There is no such thing as the Dreadnought Era

I meant to post awhile ago, after Jon Stewart creamed MSNBC, in the guise of Jim Cramer, on The Daily Show, but I fell behind and never got to it, but luckily The Daily Show proved, once again, that they don't take themselves too seriously, and made it topical again.

What I though originally, was that perhaps the Stewart/Cramer moment marked a watershed moment when people would really start to think differently about the world of finance and the economy. But on further reflection I remembered that marked edges don't tend to really occur except retrospectively, to help us mark off and remember portions of the past, for those who actually lived those events they tend not to be demarcations of temporal barriers, but instead defining events.

Thus I remembered that at some point, Prof. Sumida, who was an expert on the British and German navies before and during WWI, once said, and I forget whether it was to me or to someone else that there was, "No such thing as the Dreadnought Era." I think he didn't elaborate, or I just caught a snippet. But I think the idea was that in the naval popular history of the period there tends to be a view that the HMS Dreadnought inaugurated a new period in naval warfare that was closed by naval aviation and aircraft carriers during WWII, but that in fact that these discrete ends are in fact less clear to the point of not being substantial enough to note for the serious historian.

That said, it is hard for someone who think seriously not to wonder about how history will record the moments we live every day.