I've been reading a lot of the history of the enlightenment lately and find myself becoming detached, unfamiliar, even uncomfortable with, my own society in Southern California. I recognize this could easily be a singular incident, but I am curious if any historians experience similar attitudes or changes in perception of your own society based on studying history. Apologies if this has been asked before.
In my own studies of Economic and Trade in the Early Modern era, I sometimes feel like a lot of the current debates about feminism and female labor are just, on some level, rehashing centuries-old debates about the economic rights and abilities of women. In some ways, the labor inequality of gender, while better today it ever has been before in history, reached a low in the mid-to-late 19th century, and female labor was more valued and more emancipated in the 17th century than it was in the 19th. How much of these social shifts can be attributed or separtated from the process of industrialization, I'm not sure.
Modern Feminist authors can be so blind to issues of class that it drives me mad -- while 18th and 19th century writers did not perceive issues of race and gender in the way we do today, their perceptions of class tensions was spot-on, and something that social activists of today could stand to learn from.
Would you mind elaborating on ways in which your readings on the history of the Enlightenment have made you view differently aspects of your contemporary life in southern California?
My studies on race, urban, and media history has profoundly changed the way I view American society. Understanding media's role in the "red scare" and government's response to socialism, along with its fight against labor, allow me to understand the world I live in today. If we include Cold War history, almost the entire 20th century history in the U.S. revolves around the battle between two disparate economic ideologies - socialism and capitalism.
The battle between these two ideologies touched every U.S. citizen in some manner, but the greatest burden fell on the nation's poor. Detroit is a good example of what happens to a city when it ignores the plight of the poor, while concentrating on the wealthy. Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis : Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit provides a chilling history of this event. Moreover, I don't understand why more historians don't become angry over the repeated examples of government's ill treatment of the poor.