Hello. Welcome back to Antisocial Studies. I'm Emily Glengler, and I'm so excited because
today I get to teach you about the 90s. It was a time when
I was alive. Okay, we're not only covering the 90s today, but we are covering
the beginning, the first part of Unit 9. And Unit 9
is like the previous two units in the AP World History Curriculum.
In theory, it's the entire 20th century. But the theme of Unit
9 is globalization, which is really the buzzword for
kind of the post Cold war world, the 90s and the 2000s. And like,
he y' all will be alive during some of this unit. So I'm gonna break
this down into three parts, focusing on different aspects
of kind of the changing, globalizing world. And the reason why I'm going a little
bit more in depth in unit 9 than I have in the other unit intros
is because your teachers might not
make it here before the AP exam. And if they don't,
that's totally fine. Just watch these videos instead. That's what I'm having
my own kids do. And so the good news here is that this is the
unit that you can go the quickest through. You don't have to necessarily have the
level of depth that you've needed for other units. It's kind of similar to Unit
one in that way. And so also, I think it's the easiest unit because,
like I mentioned before, you've lived through some of this unit, and you are still
living through some of this unit. And so a lot of it is relatively intuitive.
So what you really just need is you need to just see, you know,
really the 90s through today and kind of maybe the last 100 years more generally
through the lens of history, as opposed to the lens of, like, just what
you know. Right. So the guiding question for Unit 9
comes from the AP World History of Curriculum. And they want you to be able
to explain the extent to which science and technology brought change in the period from
1900 to the present. We're going to answer this question in three parts. Part one
that we're going to focus on today is the fact that science and technology is
going to unify the globe. It unifies people, and it facilitates social
and economic advancement and exchange in a way that we've never seen before.
So in a lot of ways, unit nine is actually pretty similar to, like,
the period of 1200, 1450, where we're seeing massive regional trade networks like the Silk
Road and the Indian Ocean connecting people, having cultural diffusion. But it's just happening
now almost instantaneously and all around the globe kind of happening
at the same time. I will just give you a little preview. The next topic
that we're going to talk about in part two of this video series is going
to be how technology and science is going to accelerate economic growth and
so the changing economy from, you know, the last hundred years, but more specifically
the 90s to today. And then the third part of the series is going to
be about really the modern set of problems that we're facing. And that's going to
be the video of you just going, yeah, we know, Emily, we know about climate
change. So let's focus first on how science and technology is unifying
people and it's allowing social and economic advancement in a way
that we've never seen before. So really, there's a few topics here
that I want to cover. One is that new technology is eliminating geographic barriers.
It's allowing for better, more efficient communication and
transportation. And a lot of this is pretty obvious when we're talking about communication.
You have the radio. Like the radio is invented at least like the
commercial radio that can be used in people's home. Right around 1900s, the beginning of
the century, obviously we're eventually going to have TVs. I really want to talk to
you for a second about a thing called instant messaging.
Gen Z instant messaging or AIM from
America Online. Instant messaging was, it was like ahead of its time.
If you were a 90s kid, you could just sit on your aim instant messaging
thing all weekend and hope that the person that you liked screen name would pop
up that they were online too. And then there was this whole weird dance of
like, if you had to go away, what your away message would be and you
want it to be really cute. The point is, this was at
the time the Internet really exploding into people's homes where you could start to
use like chat rooms before they were super creepy. Maybe they're always creepy and I
just didn't realize. And you could use instant messaging where you could sit there and
like, text through your computer instantaneously with your friends and whoever you wanted
to. I know this seems really basic now, but it was very exciting in the
90s. Okay, obviously now we have the iPhone, right? The iPhone comes out from Apple
in 2006, which is probably later than you thought it was. And so all of
this is creating these elimination of barriers of communication where you can now,
first, in the early 1900s, you just have like across the country
or even across the world, you can have different people Listening to the same thing,
the same speech, whatever. By the 1950s, 60s, you have television,
you know, uniting nations together and creating more unified culture and cultural
experiences. And then the Internet, like, really booming in the 1990s and beyond.
Okay. It also eliminates barriers of transportation. So we start to have
way more efficient shipping methods, huge shipping containers that can
be carried on these massive ships, planes, obviously, Amazon prime,
yada, yada, yada. You get it? Okay. The second thing is we have a lot
of medical innovations that improve the length and quality of life. But the problem is
that a lot of those medical innovations are created out of necessity because there are
also a lot of global health crises in the 20th
and now 21st centuries. This is going to be a little bit too soon,
but we got to learn about it. So first is you have the rise of
vaccinations, like polio and the smallpox vaccination and
measles and whatever. And so that's really rising in the 20th century as
medicine gets more advanced. You have various forms of birth control kind of escalating into
the pill in the 1960s, which just gives women a lot more control over when
or if they want to have children. And really, that's an interesting piece of
evidence, because it's also evidence of just improving quality of
life anyway, because one, if you're more confident that your children that
you have will survive, you're not going to have as many. But also, as economies
around the world and societies grow more developed and advanced, they're moving away from kind
of subsistence agriculture. Families don't really have an incentive to have more
than, I don't know, one to three kids. Lastly, you also have new advancements
in medicine and technology, like a lot of new treatments for hiv, aids after the
AIDS epidemic that started and is ongoing, but started in the 1980s.
I mean, we're all living this right now, right? We have the development of the
COVID vaccine in, like, an insanely short amount of time, but that built on earlier
vaccines that had been developed through modern medicine. The problem, like I
said, is that a lot of these modern medical advancements come out of crises.
They come out of global pandemics. So you had the Spanish flu pandemic
in 1918. I'm using air quotes because it did not start in Spain, as far
as we know. It actually started in Kansas, either on a pig farm or a
military base. But the point is that actually World War I spreads this Spanish flu.
So it was a really especially kind of strong variant of the flu.
It starts, we believe, in Kansas when the U.S. troops enter World
War I in 1917. They take it over with them. It then sort of lives
in these gross, dirty trenches and kind of mutates over that year.
And then when the war ends and all the soldiers go home, they spread it
all around the world. The reason why we call it the Spanish Flu is because
Spain was neutral in World War I, and so they were not censoring their news.
So the first reported cases that were, like, publicized were coming
out of Spain because they were like, we don't. We don't care. We're not censoring
what people know. Whereas in the US And Britain and France, they didn't want to
create any other panics while we were also trying to fight the war. So we
call it the Spanish Flu. That's wrong. Really. The more correct form would just
be like the flu pandemic of 1918. Okay. You also, like I mentioned before,
have modern pandemics, like the HIV AIDS pandemic, the modern COVID pandemic.
Y' all get. Technology is also facilitating a global popular culture.
Really, for the first time in this whole course, we've been talking about cultural diffusion
a lot. We've been talking about the spread of Buddhism along the Silk Road,
the spread of Christianity, the spread of Islam through trade and conquest, that sort
of thing. But what we have, really, in the post 1950s world is
really, for the first time, a global popular culture. And what
that really looks like is a global Western culture and really American culture.
This is something where the United States has created the most
successful cultural empire that we've ever seen in world history.
Some examples of that would be Hollywood, like the United States,
Hollywood being kind of the center of the film industry, although that then spreads
and diffuses and adapts and creates syncretic cultures like Bollywood in
India and other film industries that are sort of taking what they've learned from the
American film and TV industry and then adapting it to their own culture, which is
really cool. That, like, takes us all the way back to, like, Swahili, right?
With Arabic and the Bantu languages mixing. That's all that's happening right now in something
like Bollywood. You also have social media. I don't need to lecture you all about
social media. That is helping create a global popular culture where, like, people from across
the globe, especially young people, can all be, like, watching the same event, talking about
the same event, whatever. K Pop. I don't
know. I. I could not name it. I don't know what band this is.
I have no idea. I'm looking Like I have a producer that can like tell
me it's just me, but I don't know what band this is. But like K
Pop's an example, right? Of it's not just Western culture flowing
outward, other civilizations are rising to where we're also getting
like Korean culture into the west as well. You have
mega sporting events that are really bringing together the world
in a way that's very literal for a few weeks or a month at a
time. That could be like the World cup, that could be the Olympics,
Olympic opening ceremonies, for example, are. I did like
a whole dissertation on this in undergrad for history. But they're a whole like
distillation of what is going on at the world at that moment. And it's really
fascinating. And so finally you just have global culture
with like food and clothing. The American jeans, which started out
as like sturdy for American farmers, spread and become just sort of
this like very general piece of clothing that most cultures have.
You have McDonald's all around the world. Sorry, you had for
a while a Starbucks in the Forbidden City in China,
which just blows my mind. And then the Chinese people were like,
that seems like a little bit too far. So it closed down. So those are
all examples. The other thing is that technology and increased communication,
this increasing connection and better communication and lowering of barriers
is going to allow historically oppressed groups to unite and push for their own advancement
more efficiently than ever before. So you have my love,
Eleanor Roosevelt. Here she is, she's always next to me. Hey Eleanor.
She is going to get together with the new United nations and these countries are
going to literally be able to come together and sit in the same room and.
And she comes together with this UN Council to create the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights where we are literally attempting to create a
global philosophy. Like think about how we've talked about how Confucianism has united
China, for example. The UN is attempting to do that globally
and say we as an entire world culture on planet Earth are going to try
to decide morally and ethically what we can and cannot do to other human
beings. It has not worked perfectly, but I mean, we haven't
given it that much time yet. We also have examples of other groups that had
been previously dispersed, like black people who had been forcibly spread
around the globe as a result of slavery in the African Diaspora.
They're not able to connect back together and have some shared experience as black people
in white dominated cultures and governments. And so you have
African American leaders like W.E.B. du Bois working with Jamaican
leaders like Marcus Garvey and with kind of African leaders, Kwame Nkrumah,
for example. And they're all starting to come together and they have these literal
meetings, these conversations, conferences throughout the 1900s to discuss what
are the common issues facing black people all around the globe in Latin America.
You have a really interesting religious development that's happening within the Catholic Church, which is
called liberation theology. So essentially this could go all the way back to the conquest,
right, where Catholicism was forced onto a lot of the American cultures.
But we've talked about from the beginning that Latin American Catholicism
from the beginning has been distinct. It has always taken still some of the indigenous
elements of their indigenous religions and kind of melded to create this new syncretic
form of Catholicism. Well, that really reaches its peak in like the 1960s,
1970s, when a lot of Latin American Catholic priests start
applying Catholic teachings to social issues that are being experienced in Latin
America. So the plight of peasants, the necessity of land redistribution,
fighting against military dominated governments that are not allowing freedom of expression.
You start to see priests like Oscar Romero who are using their Catholic teachings
to directly apply them to the plight of the poor and this quote,
unquote, common people in Latin America. Finally, access to education
and professional opportunities also expands to more social classes and minorities. And so
you have something like the reservation quota system in India, which is an attempt
to undo a lot of the damage of the millennia of the caste system.
So Gandhi pushed to abolish the caste system formally in India. But of course,
like we see in a lot of societies like the United States, we still see
systemic racism and systemic issues continuing. And so India
has implemented a thing called the reservation quota system that
is sort of like affirmative action in the United States for the lower caste
to ensure that they are given equitable opportunity in
education and housing and business, et cetera. You have the women's suffrage
movement, right. First it's really applying mostly to kind of white Western women.
But then eventually we're trying to expand voting rights to all
sectors of each population and around the globe. We're still working on that in some
regions of the world. And you have the dismantling of
white supremacy around the world, at least formally. So you
have movements like the ANC and the anti apartheid movement, which leads
to the rise of Nelson Mandela, finally dismantling one of the last, at least
formal, white supremacist governments in apartheid South Africa. This is
where the American civil rights movement would factor into the global, these global social movements
for rights. Obviously, we still have a long way to go, but these formal systems
of kind of this social Darwinist rooted in the kind of 18th and
19th centuries white supremacist governments are being formally dismantled
thanks to technology and increased communication, being able to
facilitate this change. So that is how science and technology is
bringing significant change. It is unifying people. It's facilitating social and economic
advancement. Next episode, we're going to talk about the accelerated economic growth that
we experienced throughout the 1900s as a result of that improved science and
technology. All right. I hope this is helpful. Follow me on all my channels,
especially my TikTok. I'm going to be starting, especially after spring break, posting an
AP World History video every day on TikTok from then until the AP exams.
So check me out there. And if you really like the content I'm making,
then check out my patreon@patreon.com antisocial studies enjoy
the 90s.