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The Short Century.
The decade of the 1990s ended with a party. As the clock struck midnight on 31 December 1999 people around the world welcomed a new millennium that only the dreariest of pedants noted would not really begin for another twelve months. That issue was beside the point. The millennial celebration might have been manufactured and ill-timed, but it was fun. However, did it really mark the end of an era? Only rarely have the pivotal events of human history happened when the years end in zeros. For that reason, historians of the modern world look to the French Revolution in 1789 to mark the end of the ancien regime, the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the start of the modern world. Similarly, the outbreak of World War I in 1914 serves to close the chronological brackets on the nineteenth century. There are good reasons for this demarcation. The...
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This section contains 3,571 words (approx. 12 pages at 300 words per page) |
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