history essay topics

history essay topics

Exploring Key Turning Points in Modern History

1. Introduction to Key Turning Points in Modern History

The traces of the conflict lie in the Renaissance and the changes it ushered in. After another three centuries, it was the Industrial Revolution that accelerated the pace of changes in weaponry and laid down the future course of related violence. Expansionist policies (themselves the result of the concept that arms and territories are the means of wealth) further increased the possibility of war. All conflicts are followed by a replacement of the old order. The World Wars were no different. It was the First World War that was the cause of the second. The peace treaties only left some major issues unresolved and the League of Nations weak and ineffective. And it was the economic slump of the 1930s and disgruntlement with the status quo that sowed the seeds of future conflict and the Second World War. Even that war did not clear all doubts or resolve the issues. The Cold War and maneuvering between the two great powers of the United States and the Soviet Union and their satellites continued until the emergence of the United States as a superpower and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The most significant turning points in modern history are, without a doubt, the two World Wars. These not only changed the course of major nations, but also of millions of individuals. It is most important to locate the cracks which finally led to the eruption of these two conflicts. This book, however, will trace the noticeable changes and the different crises after every war that finally led to them. It would begin with the growth and expansion of European states and then discuss the end of the Cold War and how the cracks were finally exposed. The third chapter would be about the Weimar Republic and the Great Depression that finally led to World War Two.

2. The Industrial Revolution: Impact on Society and Economy

Meanwhile, society largely transformed from a country of rural villages to a nation of cities—by 1920, the U.S. had thirty metropolises with populations in excess of two hundred thousand, and sixty percent of people lived in urban areas. But the benign-sounding term of “urbanization” masked some dark societal problems found in poverty-stricken urban ghettos, in which cramped housing, poor sanitation, crime, and resentful, exploited immigrants were prevalent. City planners had yet to understand the importance of zoning and sanitation or to work towards attaining harmony and interdependence. Meanwhile, industrialization, mass production, and consumerism cumulatively provided the U.S. with not only the highest per capita income but also the fastest growth in output and consumption that the market would provide. By stimulating demand, industrial transformation allowed the U.S. citizenry to feel that they possessed the highest standard of living in the world.

The harnessing of inanimate power sources made possible by the industrial revolution transformed society by furthering the decline of agrarian society and accelerating migration, urbanization, and industrialization. Technological innovation, including new machines, transportation, and improved quality of goods, dictated the transformation of pirates and culminated in contemporary mass production and consumerism. By the end of the industrial revolution, 81 percent of American workers had nonagricultural jobs, and some industries, such as textile and consumer goods, experienced difficulties meeting demand due to a shortage of factory labor. In response, businesses explored ways to exploit special groups of workers, including women, children, and immigrants.

3. World War I: Causes, Consequences, and Legacy

The first major consequence of the war was to the moral purpose and autonomy of the states that had initiated it. It seemed that might no longer prevailed over right, for Germany, having done so much so swiftly and at so much cost to impose a stability and security favoring its own interests on Europe, itself succumbed first to the casualties of war and then to revolution. In the new international state-system that emerged from the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, Germany found the relations among states not to be entirely unpredictable and capable of stable and peaceful evolution but attracted by designs and dangers emanating from a diversity of causes ready to exploit its weaknesses.

World War I began in the summer of 1914 as a Balkan conflict, rapidly escalated to a general European war, and then became a global struggle. By its end in 1918, the war had become a tragedy of disaffected populations, dehumanized progress, inhuman endurance, pervasive anguish, wretched hopes, stupefying propaganda, and obliterated individual and collective achievement to which all the belligerents had succumbed. Its primary disaster was the hecatomb of dead, maimed, and shattered in body and mind – some 20 million men, women, and children in 4 years – whose lives were irrevocably disrupted by combat, loss, and longing. Nations had exhausted their treasure and built up a mass of unfulfilled expectations. Even in victory, the war could not be judged a triumph by any standard, for it was also a colossal deviation from deeply held global aspirations.

4. The Civil Rights Movement: Struggles and Achievements

During World War 2, 300,000 African-Americans saw that they could change things much better abroad than at home, by demanding their own chance to fight. Demands for human rights have always been taking place of arguments – thank God, in the 1940s, a lot of trouble and shooting were necessary to make folks who still believed African-Americans were not folks get used to the plain fact that they were just the same as themselves. And so, the Civil Rights Movement, with equal rights and opportunity demands, got the biggest civil rights bill of 1964, plus the voting rights laws of the next two years.

Before the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to all African-Americans in 1868. Before the Civil Rights Movement, though, only a fraction of African-Americans voted, using ridiculously hard tests and poll taxes. Few good things happened after that amendment in the early 1890s. Uneasy with that tiny rights edge, one end of the Supreme Court went back to ‘separate but equal’ in Plessy v Ferguson. But separate equal never was – schools, and every other public service available to anybody, was always much worse.

5. The Digital Revolution: Transforming the Information Age

The new economy that has emerged during the last quarter of the 20th century has been heralded by some and discounted by others. It is often referred to as the “new economy” – an economy that transforms the major technologies of the past (telecommunications) to help in changing both how economic activities occur and how value is assessed. Some analysis has pointed out that the most important reason why the economy has worked differently in recent years has been because we have moved from an industry-based economy to an internet and digital-based economy. Some have argued that the recent historic changes taking place in telecommunications and the internet are changing existing industries the way the auto industry changed the transportation industry. The forecasts were that we would soon witness the last the 21st century truly progressive period.

Certainly one of the most important and defining moments in modern history belongs to the development of the internet and the rapid advancements in telecommunications. The major impact of the changes taking place in telecommunications in the final years of the 20th century was the transformation of the Information Age. This period of history, when we now live, has been characterized in terms of how we have changed the way we communicate with each other and the way we gain and use new information. It is truly the most far-reaching event since the continued growth and development of the economy, society, and government that unfolded during the modern era with the industrial revolution.