Eras
The Contemporary Period
Also Known As The Postwar Era Postwar era is common usage for the decades immediately following 1945 specifically; carried here as a widely used alias for the era's earlier portion rather than an exact synonym for the full span to the present.
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The contemporary period covers the era from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the present, encompassing the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, the wave of decolonization that dismantled the European overseas empires across Africa and Asia, the end of the Cold War with the collapse of Soviet communism around 1989 to 1991, and the accelerating globalization and digital transformation of the decades since. The period saw the founding of the United Nations and a new international order built around it, the spread of nuclear weapons and the persistent threat of their use, and a shift from a world dominated by a handful of colonial empires to one made up overwhelmingly of independent nation states, many of them newly formed in the decades after 1945. Since the 1990s, the contemporary period has also been shaped by rapid advances in computing and telecommunications, often called the Digital Revolution, which have transformed economies, communication and daily life in ways historians are still working out how to assess, given that the period remains open and its longer term significance is not yet settled.
Facts
Geographic ScopeGlobal by definition, covering every region's postwar history, including decolonization movements the era's framing is partly built around. The Cold War lens historians most often use to organize the period is nonetheless centered on the United States and the Soviet Union as its two poles, a framing scholars of decolonization and the Global South have increasingly argued understates the agency and internal dynamics of the newly independent states themselves. 1 Disputed
Start Year1945 is the most common starting point, but some historians instead date the contemporary period from 1989 or 1991, the end of the Cold War, treating 1945 to 1991 as a transitional late twentieth century era in its own right. Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
1. The Oxford History of the Twentieth Century
Oxford University Press
1. The Oxford History of the Twentieth Century
Oxford University PressPart IV, The World Since 1945
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.Postwar era
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.Includes: Suharto
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.Includes: International Monetary Fund
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.Includes: Choi Hong Hi
Asian Financial Crisis (Federal Reserve History)
Federal Reserve HistoryIncludes: Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 to 1998View the Source Why Mexico Had No Choice but to Nationalize Banks (Christian Science Monitor, 1982)
Christian Science MonitorIncludes: Latin American Debt CrisisView the Source We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Gaddis, 1997)
John Lewis Gaddis, Oxford University Press, 1997Includes: The Cold War
Wikipedia
WikipediaIncludes: United Nations, United Nations, era placementQuote, Includes: United Nations, United Nations, era placement
established by the signing of the Charter of the United Nations on 26 June 1945.
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Start Year
Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (1994) argues that 1945 is the wrong hinge for periodizing the contemporary world. Hobsbawm frames the meaningful unit as a short twentieth century running from the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, which he holds destroyed the nineteenth century's political and economic order outright, to the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, which he treats as the exhaustion of the era's great ideological contest. On this reading, banding the Contemporary Period from 1945 severs the interwar catastrophe from the war and revolution it caused, and stops the era decades before its actual close.
A dissenting reading, from Eric Hobsbawm and the short twentieth century thesisEric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (Hobsbawm, 1994), Michael Joseph, 1994
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