The Final Farewell: The Official End to the 20th Century by Paul JJ Payack, Chairman, President & The WordMan, yourDictionary.com

Like most things we cannot fully comprehend, we humans attempt to think of ‘time’ in our own terms. To this end, we break time into convenient units, bite-sized chunks, so that it is easier to comprehend and digest. We call these more manageable morsels: day, night, morning, noon afternoon, evening, and midnight. We compile what appear to be logical groupings of these units into a widely accepted hierarchy: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, centuries, and millennia. We even have a name for all conceivable time, unimaginably stretching forever backward and forever into the future: eternity.

We owe a great debt to various world cultures for this hierarchy. For example, it was the Babylonians who invented the hour with sixty minutes and the minute with sixty seconds (dividing the year into 360 daily units). (The ancient Maya also independently arrived at a Base-60 timing schema.) The ancient Hebrews invented the predecessor of the modern ‘weekend’ with the concept of the Sabbath. The Roman emperor Julius Caesar standardized the year with its 365 and Ό days and introduced the leap year, thus solving the age old problem of what to do with the extra 5 or 6 days that remained at the end of every year. (The Roman solution: bread and circus.) In the sixteenth century Pope Gregory XIII made modifications to the Julian Calendar that allowed it to stay on track for millennia, adding such modifications as a century year being a leap year only if it were evenly divisible by 400.

In the West, we never named individual years like the Chinese do, naming them after the various animals in their zodiacal progression. We chose instead to simply designate them according to their position in the numerical sequence beginning with the birth of Jesus. (It was the sixth century monk Dionysius Exiguus, who began our currently accepted numbering scheme with the birth of Christ, though he miscounted, which is why Jesus is now said to have been born in the year 4 B.C., that is, four years before the year of his birth.) In acknowledgement of the various non-Western systems, such as the Jewish, Moslem, Chinese, etc., contemporary time is often considered the "Common Era". In this light Jesus would be said to have been born in 4 B.C.E, that is four years Before the Common Era. (By the way, the term 'The West' has, over the centuries, evolved from that of 'Western Christiandom', which was the preferred term for this civilization in the prior millennium.)

Over the years I have compiled a list of beginnings and endings of the epochs of World History, as recognized by the average American. This latter caveat has greatly simplified the task, since the said subject has some difficulty navigating the territory between the Cosmic Genesis Event and the invention of television.

The Ancient World

The Ancient World began with the Cosmic Genesis Event (choose one of the following): a) The Big Bang, approximately 16,000,000,000 B.C., or b) the Creation, approximately 9:00 a.m., October 21, 4004 B.C., and continued to the end of Victorian Era. Notable events, figures, and events of world history during this period, according to the popular mind, include the construction of the Pyramids, the birth of Jesus, the death of Julius Caesar, the rise Attila the Hun, the fall of Rome, the Dark Ages, Joan of Arc, the bubonic plague, the Renaissance, Shakespeare, the discovery of America, George Washington, Sitting Bull, Abraham Lincoln, and the Civil War.

The End of the Nineteenth Century

The Victorian Era and the Nineteenth century, interestingly enough, did not end with the death of Queen Victoria but rather ended with the death of King Edward; it also marked the passing of the Edwardian Age, and the near contemporaneous election of Teddy Roosevelt as president of the United States.

The Teens

The Teens commenced with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand on June 29, 1914, encompassed the Great War, the War to End All Wars, and ended (after tens of millions of deaths) precisely at 11:11 a.m. on November 11, 1918 with the signing of the Armistice.

The Twenties

The Twenties began on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918 marking the end of World War I and ended with the onset of the World Economic Depression on Black Monday, October 29, 1929. This decade was characterized by flappers, the Model T, Babe Ruth & Bobby Jones, and the runaway inflation of post-war Germany.

The Thirties

The Thirties were another long decade that began with Black Monday of October 29, 1929, persisted through the Depression, The New Deal, the Dust Bowl, the rise of Nazism, Stalin’s Purges, and the Empire of Japan, and ended at Pearl Harbor.

The Forties

The Forties began on December 7, 1941 with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the event that ushered the US into the global conflict, and persisted a bit longer than one might expect, since Harry S. Truman was tidying up the unfinished business of his predecessor and laying the ideological foundation for the Post-Modern world. (Some might argue that the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima was an appropriate stop to that decade. I think not.)

The Fifties

The Fifties began with the election of President Eisenhower in November 1952, encompassing the rise of the Cold War, the Arms Race of thermonuclear weapons, Sputnik, the hula hoop and Elvis Presley, and ended with the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

The Sixties

The Sixties commenced with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and was characterized by the Beatles, Flower Power, the Viet Nam war, the struggle for civil rights, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Cultural Revolution in the waning days of Chairman Mao, the string of political assassinations in the US, the Moon landing, and ended on July 4, 1976 when American flags were unfurled during Arthur Fiedler’s Boston Pops rendition of "The Stars and Stripes Forever" on the Esplanade to celebrate the American bicentennial.

The Seventies

In like manner, the Seventies commenced on July 4, 1976 and ended with the election of President Reagan in 1980. Though extremely short in duration, this decade begot several of the pillars of contemporary Western civilization: the discotheque, John Travolta, and eight-track cartridge tapes.

The Eighties

The Eighties began with the election of Ronald Reagan as President, and traversed the yuppie phenomenon, the rise of Generation X, the personal computer, and the first cracks of the Soviet hegemony courtesy of Lech Walesa and the Solidarity Union. It ended with the stock market crash of October 29, 1987.

The Nineties

The Nineties began with the said Stock Market Crash of ’87 and up until a month ago seemed to be defined by the fall of Communism, the subsequent world economic restructuring, the Internet, and the integral import of DNA (consider if you will, the human genome, Dolly the cloned sheep, biotechnology, and germ warfare) to the age.

The End of the Twentieth Century

Which brings us to the Twentieth Century. Some might find it a bit curious that the said century actually persisted beyond the millennium celebration, but the fact remains.

The events of September 11 have now ended that decade. Normally, such temporal demarcations are neither so neat nor concise. However, the events of September 11, I daresay, were cataclysmic enough to have emphatically brought to a close the decade of the Nineties, the Twentieth Century, and the Second Millennium. And all within the space of a few hours.