The world marched towards an economy that knew no geographical borders, hand in hand with the innovation technological and scientific. However, this same process led to the emergence of migratory crises and terrorist attacks, the result of the tensions inherited from the previous century.

Most important facts of the Contemporary Age

The Contemporary Age began with the French Revolution.

An account of the most significant events of the contemporary age would roughly include the following:

• 1776 - Independence of the United States.
• 1789 - Outbreak of the French Revolution.
• 1801 - Beginning of the Napoleonic wars.
• 1810 - Beginning of the Latin American independence processes.
• 1815 - Defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo.
• 1820 - Revolution of 1820 in Europe.
• 1830 - Revolution of 1830.
• 1833 - Abolition of the slavery in the United Kingdom.
• 1835 - Charles Darwin arrives in the Galapagos Islands, thanks to which he wroteThe origin of species.
• 1839 - The first Opium War between China and England occurs, within the framework of British colonial policies in Asia.
• 1848 - The Spring of the Peoples puts an end to the Europe of the Restoration.
• 1853 - The Crimean War begins.
• 1861 - The American Civil War begins.
• 1864 - Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard discover pasteurization.
• 1867 - Karl Marx publishes Capital.
• 1868 - The Meiji era begins in Japan.
• 1870 - End of Italian reunification. The Franco-Prussian War begins.
• 1871 - Bismark reunites Germany and creates the German Empire.
• 1880 - The distribution of Africa by the European powers.
• 1889 - Second Communist International.
• 1893 - New Zealand approves the female vote.
• 1905 - Albert Einstein publishes his Theory of Relativity and Sigmund Freud his Theory of sexuality.
• 1910 - Starts the Mexican Revolution.
• 1914 - The First World War begins.
• 1915 - The genocide Armenian.
• 1917 - Starts the Russian Revolution that deposes Tsarism.
• 1919 - The Treaty of Versailles.
• 1922 - Creation of the USSR.
• 1928 - Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin, the first antibiotic in history.
• 1929 - The Crisis of 29 or "Great Depression" begins.
• 1931 - Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
• 1933 - Adolf Hitler comes to power in Germany.
• 1936 - The Spanish Civil War breaks out.
• 1939 - The Third German Reich invades Poland, formally initiating World War II.
• 1940 - Russian dissident Leon Trotsky is assassinated in Mexico.
• 1945 - The United States drops two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Japan. Thus ends the Second World War.
• 1947 - The Marshall Plan for US aid for the reconstruction of Europe is launched.
• 1948 - Mahatma Ghandi is assassinated. The UN proclaims the Universal Declaration of Human rights.
• 1949 - The Chinese Communist Revolution, ending the long Chinese Civil War that began in 1927.
• 1950 - The Korean War breaks out.
• 1953 - Watson and Crick propose the double helix model of the DNA.
• 1955 - Signature of the Warsaw Pact between the countries of the socialist bloc.
• 1957 - The USSR launches the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1.
• 1959 - The Cuban revolution by Fidel Castro.
• 1960 - The Organization of the Exporting Countries of Petroleum (OPEC).
• 1961 - The Portuguese Colonial War begins in Angola and Mozambique.
• 1969 - The human being reaches the Moon with the American Apollo 11 mission.
• 1973 - General Augusto Pinochet gives a bloody coup against Salvador Allende in Chile.
• 1975 - End of Vietnam War with the defeat of the United States.
• 1978 - The Iranian Revolution breaks out.
• 1979 - Cambodia is invaded by the Vietnamese army, ending the Cambodian Genocide.
• 1980 - The Iran-Iraq War begins.
• 1981 - The IBM PC, the computer most popular homemade ever.
• 1989 - The Berlin Wall falls. In China there is the Tian’anmen Massacre.
• 1991 - Publicly announced world Wide Web from Internet. That same year, the Soviet Union collapsed.
• 1996 - “Dolly” is born, the first sheep clonic of the world.
• 2001 - The terrorist group Al-Qaeda carries out an attack on the Twin Towers in New York, USA.
• 2008 - The Great Occurs Recession after the bursting of the financial-real estate bubble.
• 2009 - Barack Obama is the first black president of the United States.
• 2016 - The complete sequence of the human genome is achieved.
• 2019 - Scientists at the Event Horizon Telescope take the first real photo of a black hole at the center of the galaxy M87.