The world is a drastically different place now than it was when we were kids, and even moreso when compared to our parents' and grandparents' childhoods.

"As I became a historian, I started thinking of my grandmother, who was born in 1889, and I kept thinking of the changes she has seen in her lifetime," says Connie Sexauer, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Marathon County.

And as people in the late 19th and early 20th century grew and matured, so did the world around them.

In fact, when you look back now at the amount of technology that has sprung up over the past century and a half, it's nearly breathtaking.

Gregory Summers, Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point says, "You think about the railroads in the mid-19th century, the rise of big business, automobiles in the early 20th century, electric power, the computer age, the information age more recently, there have really been some remarkable changes in ordinary life that Americans have experienced, and it's changed almost everything that we do and we think and we feel."

And one of those changes is the way new developments have made everyday life a much easier process.

Summers adds, "You can point to convenience as being one of the biggest differences, that in the 19th century, life took a lot of work... If they want energy, if they want to stay warm in the winter, they have to go and cut down some trees and stack firewood all summer... That was an enormous amount of work... We now have this lifestyle that's push-button convenience, if we want it to be warmer, we dial up the thermostat... Those sorts of things have really revolutionized life at home, and it's begun to change the way people think, changes their attitudes, changes the way they look at the natural world."

For example, a trip from Wausau to Stevens Point for people living a century ago would be a massive undertaking, but technology also drastically changed the way they look at distance.

Sexauer says, "The world's much smaller now, even though it's the same space it always was, and we have many more people than we ever did before."

She adds that in 1907 there were 143 paved roads in the U.S., and automobiles were a rarity, which meant people looking to travel from Wausau didn't have many options besides waiting at the local railroad station and hoping its' schedule matched theirs.

Sexauer says, "Nowadays, you hop on an airplane and you're there in no time, and even with the super-highways that we have, getting from place to place is a lot easier."

But while improvements in travel have made it much easier to get where you're going, other gains have made it less necessary than ever to need to.

Summers says, "Go all the way back to the telegraph in the 19th century, one historian has called that the Victorian internet, because it had essentially the same effect, it took a world where communication was difficult, and often took weeks, and it made communication instantaneous in the same way the internet has."

Sexauer adds, "Telephone, radio, television, talking motion pictures, the computer, all of those things have been able to connect us to other people, and to a common culture, a common understanding of what's going on."

And with all of the technological jumps we've made in the recent past, the historians we spoke with say it's clear that the world is changing, and will continue to do so.

Sexauer says, "Things have happened, especially in the last 15 years, that have drastically changed the world, bringing us much closer together... I would like to think that 20 years from now, things are going to be totally different, and you and I are going to wonder, how did that happen so quickly?"

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