It's startling how much the current era reminds me of the late 1800s/early 1900s, as well as how little that era was focused on in my history classes. We jumped

It's startling how much the current era reminds me of the late 1800s/early 1900s, as well as how little that era was focused on in my history classes. We jumped from the Civil War to World War 1 pretty quickly, with scarce attention paid to the social upheaval and long, often violent struggles between workers, governments, and the upper classes. Nowadays, we act as if the Industrial Revolution evolved into shared prosperity naturally; we mock the Luddites, the utopians, the Communists for being unable to see how the disruption caused by technology would lead to positive outcomes. But these outcomes took a long time, were not inevitable, and they did not come from capitalism alone; they were fought for, every step of the way, in a long, complicated, morally ambiguous struggle to shape the new world. We seem to be entering another age of disruption, and would do well to look back on the previous one to understand what was fought for and why.