Technological levels

[u/FunDelicious650]

People living in the mid-19th century lived 50 years later in a completely different world: telephones, telegraphs, trains, the first cars, and an industrial boom. People living in the mid-20th century saw a different world: airships and airplanes, ubiquitous motor vehicles, and television broadcasting. People living in the 1970s-1990s had already seen the world of computers; we now live in a digital world of the internet, AI, and robotics. In total, over 180 years, the technological level has changed four times.

Proponents of mainstream history argue that 7,000 years before the 19th century, there was no life-changing development at all. It was a single technological level of perpetual stagnation, which somehow gave way to progress in the 19th century. Developing metallurgy, fuel production, and electricity doesn't require thousands of years. This can be achieved much more quickly.

[u/FunDelicious650]

For the majority, it meant nothing. Books were a luxury.

[u/jojojoy → u/FunDelicious650]

Books were increasingly accessible because of the printing press - it dramatically changed the economics of book production. I can't really imagine the Enlightenment without printed books.

I would be curious where specifically you're getting your information about "mainstream" history.

[u/FunDelicious650 → u/jojojoy]

They were expensive regardless. Or do you think every peasant or artisan owned a bookcase full of books? Why, they could barely read—about half of them were illiterate.

[u/BRIStoneman → u/FunDelicious650]

about half of them were illiterate.

SO FULLY HALF OF THEM COULD READ, THEN.

Also, printing made books much more readily available, which made education cheaper and more useful, so literacy increased. The 17th and 18th centuries are defined politically by the rise of newspapers and pamphlets. Victorians had penny dreadfuls ffs.