![]() (In fact, the king of Spain is on Twitter: you need turn-by-turn directions through Timbuktu? No problem. Have a question for someone in Argentina? Four hundred years ago, a message from the king of Spain to his royal governors in the Americas took months to arrive. Just take a quick inventory of what’s in your pocket: namely, a supercomputer.Īt this moment, you’re connected to 2 billion people worldwide through Facebook—over one-fourth of the population of the planet. We’re living through an unprecedented explosion of innovation. We’re living through an upheaval that will arguably dwarf the disruption our nation experienced a century and a half ago, when we morphed from an agricultural society into an industrial one. We’re living through a revolution that is going to utterly transform the ways we live and work. It’s a profession of party-poopers.īut here, in this book, I’d like to propose that we really do, in fact, live during one of the most extraordinary moments in human history. Lots of historians are now even certain the great moments weren’t all that great: Socrates was just another wise guy trying to scrape together a buck, et cetera. slim, and that the only reason we think our times are special is because we’re narcissists, every last one of us. I’m supposed to point out that these moments are few and far between, that most of human history has been pretty ho-hum, that the odds that the times we happened to be born into are genuinely world-changing are. It says so right there on the back of our “Professional Historian†identification card. The job of the historian is usually to be a spoilsport. I’m not supposed to say that, as a historian. There are certain moments that changed history forever. Harriet Tubman whispering across the fence to a soon-to-be-freed slave for the first time. General Cornwallis surrendering to the upstart American rebels at Yorktown. Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to the door at Wittenberg. Socrates teaching in the marketplace in Athens. There are certain moments in history I would love to see and hear. If they ever figure out time travel, I have my list ready.
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