differences of early period and 21st century present time and its similarities
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Many scholars have made attempts to identify how societies have changed in the 21st century compared to our ancestors. This essay will focus on finding out similarities and differences between the common man’s expectations and assumption in the 21st century and the medieval age. It will then assess that the arguments concerning the similarities are stronger than the arguments concerning the differences with the use of various examples, namely, power dynamics of gender, race, ethnicity & religion, and prison and healthcare reform.
Many scholars have made attempts to identify how societies have changed in the 21st century compared to our ancestors. This essay will focus on finding out similarities and differences between the common man’s expectations and assumption in the 21st century and the medieval age. It will then assess that the arguments concerning the similarities are stronger than the arguments concerning the differences with the use of various examples, namely, power dynamics of gender, race, ethnicity & religion, and prison and healthcare reform.Key views of similarities and differences
Many scholars have made attempts to identify how societies have changed in the 21st century compared to our ancestors. This essay will focus on finding out similarities and differences between the common man’s expectations and assumption in the 21st century and the medieval age. It will then assess that the arguments concerning the similarities are stronger than the arguments concerning the differences with the use of various examples, namely, power dynamics of gender, race, ethnicity & religion, and prison and healthcare reform.Key views of similarities and differencesThere are two views on the differences in the public’s expectations and assumptions in the 21st century and the medieval period. Proponents of the traditional view that the events which occurred after the medieval age may have led to significant development and betterment of people, thus differentiating the expectations of the public from the medieval age. Authors like Boroda (Boroda, 2008) argue that the peasants were living in a worse condition during the medieval ages. This was because the peasants were living in poverty and had no rights. The feudal system was prominent in the medieval age, whereby only lords own lands while the landless, called the peasants, worked on the lands belonging to the lords (Sider and Smith, 1997). The lords would allow the peasants to live on the land and cultivate crops if the peasants paid taxes (Sider and Smith, 1997). The farm work is often relatively more labor-intensive and the taxes that the peasants had to pay made them poorer with the time (Sider and Smith, 1997). The social Marxist revolt which liberated peasants did not take place until the 19th century. Hence, laborers in the medieval age did not have rights as that in the 21st century and thus lived in worse conditions (Sider and Smith, 1997) (Boroda, 2008). The peasant’s situation worsened due to the Black Death epidemic and the Hundred Years war, which increased poverty (Wuetherick, 2008). Even though agriculture was the main source of income, the epidemic and the war led 70 percent of peasants to search for jobs outside agriculture (Boroda, 2008). Ashton and Landen (Ashton, 1997) argue that it was only after the 17th-century industrial revolution that people started living a better life due to the rise of innovations and technologies.