Modernity
Modernity In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during the scientific revolution, the idea of modern identity, or Modernity, first began to flourish. In the beginning modernity was revolutionary. This is because for most people modernity was an idea of a greater future, a better tomorrow. This idea was introduced in a time where human understanding of all things started to grow and change. It was the idea of pushing the human ideas into the future, while challenging the traditional knowledge of the past. The eighteenth through the late nineteenth century the thought of modernity was welcomed and practiced by many. Though it would not always stay that way, from the late nineteenth through the twentieth century the thought of modernity vastly changed. It was once thought that modernity was to be the dawning of a better time, yet over the decades that thought evaporated and what was left was fear. In the early years of the twentieth century many people became fearful and believed that somehow the modern world that had been molded and created was, through the ideals of modernity, headed for some dire fate. This change in belief and opinion, of modernity, plays a giant role in the study of history and also how history was therefore studied and “periodized”. Modernity, if traced back far enough began in sixteenth and seventeenth century, in Renaissance Europe, during the scientific revolution. It began to grow in Western Europe, when intellectuals started to question the way things were done in the past. More thought provocation of traditional methods and knowledge lead to the spread of modernity ideals. These people called themselves moderns, or living in a new “mode”. These moderns looked at the world with a different perspective and thus science began to dominate the way of thinking. This was a way to understand nature and the world around them all while helping improve social conditions and the material world. This sudden expansion in modernity and