The last few months have been marked by big developments on many fronts: a slowly recovering economy, a troop surge in Afghanistan, the passage of health care reform bills through both houses of Congress, and an international conference on climate change that fell short of many expectations. We talk with best-selling historians Philipp Blom and Jay Winik about what future generations will remember when they look back on the end of the century's first decade.

Historian and author Philipp Blom’s latest endeavor makes the case that the period between 1900 to 1914 in Europe was, as the title of his new book calls it, The Vertigo Years. Those tumultuous times at the start of the last century were an era that was marked by revolution and war, but was also a time where cultural and technological changes happened at an accelerated pace. Blom joins The Takeaway from Vienna, Austria for a look at how the dizzying turn of the 20th century compares to these vertiginous times.