If people do make history, as this democratic view suggests, then two people make twice as much history as one. Since there are almost 7 billion people alive today, it follows that they are making seven times as much history as the 1 billion alive in 1811. The chart below shows a population-weighted history of the past two millennia. By this reckoning, over 28% of all the history made since the birth of Christ was made in the 20th century. [There's more, and a great chart.]
Some version of this reality first struck me when as a teen I read this dictum from Arthur C. Clarke: "Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." My response (as I remember it, anyway): is that all? After all these millennia? It jibed with some museum display of human population growth expoding in the last few centuries.
Where this came home to me is in education. The sheer volume of discovery, thinking and writing produced in the last two hundred years -- always accelerating across even that span -- justifies because it necessitates the thinning out of students' exposure to the literature and history of the west from ancient times to the near present.
