Start of Modern World

Introduction - Liberal Values and the Modern World

The term “modern” when used to describe Modern History involves a lot of ideas about how the human societies in the world work today compared to how they worked in the past.  A good place to begin in understanding modern world history is to think of the ideas that most people use to define what makes the modern world “modern”.  Two principal ideas that stand out in defining the modern world are personal freedom and the nation-state.  The idea that individual people should have large amounts of personal freedom and that governments represent and rule for the benefit of the people of a country are historically new ideas that would have been inconceivable to most people for most of human history.  Modern world history studies the process by which these ideas became the norm throughout most of the world.  

Most historians consider the events of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution to be the starting point of the modern world.  The rise of absolute monarchs in Europe, political revolution in Britain and the ideas of the Enlightenment unleashed the forces that led to the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, and the formation of the modern world.  The rise of the absolute monarchs involved building nations under the rule of a single powerful leader.  The political revolution in Britain was a conflict over how much the government should represent the people of a nation.  The Enlightenment developed the idea that a society based on personal freedom would be happier, more successful and wealthier.  The combination and conflicts between these ideas would set the modern world in motion.

Key Terms for Unit 

Core Concepts - There are several big ideas that are important to this unit about how the modern world.  The idea of the modern world is defined by ideas that shape how societies work.  The core concepts described blew are central to the history covered in this unit and will be used throughout the rest of this course.

Class Assignment # 1 - Identifying Reasoning