“Contemporary history” usually starts where 1945 left the world
In English historiography, contemporary history covers roughly 1945 to now, overlapping social scientists’ talk of postmodernity. Its political spine is the Cold War (1947–1991), while labs delivered spaceflight, semiconductors, molecular biology, and the commercial computer path into the Information Age.
English-language historians use contemporary history for the slice of modern history running from about 1945 to today, an era social scientists tie to the rise of postmodernity. It opened with the Allies victorious and founding the United Nations to handle disputes between states. After the Yalta Conference, defeated and devastated countries were carved into zones, each assigned to one Allied power for rebuilding. Some zones really were temporary, as when occupied Austria was released as a neutral state, but rivalry between the American-led West and the Soviet-led East froze many lines in place. Eastern Europe got communist satellite regimes, the Berlin Blockade of 1948 prompted a Western airlift, and in 1949 Germany split into a democratic West and a communist East.
That standoff, the Cold War of 1947 to 1991, dominates the period's politics. It raised fears of nuclear war, yet an all-out conflict never came; instead both blocs meddled in smaller countries and fought through proxies until the revolutions of 1989 and the Soviet breakup in 1991, which opened the way to democratisation across much of Europe, Africa and Latin America. In East Asia, Chiang Kai-shek's government lost the mainland to Mao Zedong's Communists by 1949 and withdrew to Taiwan, with both still claiming all China. Korea, divided like Germany, went to war from 1950 to 1953 and remains a frozen conflict. Japan adopted a constitution renouncing aggressive war in 1947, and the US occupation ended in 1952.
Between 1945 and 1975 new states across Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa won independence from European empires. The Middle East also saw conflict around the new state of Israel, oil politics, the rise and fall of Arab nationalism and the growth of Islamism. Supranational bodies such as the United Nations and the European Union appeared for the first time.
The post-war boom lifted living standards across the developed world, with Japan and West Germany becoming economic powerhouses and American films and television spreading worldwide. From the 1960s to the 1980s countercultures and the sexual revolution reshaped Western society, peaking in the protests of 1968. Some Western economies began deindustrialising in the 1970s, while Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan followed Japan's rapid growth and China's reform and opening up from 1978 made it a giant exporter. Science delivered spaceflight, nuclear power, lasers, semiconductors, molecular biology and the Standard Model, and commercial computers led on to the Internet and the Information Age.
Source: Contemporary history
