Hi, I'm taking AP World History currently, (9th grade, absolutely LOVE IT) and made a kinda weird observation. I was scrolling through outlines of the time periods (In comments) and I saw that period one (around 9000 years) was a similar size to period two's (about 1200 years) and period 3 (only 850 years) was even longer! Is history I guess in a weird way, speeding up? Like more is happening in less time? The last time period is only 100 years and I know a TON happens in the 20th and so far in the 21st century. Is history "speeding up", and if so, why? Globalization? The internet? New technologies allowing faster communication (such as the internet)?
There are many more people doing a much broader variety of things now than there were even 50 years ago, much less a thousand years ago. So history is "speeding up" in the sense that more things are happening just as a factor of a growing human population multiplied by technological progress and economic development.
That being said, you also have to keep in mind that the further back you go into the past, often the less reliable information we have. So your impression that not as much happened in the past is shaped by the fact that many things happened that historians simply know very little about, or don't know about at all. Secondly when you have a general history focused on explaining why things are the way they are today, there's going to be a focus on things that are part of the story the author wants to tell- many things that people living in that time would have considered important won't be included because they don't contribute to the author's big picture. Historians make editorial choices about what information is and isn't important for the topic they're covering.
Time Periods:
8000 B.C.E. - 600 B.C.E.
600 B.C.E. - 600 C.E.
600 - 1450
1450 - 1750
1750 - 1900
1900 - Present