Learning History

Recently finished read How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World. Steven Johnson has been my introduction to this genre itself - telling stories from history like they were puzzle pieces that fit in a logical way. If they taught us history like this back when I was in high school, we would have produced a dozen historians just in my own class. The rest would have gone into the world with analytic skills that would have served them well in any profession. His choice of the six innovations is fascinating. Makes the reader wonder if there were others he could have selected and they would form a completely different narrative arc. The connections that the author makes are always clever and reminiscent of Freakonomics. 

He shows us how flash photography led to antipoverty programs at the turn of the 20th century; and how the invention of the laser contributed to the decline of mom-and-pop stores. Taking those things a step further one could say for instance the laser is connected to the rise of big box retail in America leading to suburban sprawl and the re-organization of residential locations around these stores, leading to more and less expensive zip-codes and school-zones. That in turn leads to inequity of access to education and opportunity for social mobility. 

But for the invention of the laser, the rise and fall of a community's fortunes would not be tied to which retailers were able to survive in the neighborhood mall in the wake of a pandemic. Johnson has given is readers a framework to use and extend their understanding of the world we live and how it is that we came to be here - what forks existed along the way to here and what different outcomes may have resulted if our forbears had gone different direction.