Currently, most English-speaking historians designate "modern" history as beginning with the Industrial Revolution and/or French Revolution and continuing through the present day. There is some debate about what precisely comes between the end of the Middle Ages and the modern, but in the U.S. and England, "Early Modern" now seems to be the preferred term. But "modern" has certainly not always meant what it does to historians today, and it doesn't mean quite the same thing to a historian as it would to, say, an artist or a linguistic scholar or a philosopher. A great many people argue, by the way, that we are no longer in a modern, but rather in a post-modern society.