End Of An Age / Real Life

A No Recent Examples rule applies to all Real Life examples of this trope. Real life examples shouldn't be added until 5 years after the era is believed to end.

---

Pre-History

• Mars is divided by scientists into 4 periods, marked by different types of surface features. In Martian history, ends of ages could be marked by the loss of surface water, and by the decline of volcanism.
• Venus at one point may have had oceans and water. At some point, its water was lost and conditions became more like they are today.
• The very early Earth has been claimed to be enshrouded in a very thick carbon dioxide atmosphere, even denser than the one Venus currently has, and having been saved from becoming a Venus-like world by both a Sun that was less luminous than a present and such carbon dioxide having been locked in rocks when plate tectonics started, and later on by photosynthetic organisms being replaced by oxygen as noted on below.
• The formation of Snowball Earth ended an approximately billion year period of relatively slow changes on Earth, a period where life, climate, and oceans stayed relatively constant, while continental drift and growth had continued steadily.
• Jupiter's moon Ganymede had been tidally heated in the past. At some point, its orbit changed, heat stopped being generated, and Ganymede became the geologically inactive place it is today.
• Mass extinction events are this in general. Before one occurs, one group of animals forms the dominant species, evolving into the most wondrous beings. But then a Mass Extinction Event occurs, which means the ruling group of animals gets extinct, causing another to take its place, beginning a new age, in which evolution takes yet another route.
  • One of the most well-known examples of this would be the meteorite collision that ended the Mesozoic era, and hence the near-total extinction of the dinosaurs (only birds, who evolved from non-avian feathered dinosaurs, survived the extinction event). And with the end of the age of the dinosaur, the rise of the mammals soon followed.
  • The ending of the Paleozoic thanks to the Great Dying is an even earlier example.
  • And a bit more than two billion years before that, the "Oxygen Catastrophe" marked the extinction of most anaerobic organisms as oxygen first became a significant part of Earth's atmosphere.
  • The Toba catastrophe theory suggested that a supervolcano from 75,000 years ago erupted and the ensuing climate change nearly wiped out all humans and did wipe out nearly all subspecies of man, to the point where only around 1,000-10,000 human breeding pairs total remained.
• The end of the Paleolithic Ice Age for a number of reasons. First was the extinction of most of the world's megafauna. Many large mammals that were once common throughout the world went extinct completely or were reduced to a handful of surviving examples (ex: rhinoceros used to live in almost every continent save Antarctica, South America, and Australia, now they are only found in Africa and parts of Asia). The second was that human beings evolved and rose to become the dominant species on the planet. This could be seen as either a good thing or a bad thing depending on your personal view.

Ancient History

• The development of cities and agriculture changed the societies affected from hunter-gatherer societies to much more hierarchical, organized, and larger-scale societies of civilizations.
• The end of the Bronze Age brought with itself a collapse of nearly a dozen ancient cultures like the Mycenaeans ^note proto-Greeks, the Hittite Empire, the Mitanni, and with the Kingdom of Egypt somehow managing to survive by the skin of its teeth. Some archaeological evidence even suggests that this end was one of general chaos, disarray, and violence, with signs of war and hushed whispers in the few surviving sources talking about the mysterious "Sea Peoples" who may have been the cause of the collapse or a result of it. Possible causes include:
  • The Sea Peoples: Texts describe a voracious and unstoppable army of people coming from the sea, sweeping across the Bronze Age civilizations. They're never clearly depicted, save for the depiction of the Battle of Djahy in Ramses III's mortuary temple, so we don't know who they were for certain save for the fact that they were a multi-ethic coalition, and at least one, the Peleset, were the likely ancestors of the Philistines faced by the Israelites in the Bible.
  • Famine: There is widespread evidence of drought that appears to have started in the west, which may explain the appearance of the Sea Peoples: driven from their homes in desperation, they picked up more people as the drought spread (along with the devastation caused by the SP themselves). Famine ended up striking the whole of the region, though, and some have suggested the massive Hekla 3 volcanic eruption caused volcanic winter, though the dating on that isn't precise enough and doesn't quite line up.
  • Plagues: The Bronze Age civilizations were immensely interconnected, a web of commerce and diplomacy that bound a vast region together. If the ruler of one kingdom wasn't in direct contact with another, they were only one or two connections separated. Goods moved vast distances and in all directions. If a plague were to start in one area, it could have spread quickly to another, and there is some evidence of plague victims. However, in the chaos of war and the weakness caused by famine, plague would have been inevitable, so this could be a result, rather than a cause.
  • Revolution: When a city is destroyed by violence and fire, it's very difficult to determine who exactly destroyed it, especially since neither an invading army nor an insurgent peasantry are likely to keep careful records. Nor are the now deceased ruling elite.
  • Iron: Pure iron is brittle and corrodes quickly, whereas pure copper is resilient to impact and corrosion and massively improved by alloying it with tin. Further, tin has a low enough melting point that you can melt it on a campfire, making the bronze alloy easy to create. Melting iron requires a smelting furnace to achieve high enough temperatures, and that technology required the 2000 years of the Bronze Age to develop, and then further to discover the properties and working of an iron-carbon steel alloy. Once that was done, though, iron is abundant, whereas tin is scarce, making iron weapons cheap and effective. It's possible this disrupted Bronze age Warfare and allowed peasant armies to do those revolutions.
  • Earthquakes: The entire region is riddled with fault lines. Earthquakes and volcanoes are common. Sometimes, regions produce what are known as earthquake swarms, where a large number of earthquakes occur in a relatively brief period (days, months, or years), with all quakes being roughly the same size. They're generally moderate in size and thus more distressing than dangerous, but they can be followed by large quakes. Bodies have been recovered indicating the possibility of at least one earthquake in the correct time frame.
  • All of these: Systems Collapse Theory posits that the Bronze Age culture was a robust collection of interconnected civilizations, with multiple redundancies allowing necessary goods and communications to be routed around any incidence of disruption (internal rebellion, say), allowing for thousands of years of stability. Therefore, instead of any one catastrophe, the theory says that multiple catastrophes struck the region in successive waves, piling on the damage until the entire network collapsed.
• In 256 BC, the last Zhou king was killed after about 800 years of rule. The dynasty had been declining slowly but surely over most of that time, and the king had almost no power when it ended, but the overthrow sealed things.
• The conquest of Babylon by Persians could be said to have ended several thousand years of Mesopotamian power. After that point, the region would mostly be controlled by outside empires, though would still be an important center and even the site of many purpose-built capitals.
• Egypt's conquest by Nubians, Assyrians, Persians, Romans, or some other empires could be considered this as well. Independent Pharaonic Egypt has lasted for thousands of years, but over time these conquests would reduce its independence, power, and eventually change the culture.
• Alexander the Great is somehow both the End and the Dawn of an Era. On one hand, his conquests increased the knowledge of the world, spread Greek civilization as far away as the Indus River, and transformed society like few before him did. On the other hand, his empire brought the end of the Persian Empire, ended the classic period of Athenian civilization and the resulting Dark Ages saw the decline of Greece in favor of Rome as the hegemon of the Mediterranean.
• The end of the third Punic war saw Rome destroying its main competitor in the western half of the Mediterranean, Carthage, by the Scipio family. This allowed the Romans to get their hands on the rich mines and crops of Hispania and the fertile lands of Northern Africa, fueling their further conquests in all directions. This was both the end of Phoenician culture (Carthage was founded by Phoenicians) in the west, and the end of the era where Rome was just one of several great powers in Europe.
• The Assassination of Julius Caesar marks the end of The Roman Republic (Ironically, this was what the conspirators were hoping to avoid by killing him). The Republic and its instiutions persisted in name for several centuries, but from Caesar on all power was concentrated in the hands of one man.
• Pompey's invasion of Judea is seen as the beginning of the end of classical Judaism. The destruction of the Jewish Temple and the Revolt of Masada is also regarded by Jews as the beginning of their status as a diaspora.
• The Roman Empire has many endpoints as well:
  • Emperor Julian the Apostate's failed attempt to curtail the spread of Christianity by reviving Hellenism is seen as the Death of the Old Gods, the end of classical paganism, and the unchallenged and unopposed rise of Christianity in cultural hegemony.
  • The barbarian invasion of Odoacer, forcing the abdication of Romulus Augustus, marks the definitive end of the Western Roman Empire. The Byzantine Empire in the east would however continue for nearly a millennium.
• The Christianization of Rome, conversion of other Europeans, and Muslim conquests replaced most ancient polytheistic religions in most of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Dark Ages, Warring States

• After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe was cast into the Dark Age, and large parts of Roman technology and culture were forgotten. Of course, sixth-century Europeans didn't see themselves as being in a Dark Age, and many may have been very happy not to be on the business end of Roman imperialism any longer. Also, "Dark Age" in this context doesn't necessarily refer to the standard of living at the time but rather the fact that we're "in the dark" about a lot of what went on then due to a dearth of contemporary writings. Nowadays most historians refer to this time period as the Early Middle Ages to avoid the connotations of the word "dark".
• The Fall of the Sassanid Empire saw the end of the dominance of Zoroastrianism over the Middle East and the last traces of the ancient world since the Bronze Age.
• The Rise of Islam is seen as the end point of Late Antiquity since the conquests of the Umayyad Caliphate broke the joint story of the Mediterranean, dominated at the time by the Eastern Roman Empire and still having the religious factor as unification, and permanently began the rift between the East and the West, the former eventually becoming more Greek and Slavic while the West shifted its power from the Goths to the Franks.
• After about four centuries of Han dynasty^note roughly contemporary with the Roman Empire rule, in the 3rd century AD, the slow disintegration of the first long-lived empire to dominate all of China was punctuated by a coalition of nations south of the Yellow River effectively declaring themselves independent as new states. The fighting eventually ground to a halt as everyone went broke and had to sue for peace, splitting the empire into three de facto countries whose Emperors each claimed to be the sole legitimate heir (aka the 'Three Kingdoms' era). It would be several centuries before the Sui, and their almost immediate successors the Tang, managed to reunify all former Han territory, a difficult task in particular due to somewhat chaotic post-Han migration undermining the old ethnic status quo of the region.
• Culturally, ethnically, and linguistically, the fall of the Western Roman Empire created a huge shift in the general population of Western Europe, which happened far more gradually than the political and military changes but was arguably much farther-reaching. For most of the Roman Empire's heyday, Western Europe was politically dominated by the Romans of Southern Europe, though most of the region was culturally dominated by various indigenous peoples who could be broadly described as "Celtic" (though that term was invented by Greek historians, and they never called themselves "Celts"). After Rome's legions deserted them, the Celtic peoples of Western Europe were suddenly at the mercy of the far more aggressive "Germanic" peoples of Central Europe, who became the predominant cultural force in the region within a few centuries. To this day, the region that was formerly known as "Gaul" is now known as "France" (after the Franks), while two of its largest regions are known as "Lombardy" and "Normandy" (after the Lombards and the Normans), and the country on the Northern side of the English Channel is called "England" (after the Angles), with "Anglo-" being a universally recognized prefix for all things English. As a result of centuries of invasions by the Angles, Saxons, and Normans, the Germanic-derived language of "English" is now the most widely-spoken language in the world, with the Celtic-derived tongues of "Irish", "Scottish Gaelic" and "Welsh" spoken only by a handful of faithful devotees. English speakers even still refer to the days of the week by names derived from the gods of the Norse pantheon, which was shared by the Anglo-Saxons.^note  "Tuesday" is "Tyr's Day", "Wednesday" is "Wodan's Day", "Thursday" is "Thor's Day", and "Friday" is "Freya's Day".

Middle Ages

• The beginnings of the Vikings' raids were the heralds of the end of the stability brought by the Carolingian Empire, replacing with the various sacks across all Europe.
• The Viking Age itself ended fourfold with the failed settlement of Newfoundland, the Christianization of the rest of Scandinavia, the part where King Harald III of Norway failed to invade England months before the Norman Conquest, and the launching of The Crusades which opened up trade routes in the Middle East.
• The destruction of Baghdad in 1258 at the hands of the Mongols ended the Arabian Golden Age, which had probably ended by the time of the Crusades in most places, but probably continued on in Baghdad. Overall this was a period of decline in relative power for quite some time (thanks to the Crusaders, Mongols, and the Reconquista in Spain and Portugal) but it wasn't until Baghdad was utterly destroyed that Islam's decline really set in. The city of Baghdad was razed, the greatest center of Islamic learning was destroyed, and more people died in that city than (possibly) in the destruction of any other up to that point in time. Losing these centers of learning crippled the progress of Islam. After Baghdad fell, the momentum of Islam shifted from the Arabs to the Turks, the Mongols who assimilated into Islam much later as well as the Empires in India.
• The Purge of The Knights Templar by King Philip le Bel in 1307 is also seen as the final nail in the coffin of the Crusades, since having outlived its original purpose as a Church Militant, the Templars' changed role as a banking organization was seen as a liability.
• The Christianization of Lithuania starting in 1387 is said to be the final nail in the coffin of non-Abrahamic majority religion in Europe outside of fringe holdouts and folklore, the nation having outlasted all of its neighbors as Europe's last pagan state.
• The Black Death, as well as the short cooling down of Northern Europe, are seen as parts of the end of the prosperity of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, replacing Europe with famine, conflict, and crisis of which the fifteenth century was famous for. It also delivered a major blow to the authority of both the feudal lord and the church: the ensuing labor shortage allowed serfs and artisans to negotiate their wages and relationship to their lords for the first time, while the church's response to the crisis shattered confidence in the institution and opened it to criticism.
• The Battle of Crécy as part of The Hundred Years War is considered to be the beginning of the end of classic chivalry. Knights on both sides were part of the old warrior nobility of Europe, but the English longbowmen beat them both, having been training weekly with one of the most powerful but difficult-to-master weapons in history for at least a century before the war began. And knights, particularly French knights, were notoriously impetuous, and several battles in history were lost due to undisciplined, glory-hungry knights insisting on being the first into battle, even going as far as riding over their own archers, such was their eagerness to get to grips with the English. As such, the English forces led by Edward III and Edward the Black Prince defeated the French forces of Philip VI despite being outnumbered at least 4 to 1. And, after the battle, the peasants mercilessly killed the incapacitated knights.

Renaissance

• The capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 marked the end of The Middle Ages, and it was also the final defeat of the Roman Empire that had been in existence for almost two thousand years (as the Byzantine Empire in its medieval phase). By then, the Empire was just The Remnant and Land of One City, but the defeat sent shockwaves through all of Christendom. The fifteenth century also brought the flowering of the Italian Renaissance and the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation that ended the religious dominance of the Catholic Church in Western Europe.
  • Of course, this is a highly contentious issue - for others, the End of The Middle Ages is marked not by the fall of Constantinople, but by Columbus' first voyage (1492) or Luther's Reformation. And from a Greek-Byzantine point of view, there were no Middle Ages, the fall of Constantinople marking the end of antiquity. To a large extent, "The Middle Ages" is a construct of snooty Renaissance writers badmouthing their antecedents. In the view of many (social) historians, the Middle Ages went on until the 18th century in many respects throughout large parts of Europe.
• 1453 also signaled the end of The Hundred Years War, which meant the end of the English dream of taking the French throne (and uniting both crowns). Despite losing a good chunk of its population, France won the war and recovered nearly all English territory on French soil.^note The Pale of Calais remained in English hands until 1558. This led to England becoming an island nation for the first time since the pre-Norman Conquest era; the losses also drastically weakened Henry VI of England in many ways and helped contribute to the Wars of the Roses.
• The abandonment of the Congress of Mantua's planned crusade against the Turks before it had even begun at Ancona in 1464 is considered to mark the final death of the temporal power of the Papacy over the Princes of Europe. Envisaged by Pope Pius II as a grand final crusade, creating a United Europe to fight and finally annihilate Christendom's common enemy, Islam, the "paper crusade" was ignored by almost every European power of note. When the miserable Crusade fleet, a tiny flotilla of barely seaworthy Italian warships, finally sailed into Ancona, the elderly Pope crossed the Despair Event Horizon and died two days later. The Vatican's power was never quite the same.
• The end of the Wars of the Roses in 1485 spelled the end of the feudal system in England. Its conclusion, the Battle of Bosworth Field, is also seen as the Twilight of Chivalry. Richard III became the last English king to be killed in battle, as well as the last king of the old Plantagenet bloodline. His successors, the Tudors, were quick to establish a top-down royal bureaucracy and civil service to keep the nobles in line—largely because no one wanted a repeat of the Wars of the Roses.
• In 1492, a mediocre sailor named Christopher Columbus led three ships across the Atlantic in an attempt to reach China and India. What they found was something different, and what happened next was nothing short of The End of the World as We Know It for Native Americans. European diseases spread far in advance of European settlers, killing up to 90% of the Indians infected (estimates for the number of Indians killed by disease at the time exceed ten million). When the Europeans themselves followed, the results were no less tragic, with widespread pillaging, forced conversions, and genocide. Thousands of years of Native American civilization, including two of the mightiest empires the world had ever known, were destroyed in less than a century, leading to the concept of Indians as backward primitives.
  • While not less dramatic, the treatment of the Amerindians was something that varied between the areas of influence of either European power: in the Spanish kingdoms, there were laws to protect the Amerindians from the abuse that the original Conquistadores and their descendants made them suffer (how much were these laws enforced varied between the continent) and actively required the assistance of the native nobility and a sort of respect towards the works of the original populations; the Portuguese and the French, although as not as active as the Spaniards, allowed native populations to be integrated into their territories; on the other hand, the English colonists actually argued that because the Amerindians that lived in their borders had not reached the cultural and technical level of either the Aztecs or the Incas, they couldn't become part of the colonial system. In short, if you were a native and lived in a Catholic zone of influence, your chances of living were better than in the Protestant zone of influence.
• The arrival of three technologies created a massive change in European commerce and culture: cheap paper, moveable type, and the press. Together, these created an explosion of literature and learning, encouraging widespread literacy. Cheap paper, above all, meant that you could print disposable pamphlets for discussions of politics and religion, or just write lots of letters to distant friends about your scientific ideas. Whereas in Antiquity a book cost the equivalent of a high end luxury or sports car, meaning only the elite could have a personal library, cheap paper meant a middle class family could have a small library, and even a poor person could afford a book or two. Not only did this begin the scientific revolution (alchemy -> chemistry, astrology -> astronomy), and the Protestant Reformation, but it also created an awareness of the middle class as a group unto themselves, as merchants, artisans, and the like were finally able to not merely communicate in local communities, but to see themselves reflected in art and literature across all of Europe.
• The 1512 defeat of Florence by the Medici and the Pope (supported by Spanish troops) marked the end of the Florentine Republic and the classic period of the Renaissance. Until then, Florence had been the center of European finance and arts, the home of Giotto, Cimabue, Donatello, Leon Battista Alberti, Pico della Mirandola, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. By 1512, the center of gravity had shifted to Rome, the Medici were no longer a banking family but had become hereditary nobility and after the fall of Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli — who had formed the Florentine Militia — was sacked, tortured, and exiled. In his retirement, he worked as a playwright and later wrote a small book called The Prince.
• The age of the Italian Renaissance ended with the Italian Wars of the 1490s, and its subsequent invasion by Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire in the early 16th century. Of course, the invasion of Italy spread the Renaissance ideals to the rest of the continent, making it also a Dawn of an Era to the European Renaissance.

Early Modern (15th-18th Century)

• There are two points at which the Sengoku Jidai are said to have ended. The first is the official point, the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, where the forces of Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated those of Ishida Mitsunari. Despite some resistance beyond the battle, including the 1614-1615 Siege of Osaka that ended with the destruction of the Toyotomi clan, and officially ended the largest resistance to the shogunate's rule, the Sengoku period is usually declared to be over after this by most historians. The other is more symbolic, the Battle of Nagashino twenty-five years prior, where Oda Nobunaga destroyed the famed Takeda clan cavalry by using European arquebuses in rotating volumes of fire. Guns had been used before this battle, but the tactics used by Nobunaga kick-started an arms race and forever altered the Japanese attitude towards warfare. Both are seen as the point when the traditional age of samurai engaging in honorable single combat, ronin wandering aimlessly from town-to-town, and the political plotting of the daimyo ended. Often viewed in the same light as the declared end of the Western frontier in American culture.^note Even 250 years before the arrival of Commodore Perry (see below) Tokugawa's rise to power essentially sowed the seeds of the shogunate's demise. Tokugawa devised the entire social hierarchy of the daimyo based on who was loyal to him before his victory at Sekigahara and purposely made it nearly impossible for minor daimyo and their descendants to advance in power and prestige if they weren't already powerful when he became shogun. Not to mention that he tried to install the samurai as the unchallenged ruling class at the top of Japanese society, even though they inevitably became irrelevant over the course of 250 years of peace, while the merchants (ostensibly the lowest social class) just got more powerful and relevant as the country's economy got more advanced. As a result, resentment towards the shogun and the samurai just built up over time as they both tried to maintain the old status quo indefinitely. The shogunate and the samurai held for 250 years, but they were already at the end of a long decline when Perry's flotilla arrived. There's a reason the shogun fell from power in short order afterward.
• The English Civil War (1642-1651) and the subsequent Glorious Revolution (1688-1689) marked the decline of the English monarchy from rule by divine right to the status of constitutional figurehead. From then on, the Parliament were the real rulers of Great Britain and continued to call the shots right to the present day.
• The rise of Louis XIV (reigned 1643-1715) and absolute monarchy was seen as the end of the old feudalism later celebrated in the books of Alexandre Dumas. Formerly, the King ruled by feudal contracts. By fully taking power, the King eroded the powers of the old aristocracy, made them mere figureheads without armies and levies, and brought them to Versailles to live a life of Conspicuous Consumption. By centralizing power at Versailles, Louis XIV also began the process of transforming France from a kingdom to a nation-state.
• The year 1672, also known as Rampjaar (disaster year) marked the end of the Dutch golden age of the 17th century and consequently the Dutch Republic. Before this year, the Netherlands was a progressive republic amidst a Europe filled with conservative monarchies and yet were a world power to be reckoned with, due to their impressive navy and great skill in economics. In 1672, the Dutch Republic came under attack by France, England, and several German states. This war resulted in the Dutch economy being crippled, the death of the republic's leaders Johan and Cornelis de Witt, and the end of the Republic itself, because William III was crowned Stadtholder to replace the De Witts. After this war, the Netherlands sank into decline and never returned to being the massive world power they were during the 17th century.
• The Siege of Vienna (1683) ended the Ottoman Empire's expansionist campaign into Europe. While previous battles such as the Great Siege of Malta and the Battle of Lepanto were just as decisive since they shattered the perception of Ottoman invincibility, from Vienna onwards the Ottomans would only gradually lose more and more of their territories into the next centuries, with their decline formalized by the Americans crushing their Barbary corsairs and Imperial Russia seizing the Crimean Khanate, which ended their slave raids into Europe. On the flip side, it allowed Westerners to have a more nuanced and diplomatic view of their people and religion.
• The Glorious Revolution (1688-1689) was also seen as the end of Scotland as a distinct society, the 1706-1707 Acts of Union led to Scotland acceding to England and forming the state of Great Britain. This Hanover-Stuart Wars and the Jacobite Rebellion was the last major civil conflict on English soil. The Battle of Culloden (1746) was seen as the final nail in the coffin of the Stuart Kings and the end of Scotland as an independent power.
• The Great Northern War (1700-1721) caused the total collapse of the Swedish Empire; after its grave losses - including their king itself. Rose in the eve of the Thirty Years' War, the Swedish Empire was immediately threatened by the emerging Russian Tsardom (later reformed as the Russian Empire) and a couple of other nations that they immediately declared war on them from which they were lost. Afterward, while Sweden is still capable of dealing with international affairs after the war; The Napoleonic Wars, and their total loss of what's left of their territory - namely all of Finland and the chunk of the Pomeranian region - gave the Swedes no choice but to retreat from the international affairs and became a neutral nation instead; ending their great power status as a whole.
  • The war also became the final nail of the coffin for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Well known for its type of monarchy that focuses on electability rather than the succession through familial heir^NoteIronically enough, the PLC started as a hereditary monarchy before changing into the system that we know and loved, then changing into a constitution monarchy halfway through, before changing back into an elective monarchy, right at the final years of their existence. Though they remained the parliamentary-style of governance during the change of the monarchial systems throughout their existence and a constitution that is considered as one of the earliest examples in the European continent, right after the drafting of the American Constitution itself; the PLC immediately went into a total decline thanks to internal troubles as well as the dual invasion by the Swedish and the Russian forces in the middle of the 16th Century which devastated the Commonwealth as a whole. When the above war happened, it finally sealed the fate for the decline of the PLC, and their existence would disappear by the next couple of decades, despite several attempts of reforms, thanks to partitions committed by Russia, Austria, and Prussia itself.
• The Golden Age of Piracy, which began in the mid-17th century, petered out in the wake of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) with the passage of the Treaty of Utrecht and the rise of conscript armies. The most iconic era of the period centered on the Pirate Republic (1706–1718) was a brief seven-year period that ended when the English Governor Woodes Rogers occupied Nassau. The death of Bartholomew Roberts, the most successful pirate of that era, in 1722, is seen as the end of the period.
• France's defeat in the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) marked the end of its North American Empire. It also marked the beginning of the end of Native tribes on the East Coast. Formerly courted by either France and England as an ally against the other, the rise of a single European colonial hegemony in North America left them with fewer allies than before. Their losses of life and land in the period from the French and Indian War to The American Revolution marked the migration of the tribes westward, and the start of their marginalization and exploitation as minorities in a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominated America.
• The American Revolution (1775-1783), in which France played a vital role, had its own impact. Seeing a bunch of colonists revolt against the British crown, fomented thoughts of revolution in the French, who came to see their aristocracy as something to overthrow and became enamored of the idea of a French republic.
• The French Monarchy overall suffered constant defeats and decline in the 18th Century which in turn led to The French Revolution (1789-1799). The death of Louis XVI (died 1793) by guillotine in a formerly Catholic nation (as opposed to a Protestant nation in the case of Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil War) was the end of the Divine Right of Kings as a concept of sovereignty and absolute monarchy. The 1793-1794 French Revolutionary Wars, as per Carl von Clausewitz and later observers, was the first total war and France's victory, despite later revolutionary reversals, marked the rise of the nation and the end of Kingdoms.

19th Century

• The Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) led to the end of feudalism across Europe, started the process of de-ghettoizing Jews, and introduced meritocracy and modern civil law via the Napoleonic Code. Napoleon's conquest of Spain marked the end of Spain's rule over its Latin American colonies. Napoleon's final defeat likewise marked the end of France as a major European power on the Continent. The period afterward was characterized mainly by the dominance of the British Empire in European affairs, which itself would end with the World War I.
• The rise of total wars in the wake of the French Revolution changed the nature of warfare. For about the previous 150 years, warfare, while bloody, was conducted by relatively small armies led by nobles for relatively small gains. By the late 18th century it had become almost ritualistic. The Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) threw all that out the window, with whole national populations mobilized for the first time in centuries and armies swelling to hundreds of thousands. It could also be considered the birth of modern nationalism. Previously the nobles and monarchs of Europe were a class unto themselves - having more in common with each other than with their own people. At the start of the Napoleonic Wars, the entire Russian court spoke in French. By the end of it, they were speaking only Russian.
• In 1806, Napoleon requiring Francis II to abdicate as Holy Roman Emperor ended a title that went back to 800 A.D. with Charlemagne himself. The empire was officially dead and would never be reformed.
• In Europe the slow decline of autonomous noble power began in this period. From the greater military power of politically unified nations, a rise of absolute monarchs, the spread of revolutionary political thought, and the growing economic power of lower classes the nobles were unable to compete. While there were holdouts for a long time (some European states still have official positions for nobles) it was never the same.
• In 1842, the British forced the Chinese Empire to accept a humiliating peace after two years of Curb-Stomp Battle in the First Opium War. While it was hardly the first time that the Chinese military forces were defeated by foreign "barbarians", it was the first clear reminder that the Chinese had fallen decidedly behind technologically and needed to change significantly.
• In 1853, Commodore Perry's arrival in Japan hastened the end of isolationist feudal shogunate rule. The end officially came with the ascension of Emperor Meiji in 1867 and started the Meiji Restoration in 1868. From that point, Japan embarked on a programme of rapid industrialization.
• The Bakumatsu (1853-1867) — The End of the Curtain and the Meiji Restoration (1868), were the definite end of the samurai rule. People saw that the samurai regime of Tokugawa couldn't defend the country from the dang-blasted foreigners and feared that Japan would become the next China. Wars ensued. The new country that rose from the ashes of war then allowed every citizen to hold positions of significant power, not just the samurai.
• The Crimean War (1853-56) is considered this in the history of European diplomacy. While it was relatively insignificant militarily, and characterized by blunders and incompetence, it broke the international system based on "legitimacy" created (or restored, depending on your perspective) after the Congress of Vienna and opened the way for the rise of nationalism and nation-states. It set the stage for the creation of Germany and Italy, and later the Balkan states, and in so doing, paved the way for World War I.
• The 1857 Indian Mutiny was something of a Fully Absorbed Finale for Indian feudalism as a whole. It was the last time Indian kings and queens led and commanded armies in battle, it saw the final end of the Mughal Empire with the final two heirs brutally executed and the Emperor exiled to Burma. Delhi was formerly a Land of One City of a Vestigial Empire. Now it was occupied by the British. The Mutiny also marked the end of the East India Company as a major player in international commerce. The British government took over the administration and formed the British Raj.
• The American Civil War (1861-1865) marked the end of several American political and social concepts, chattel slavery only being the most obvious. The Union victory redefined the United States as a singular nation with a strong federal government that had supreme authority over its constituent states, rather than a loose alliance of semi-independent nations. Moreover, the idea of voluntary and legal secession from the Union was dead in the water, as per an 1869 Supreme Court decision. It was also one of the first modern industrialized wars, along with the Crimean War and the unification wars in Germany, bringing the concept of modern warfare on a vastly more destructive scale to bearing. The cultural tensions between the North and South, however, would prove more elusive, and they still linger to some extent to this day. True legal and social equality for Blacks and other minorities would also take another 100 years or so to be actualized.
• The Battle of Hampton Roads, the first battle between two ironclad warships signaled the end of the age of Wooden Ships and Iron Men, while indecisive, it showed that the only ship that could stand up to an ironclad was another ironclad. Every other naval power in the world immediately cancelled all orders for new wooden warships and began designing new, bigger, and more advanced metal warships, eventually leading to most of the modern classes of warships by the end of the century.
• In 1890, the US Census officially declared that the "Frontier" no longer existed. This marked the end of American expansionism and of the "frontier culture" that had characterized the United States until then. Interestingly, this is about the time that the United States started to turn outward to gain more resources, much to the dismay of its Latin American neighbors and, later, countries in the Eastern hemisphere. A lot of historians have noted this.

20th Century

1900-1919

• 1905 was a critical turning point in Russian history: Russia's catastrophic defeat against Japan, the first time a European nation lost to an Asian Power, the brutal Bloody Sunday crackdown against peaceful protestors, and the 1905 Revolution forever changed the relationship between the Tsar and the Russian people. Initially, the Russians looked to their Tsar as a divinely appointed ruler but after the events of 1905, they began to see him as a brutal tyrant who stood in the way of prosperity. While the Tsar managed to hold power by enacting a limited constitutional government, the groundwork would be laid for the 1917 Revolution.
• In China, the Xinhai or 1911 Revolution (1911–1912), coupled with the Beijing-region General Yuan Shikai turning on the Emperor, saw the Empire of the Qing and the Chinese Empires ended forever in favor of a protracted civil war known as The Warlord Era (1916–1928). The victory of Chiang's Guomindang in the 1931 Central Plains War (over the forces of three of China's five remaining Great Warlords) was the effective end of The Warlord Era, though the nominal end had come when — in 1928 — The Guomindang had taken Beijing and been recognized abroad as the first legitimate Chinese government since Yuan Shikai had died in 1916. And then, the Communist victory in the 1946-1950 Civil War (the official end coming in 1949 when the Communists declared the foundation of the People's Republic) was an even bigger End of an Age. So yes, China had a lot of these in the 20th century (in fact, there was another one in 1978 — see below).
• World War I (1914–1918), the War to End All Wars, is considered to have ended an era. Before that, human progress seemed unlimited, and war and many other ills were viewed as likely to be abolished. Alas, the mighty technologies of mass production and automation can be applied to killing people. The realization pretty much put the kibosh on the centuries-old idealism of the Enlightenment, and in hindsight, the War is widely considered the true cultural and political start of the 20th century for this reason. Nice work, fading monarchies of Europe (and France, the United States, recently-turned-Republican Portugal and China, Brazil, and Japan).
  • It also signaled the end of many old European powers, with the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empires imploding from a mix of war fatigue, ethnic nationalism, and revolution. The end of the Russian Empire also marked the end of a dynasty that had ruled Russia for centuries with the deposing and later death of Tsar Nicholas II and his family at the hands of the Bolsheviks.
  • Very much the sense of Sir Edward Grey's famous words about the outbreak of the war:
    Sir Edward Grey: The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.
  • For all his flaws, Woodrow Wilson also had serious reservations about what would come next:
    Woodrow Wilson: I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.
  • WWI also brought the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, which is (today) largely seen as the last Caliphate. Turkey saw a secular zeal to overthrow anything that smelt like Islam in the government. The Arabs and Persians carved new states out of Ottoman-ruled lands, in many cases with the eager help of the more successful, non-Muslim empires of the time: British, French, American, Russian, and so on. Arab Nationalism was in vogue, and it seemed that government backed by God is 'so yesterday'.
  • In a similar way, World War I is sometimes considered to have dealt a fatal blow to the concept of Christendom. Unlike in the Middle East, the triumph of secularism in the West seems permanent and appears to only be getting more entrenched with time, notwithstanding some reactionary backlash.
• World War I and the sinking of the Titanic (1912) two years earlier were arguably the one-two punch that brought an end to The Gilded Age, as the elites of Europe and America were confronted with the realization that they were Not So Invincible After All.

1920-1945

• In 1921, the crushing of the Kronstadt Rebellion by the fledgling Soviet regime and the death of renowned anarchist Peter Kropotkin are said to have marked the end of the optimism surrounding the Russian Revolution and the aspirations for a more just and democratic Russia. Kropotkin's funeral was the last time anarchists were allowed to demonstrate publicly in Russia.
• The stock market crash of October 29, 1929 ended the economic prosperity of The Roaring '20s, triggering The Great Depression for years to come. It also cemented the rise of Fascist regimes in Europe during the following decade.
• Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War and the impotence of the League of Nations in deterring Axis aggression marked the end of interwar hopes for a more peaceful world, and it was instrumental into paving the road for WWII.
• World War II (1939–1945) had several examples of this, as while World War I helped usher a new era, it was the aftermath of this war which helped refined them:
  • It marked the shift from naval supremacy to air power, the culmination of a process that began during WWI. War and devastation could be brought to cities far behind enemy lines, and the mighty navies of the world were sitting ducks without adequate air defense.
    • The impact of naval aviation meant that the aircraft carrier dethroned the battleship as the king of the sea. While the American Iowa-class battleships would see intermittent service up until the 1990s, almost all the other battlewagons were either turned into museum ships or relegated to the scrap heap after the end of World War II.
    • While its power had been waning since World War I, the Second World War saw the definitive end of the Royal Navy's supremacy at sea. Between wartime losses, draw downs from budget cuts, and the loss of many of its overseas bases, the Royal Navy became a shadow of its former self and the United States Navy became the undisputed ruler of the waves.
  • The close of World War II in 1945 (and the freeing of various formerly "conquered" and "settled" territories) marked the end of Fascism and Imperialism. Decolonization became a watchword, and when taken together with rebellion and revolution in the Empires of Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal the 1970s saw a world without military-political colonialism (so-called 'economic colonialism' is another matter) and geographically large empires. (The end of World War I was already the beginning of the end of the Age of Empires; the aftermath of WWII finished it off.)
    • Some analysts specifically credit the publicizing of The Holocaust as the biggest factor in starting the age of decolonization and the rise of civil rights movements in America and elsewhere.
    • The genocide brought the dark side of colonialism to the forefront by utilizing common colonialist ethnic cleansing justifications against a predominantly white population.
    • As the genocide had been inspired by eugenics, scientific racism, and nationalistic hatreds, much of these ideas became taboo, and the global consensus has been toward tolerance, equality, and multicultural unity.
    • The end of WWII also marked the end of roughly a century of power concentrated largely in European hands and marked the rise of two superpowers outside of Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union — and with it, the Cold War. The Soviet Union and America, both adhering to modern and cosmopolitan ideologies despite being at odds, more or less pushed the world to abandon its old ways in favor of global capitalism and communism once the shifting power was concentrated in their hands. Both sides managed to get Europe to decolonize the third world one way or another, but of course, this instead marked the era of proxy and puppet states because even though the United States and the Soviet Union were officially anti-imperialist, they still fought over who would indirectly control these nations via loyal governments.
  • World War II also marked the death knell of centuries of military and political competition between European nations, in favor of economic and political unity. The postwar leadership of France and West Germany were determined to bury the hatchet and prevent another European war from happening again. Germany itself abandoned its culture of militant nationalism.
    • The War also helped further the decline of European monarchies, as the Italian, Yugoslavian, Romanian, and Bulgarian thrones were abolished within the next few years, the latter three seeing Communist governments rise in their place. (The Greek monarchy fell out of power two decades later.) It also led to the Emperor of Japan becoming a symbolic figurehead.
  • Arab Nationalism got a rude awakening immediately after World War II and the following decades, which saw the UN acknowledging the state of Israel. The inability of Arab nations to put an end to Israel caused Arab Nationalism to meet its end of age, and in many cases replaced by religious zeal. Within the Islamic world, there was a slow but unrelenting trend of the end of inclusive nationalism, with the idealism of re-building the Caliphate that was lost following World War I. It would be interesting to see where this cycle leads...

1946-1969

• The onset of the Cold War (1947–1991) essentially marked the end of the age of traditional warfare, largely because the advent of nuclear weapons suddenly made it obsolete; while the United States and the Soviet Union remained bitter enemies until the latter's downfall, they never formally declared war on each other, knowing full well that the resultant nuclear exchange could very well bring about the end of human civilization. Every war that the two superpowers waged during the Cold War was a small-scale "proxy war", aimed at containing or spreading Communism. Likewise, every major war that the United States has conducted^note the US has never formally declared a war since WWII since the fall of the Soviet Union has been a small-scale war aimed at containing terrorism and rogue states. It is quite unlikely that the world will ever see another war on the scale of World War II, with the world's most powerful nations duking it out on the field of battle.
• The 1956 Suez Crisis is seen as the final nail in the coffin of British Imperialism and marked its end as a global superpower, with the United States and the Soviet Union calling the shots. Likewise, French defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (1954) and the Algerian War (1954–1962) ended the French empire as well.
• The 1960s is considered the End of American Innocence (or Naïvete). Symbolically tied into that, President John F. Kennedy's New Frontier (also known as "Camelot"), ended when he was assassinated in 1963.
  • Much of the nostalgia surrounding both New York World's Fairs (1939–40 and 1964–65) focuses around the former being held just before WWII and the latter being one of the last straight examples of the shiny jetpack future prior to The Vietnam War and The '60s "back-to-nature" movement.
  • August 1968 saw the withdrawal of the last remaining mainline steam locomotives in Britain, under the 1955 Modernisation Plan, which called for the withdrawal of all steam locomotives in favor of diesel and electric locomotives. Since July 1967 and the end of Steam in the South of England, steam had been restricted to lines in the Northwest. By August 1968, these locomotives were restricted to Lancashire, on goods working and the odd passenger service. The last revenue-earning runs were made on 3rd August, followed by a series of special trains the following day. After one last excursion a week later, the age of steam in Britain officially ended.
    • Similarly, the end of steam in the South of England in July 1967 saw the end of the last regular steam-hauled express passenger services out of London.
  • The "Summer of Love" (1967) is said to have died with the Altamont concert in 1969. The Manson Family murders (1969) can be seen as putting the kibosh on the hippie romanticism of the 1960s. The fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975 that ended the Vietnam War was considered the end of the 1960s as the post-Vietnam hippies began to be seen as cloudcuckoolanders.
  • The 1960s saw the end of the golden era of ocean liners. Although ships on the UK–South Africa route lasted into the 1970s, most cite the retirement of the SS United States, the last ship entirely committed to a transatlantic route,^note The United States was built for speed to such an extreme that she simply could not function like a cruise ship in any economically viable capacity. in 1969 as the end of the grand liners. This was because jet airliners could now do their job in a fraction of the time. The next few decades would see the end of ocean liners as a whole as more airports were constructed and there was no longer a need to transport people by ship. The ocean liner would endure in the form of the Queen Elizabeth 2 (and later the Queen Mary 2), but both were built with the intention of doubling as cruise ships, their scheduled transatlantic crossings more for the tourist trade, and even then, only seasonally (though they still carry mail on these crossings, keeping that tradition alive).

1970-1979

• The 1970s also brought about several events that caused an end to several things:
  • This decade is often considered the end of an age for boxing, especially the heavyweight division. (For more, see the "Other/Multiple Periods" folder of this page.)
  • The post-WWII economic certainty of the Bretton Woods system (1944–1971) was thrown into disarray by the costs of the Vietnam War (1955–1975), the decoupling from the gold standard, industrial unrest, emerging culture wars and the oil crises of the 1970s. The knockout blow came with the election of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, signaling the start of the neoliberal financial deregulation era.
  • In particular, one of the more visible effects of the oil crises was a turning point in global car industry trends. Detroit's Big Three - Ford, General Motors and Chrysler - unaffected by World War II and which dominated the global car industry for years with land yachts and muscle cars, were caught napping by Japanese and European car makers which had rebuilt from near nothing and were able to supply smaller and fuel-efficient vehicles. The Big Three are still around today, although they're no longer in pole position. And one of the Big Three (Chrysler) has been European-owned for most of the current century.^note Bought by the parent of Mercedes-Benz in 1998, spun off into a separate company in 2007, bought by Fiat in 2014, and then merged with PSA (Peugeot, Citroën, Opel, Vauxhall, et al.) in 2021 to form Stellantis.
  • Speaking of economics, the 20th century largely saw the end of feudal and semi-feudal economies. While there had been a long slow-going process to replace a system dependent on personal loyalties with more modern economics, World War I and the Russian Revolution really incentivized either reform or revolution. The interwar period saw major reforms in Europe while the Cold War saw the rest of the "third world" seized by either socialism or capitalism. The last feudal rents based on European manorialism would be paid in 1970. After 1991, the few holdouts part of the "third way" largely saw no reason not to embrace capitalism. There are a some "traditional economies" still left, but they are an extreme minority.
  • The Watergate scandal (1972–1974), leading to President Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974, has also been considered an end of American innocence, in terms of the public trust formerly held for the office of Presidency. The Presidency lost a lot of prestige in the eyes of the public.
  • With Deng Xiaoping's triumph in ousting Mao's hand-picked successor in 1978, there came the de facto end of Communist economic policies in China, and state capitalism was gradually introduced.
  • July 2, 1978 was the last day The New York Times was made via manual typesetting; the following day, it computerized the whole process.
  • The Iranian Revolution of 1979 ended the reign of the Pahlavis and started a radical change in Iran.
  • Color television sets began to outnumber black-and-white sets for the first time in the early-to-mid 1970s. Analogue color broadcasting would itself be superseded by digital in the 21st century (see below).

1980-1989

• Just like the last two decades, the 1980s has its own moments to begin with:
  • The 1980s and AIDS are considered the end of the Sexual Revolution.
  • The death of Josip Broz Tito in 1980 led to a situation where the one unifying figure in Yugoslavia was gone and no other figure was capable of stepping in without sparking resentment and distrust from leaders of the other ethnic groups. Happening at the same time as the collapse of the Soviet Union, this meant the end of Yugoslavia and its own (much more violent) dissolution.
  • The critical and financial failure of 1980's Heaven's Gate killed two eras. First was the era when United Artists was an independent studio, as it led to its sale to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer a year later. The second thing it killed, along with the rise of the blockbuster, was the New Hollywood era, as its bad publicity from its Troubled Production led studios to be more weary of giving directors the Auteur License.
  • The 1982 film 48 Hrs. actually arrived at the end of a cultural arc, with its in-your-face but comic take on race relations. The '70s were full of that stuff, with everything from Norman Lear sitcoms to "blaxploitation" films. It had begun to run out of steam and seemed less culturally relevant. But the social and Political conservatism of the 1980s really tamped down that fire. By "conservatism", this meant a "play it safe" attitude that took over American culture in the 1980s. 48 Hrs. itself, seems like a bridge between the 1970s and The '80s. Nick Nolte's character Jack Cates comes across like a variation of Popeye Doyle from The French Connection. The language Cates uses would have been acceptable in the movies of that era.
  • The Golden Age of Video Games came to a screeching halt with The Great Video Game Crash of 1983, and coincided with the rise of home computing and the Japanese video games industry.
  • For all intents and purposes, Walt Disney's indirect influence over the future of Walt Disney Productions ended with the release of The Black Cauldron in 1985. That movie's box office failure gave Disney's new management team of Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, Roy E. Disney, and Jeffrey Katzenberg the leverage they needed to fire the remaining Walt-era executives and transform the studio into the more business-minded and Hollywood-esque Walt Disney Company, which not only led to its revival in the late 1980s but also set it on its course into becoming the multimedia empire it is today.
  • The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986, exposed the thin façade of that era's folksy jingoism. The event was more or less carefully calculated to piggyback on Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" to boost support for what was (unfairly) seen as a tired, bloated government program.
  • Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for all intents and purposes ceased being a major film studio in May 1986, when Ted Turner bought it, kept the back library, and then sold the studio back to Kirk Kerkorian. MGM has since this time emerged twice from bankruptcy in the 2010s.
  • The stock market crash of 1987 triggered the end of the "Greed is Good" mentality of the 1980s.
  • The June Democracy Movement of 1987 triggered the end of nearly 40 years of dictatorship in South Korea: while the country's last dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, did succeed in appointing his hand-picked successor, Roh Tae-woo, to the presidency, his acquiescence to the June Democracy Movement's demands ensured that it would be done through the country's first properly free and fair election, with Roh's ascension marking the first peaceful transition of power in South Korea's entire history. Following his inauguration in 1988, Roh would institute constitutional revisions that would democratize the nation and establish the incumbent Sixth Republic.
    • A similar democratic wave happened in Taiwan the same year, when decades of martial law (known as the White Terror) enacted following Chiang Kai-Shek's retreat in 1949 ended.
  • The Cold War era ended after the fall of Communism in Europe (1989) and friendship between the reforming USSR and America was called The New World Order by Bush 41. Some took it another (facepalming) way.
• Super Bowl XXIII, which was played on January 22, 1989 in Miami was the end of an age in several different ways. It was for starters, the last outdoor Super Bowl to start earlier than 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, as it started just after 5 p.m. It also served as the last Super Bowl to be played on the second to last Sunday in January. San Francisco 49ers head coach Bill Walsh retired after this game and it was the final Super Bowl that Pete Rozelle presided over as the commissioner of the National Football League. Walsh would the following season, become NBC's lead color commentator for their NFL broadcasts, replacing Merlin Olsen, who called his final Super Bowl here with Dick Enberg. Lon Simmons meanwhile, called his final game 49ers play-by-play announcer. He would be replaced on a full-time basis by Joe Starkey the following season.
• The 1989 Major League Baseball season served as NBC's last year of broadcasting baseball in some shape or form since 1947 and the Saturday afternoon Game of the Week since 1957 (and exclusively since 1966). It also marked ABC's last year of covering baseball, having done so alongside NBC since 1976. CBS would take over the network broadcast television package for the next four years.

1990-1999

• The 1990 World Figure Skating Championships were the last to include compulsory figures, which involved skaters tracing circular patterns on the ice to demonstrate skill in making clean turns. That segment of the competition had been steadily deemphasized over the prior 20-plus years for reasons you can find at The Other Wiki.^PostscriptAs you can see if you follow the link, figures would be revived as a completely separate competitive discipline in the current century, and a figures-only world championship has been held since 2015.
• WrestleMania VI in 1990 is often regarded as the end point of the World Wrestling Federation's "golden era".
• Jim Henson's sudden death in 1990, just as he was preparing to sell his studio to The Walt Disney Company so he could focus more on the artistic side of creation than the business side, turned out to be this in a way. After his death, the deal with Disney fell through — this was followed by years of sales and resales fracturing ownership of the company and its properties, while both his original work and new productions building upon his legacy were rarely capitalized on by distributors and often overlooked or dismissed by audiences as old hat. In particular, in The '80s the "classic" Muppets looked set to join the panoply of Disney animated characters as beloved by multiple generations, but by The New '10s they were at the low point of the Popularity Polynomial — even the 2011 revival film The Muppets made their fall from attention a plot point. When that movie became a hit it seemed as if a comeback was all but certain, but its sequel Muppets Most Wanted flopping three years later seems to have hindered a true revival, leaving the Muppets' parent Disney (who ended up buying the Muppet franchise in 2004, but not the company itself) back at square one.
• Game 5 of the 1990 NBA Finals served as CBS' final National Basketball Association broadcast after being the NBA's network television partner for the past 17 years. The package would move over to NBC for the next 12 years.
• The dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991) dissolved one of the largest political entities in human history, sparked a rise in ethnonationalism, and completely altered Central Asian, Balkan, and Eastern European politics. For a while, U.S. foreign policy became confused. For decades, the U.S. had centered its foreign policy on battling the Soviet Union, so its disappearance was met with a So What Do We Do Now? reaction.
• The Japanese asset price bubble's collapse in late 1991 and early 1992, led to an economic downturn known as "The Lost Decades" (1991–2003, with some saying it's still struggling from it today). Japan's global dominance in the automotive and computer manufacturing fields suddenly ended, leading to a steady decline that some say mirrors the "Great Recession" America suffered a decade later. While still an important player in both industries, Japan is no longer seen as taking over the world and focus has instead shifted to China.
• The early '90s saw India transitioning from a mixed economy to a free market economy, marking the end of India's formerly socialist leanings and the move towards middle-class consumerism and Conspicuous Consumption.
• The 1993 Major League Baseball season was the final season of two-division play in each league before the Central Division was added the following season, giving both the National League and American League three divisions each. It was also the last season in which CBS was MLB's primary network television partner.
• The NFC Championship Game between the Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers on January 23, 1994 was the final National Football League game that CBS would televise for the time being. Having been outbid by the upstart Fox network in December 1993, CBS would be without the National Football League for the first time since 1956. CBS would however, ultimately resume coverage of the NFL in 1998 when it purchased the American Football Conference package from NBC.
• The opening of Usenet to all AOL users in 1994. See also Eternal September.
• Several moments in computer history have been cited in hindsight as when IBM lost dominance of the PC platform and its transition to "Wintel":
  • The successful reverse engineering of the PC's BIOS by companies such as Compaq and Phoenix, which allowed the production of 100%-compatible clones.
  • Compaq using the 386 chip in its own computer before IBM did.
  • The PC clone manufacturers rejecting IBM's Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) used in the PS/2.
  • The success of Windows over OS/2.
  • The bankruptcy of Commodore in 1994 marked the end of prominent alternatives to the PC platform. A combination of mismanagement and difficulties producing a decent upgrade without breaking compatibility saw the Amiga winding down into a very small hobbyist platform, while the competing Atari ST had already been out of production for a while. At the same time, Japan's PC-98 and FM Towns started slowly integrating PC compatibility until they eventually became completely homogenized. Only the Apple Macintosh remains, and even that has migrated twice, first to Intel chipsets and now (in a currently ongoing migration) to Apple-designed ARM chipsets.
  • Finally, IBM exited the PC manufacturing business altogether in 2005, transferring it to Lenovo.
• Since the release of Super Mario Bros. 3, the last game developed by Nintendo's internal teams for a console indicates that the current console generation is coming to an end and the next console's release is imminent.
• The 1995 Rugby World Cup, which provided the main plot for Invictus, was the final event of the sport's amateur era. At the time, rugby league (which had been professional for decades) was threatening to entice most of union's top players with huge salaries for that era, and Aussie media mogul Kerry Packer was making noises about creating a worldwide professional league for union. Union's authorities determined they would lose control of the sport if it didn't go professional. Accordingly, the International Rugby Football Board (now World Rugby) announced two months after the World Cup Final that the sport would be professional from then on.
• The launch of the Nintendo 64 in 1996 marked the end of Nintendo's 13-year dominance in the home console industry. The Nintendo Entertainment System was a smash hit in the US and Japan, dominating the video game industry in its era, and while the TurboGrafx-16 and Sega Genesis provided stiff competition in Japan and the west, respectively, during the early 90s, Nintendo's own Super Nintendo Entertainment System ultimately outsold both, and they seemed poised to continue that streak in the second half of the decade. However, a combination of obtuse technology and old grudges caused the vast majority of Nintendo's third-party support to jump ship to the PlayStation, giving the latter a much more vibrant and active library that allowed it to outsell the N64 and secure Sony's place as the leading console maker for the next ten years.
• The 1996 Major League Baseball season would serve as the final one before the implementation of interleague play.
• Although The British Empire had long been a shadow of its former self, the handover of Hong Kong to China (July 1, 1997) is popularly seen as its official end. Adding to the symbolism was the decommissioning of the royal yacht Britannia the same year; her last overseas mission was conveying the future Charles III and the last Governor of Hong Kong back to the UK after the handover ceremony. The death of Princess Diana that August 31, and the subsequent backlash against the lack of public mourning by the Royal Family, also permanently changed how the British people (and those in the other Commonwealth realms) would view the monarchy.
• Game 7 of the 1997 World Series between the Florida Marlins and Cleveland Indians (now respectively the Miami Marlins and Cleveland Guardians) was the final Major League Baseball game to be nationally broadcast on CBS Radio, having broadcast the World Series since 1976. The World Series going forward, would be broadcast nationally on ESPN Radio. It was also the 25th and final World Series to be called by Vin Scully, who called 11 for CBS Radio.
• Bad Hair Day was "Weird Al" Yankovic's last album to feature his "classic" look of a mustache and wire-rimmed glasses. Two years later, in January 1998, he'd have laser eye surgery and shave his upper lip, which drastically altered his appearance. It was also his last album on longtime label Scotti Bros. Records before the company was bought out by Volcano Entertainment.
• Super Bowl XXXII between the Denver Broncos and Green Bay Packers at the end of the 1997 season was NBC's final NFL broadcast after spending the past 33 years as the holder of the American Football Conference package. The following season, CBS would take over NBC's rights to the package. NBC wouldn't broadcast NFL games again until the 2006 season when they launched Sunday Night Football.
• The Trisakti Incident in Indonesia in 1998 marked the end of the Suharto era, known as Orde Baru (New Order) when many of Suharto's dirty secrets were exposed. For 32 years, he used corruption to build up Indonesia as a strong powerhouse in Asia and swiftly shutting down any of his oppositions, installing himself as a dictator. With the end of Orde Baru, Indonesia entered a new era of democracy, with all its advantages and disadvantages, but most of the stability provided by Orde Baru are gone.
• The launch of the iMac ended two ages for computers. In terms of aesthetics, its transparent blue exterior case ended the era of beige computer cases, leading other manufacturers to retire the color soon after the iMac launched. Technologically, by including only a CD drive and USB ports, it marked the beginning of the end for both floppy disks and as well as various legacy and proprietary PC connectors and cables.
• Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals between the Chicago Bulls and Utah Jazz was the end of the NBA's "golden era" that began with the 1984 Finals between Larry Bird's Boston Celtics and Magic Johnson's Los Angeles Lakers. It not only marked the end of the '90s Chicago Bulls dynasty led by Michael Jordan and head coach Phil Jackson but Game 6 earned the NBA their highest television ratings of all time. After Jordan retired, interest in the NBA declined, especially after the 1998–99 NBA lockout.
• While the '90s were by no means considered a peaceful decade, the 1999 Columbine shooting marked an abrupt end to the more idealistic side of it, casting any optimism people had about the forthcoming 21st century into serious doubt.
• The 1999 World Series between the New York Yankees and Atlanta Braves served as the final time (to date) that a World Series was broadcast on a television network other than Fox. In this case, NBC broadcast its 39th and final World Series thus far. It also marked the final time that the American League and National League officially operated as separate legal entities.
• February 2000 saw the death of Charles Schulz and the last Peanuts comic ever made (which ironically was meant to announce Schulz's retirement), thus ending what many people consider to be the golden age of Newspaper Comics. Out of all the comics considered the best ever made (the others probably being Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side), it was the last to go. This has led to the rise of webcomics, which are now the preferred form of using comic strips to tell stories. Of all the biggest Cash Cow Franchises in the world, Peanuts was the longest-running of them to have an official end.
• 1999 marked the end of Morse Code in commercial and military communications as digital terrestrial and satellite modes came to the fore. This was coupled with the gradual relaxation of the FCC’s Morse requirement for Amateur Radio licenses throughout the '80s and '90s, leading to the code requirement being dropped altogether in 2007, marking the end of a legacy stretching back over 150 years to the birth of telecommunications. One of the last additions to the international Morse Code was the @ symbol (di dah dah di dah dit) as a tip of the hat to the young Internet. Morse is still one of the most popular modes among hams despite it not being necessary to get a license, and a jack to plug in a telegraph key is a standard feature on even the most bleeding edge radios.

21st Century and Beyond

• The 20th Century was said to have ended, both politically and culturally, on September 11, 2001, and the Long War/Terrorism era began. The optimism from the celebrations of both the new millennium — riding high on the aversion of the Millennium Bug — and the end of the Cold War 10 years prior had been replaced by a culture of fear, paranoia, and increasing authoritarian control over all aspects of everyday life, as everyone lived in constant fear of the next major terrorist attack (fortunately, no attack on the scale of 9/11 has taken place since then, though smaller-scale attacks still happen regularly).

Comic Books

• Cartoon Network Action Pack, ceasing publication in 2012, was the last Comic-Book Adaptation of Cartoon Network shows not based on DC Comics properties to be published by DC Comics, with future comics adapted from Cartoon Network properties instead being published by Boom! Studios or IDW Publishing.

Film & TV

• Many animated films and TV shows in the early 2000s would help end The Renaissance Age of Animation, causing the industry to transition into The Millennium Age of Animation:
  • For film, we have:
    • 2001, which saw the box office success of DreamWorks Animation's Shrek and the underperformance of Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
    • 2002, which saw the box office success of Blue Sky Studios' first feature film, Ice Age, and the failure of Treasure Planet.
    • 2003: The underperformance and failure, respectively, of films like Rugrats Go Wild! and Looney Tunes: Back in Action, the latter of which incorporated hand-drawn animation with live action, while Pixar's Finding Nemo was released in the same year, with considerable success.
    • 2004: The failure of Home on the Range, which forced Disney to abandon 2D animation after the failure of the film, and the box office successes of Shrek 2, which became the highest-grossing film that year, and Pixar's The Incredibles. Additionally, the underperformance of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie: Pyramid of Light lead to 4Kids Entertainment no longer putting any anime films to American theaters or having a hand in producing any future films.
  • For animated TV shows, not only they were abandoning cel animation for digital ink and paint, very similar to how 2D animated techniques were abandoned in favor of 3D in films, but there was also a huge exodus of animated shows from the '90s ending around 2003-2004 for some reason or another:
    • For Nickelodeon, almost all of Klasky-Csupo's shows, Hey Arnold! and CatDog, just to name a few. ^note SpongeBob SquarePants was also going to end after its movie, but Nick renewed the show, and it's still running.
    • For Cartoon Network, many Cartoon Cartoons, like Dexter's Laboratory, Johnny Bravo, and The Powerpuff Girls (1998) being examples. Ed, Edd n Eddy was supposed to end in 2004, but it returned exactly a year after, but this time, animated in digital ink and paint, making it the last show in the US to use traditional cel animation. Additionally, The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy pilot "Meet the Reaper" was the very last new cartoon (that isn't a continuation of a legacy franchise) to be made under the Hanna-Barbera name and bear its logo. By the time Grim and Evil formally began production, the transition from Hanna-Barbera to Cartoon Network Studios was complete.
• The 2001 cancellation of The Bozo Super Sunday Show (formerly Bozo's Circus) on WGN-TV in Chicago marked the final death knell for local children's television programming in the U.S. Although these staples of local television began to decline in the early 1970s, the biggest blow came in a 1973 FCC ruling that restricted advertising on children's programming. Deprived of their revenue sources, coupled with subsequent E/I requirements handed down by the FCC, these programs faded quickly from the airwaves (and even before its cancellation, Bozo was clearly a pale shadow of its old self).
• With The Millennium Age of Animation, many traditional animation techniques died out in lieu of digital technology, with the last animated series to be hand-painted on celluloid either ending or switching to newer methods. The success of the world's first computer animated feature film, Pixar's Toy Story, in the previous decade, and Shrek at the beginning of the millennium, also led to the effective end of 2D animated features in North America as Disney's last few 2D films were box-office bombs, and the public began viewing 2D animated films as quaint and out-of-step compared to the hipper, edgier films DreamWorks was putting out, as well as the more wholesome Pixar films.
  • 2009's The Princess and the Frog and 2011's Winnie The Pooh were the last two traditionally animated films released by Disney and marked the unofficial end of 2D feature films.
• James Bond:
  • Die Another Day was the final Bond film to star Pierce Brosnan, as well as the final Bond film in the (extremely loose) original continuity that began with Dr. No in 1962. The shift towards more seriousness in the series post-9/11 would become apparent four years later with Casino Royale, an explicit Continuity Reboot.
  • Skyfall (2012) was the final Bond film with Judi Dench as M (she's been there since GoldenEye in 1995).^note She appeared in Spectre, but as Video Wills.
• Star Trek:
  • Apart from being the end of Star Trek: Voyager, "Endgame" was the end of an age in other ways:
    • "Endgame" concluded the 24th Century era's 14-year consecutive TV run (which had begun with Star Trek: The Next Generation's pilot episode "Encounter at Farpoint" in 1987). While Star Trek: Nemesis would begin shooting shortly thereafter, televised Trek would not return to the 24th Century until Star Trek: Picard premiered in 2020.
    • It was also the final outing for the VOY shooting sets, which had occupied the Paramount sound-stages since 1978 (during development of Star Trek: Phase II before being used for the TOS films and then later redressed for both TNG and VOY). The 20+ year old sets would be dismantled after "Endgame" to make way for the construction of Star Trek: Enterprise's sets.
  • "These Are the Voyages", the much-maligned series finale of Star Trek: Enterprise marked the end of 19 continuous years of Star Trek productions that started with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home as well as 18 continuous years of Star Trek TV series that started with Star Trek: The Next Generation. While the feature film Star Trek (2009) would come along four years later, Star Trek would be absent from television screens until the launch of Star Trek: Discovery in 2017.
  • A case can also be made for the "It's A Wrap!" auction. Shortly after Enterprise concluded, Paramount Pictures sold nearly its entire lot of Star Trek props and costumes. As one of the factors that had made Star Trek such a profitable franchise was the ability to reuse props and costumes across multiple productions, this was a clear message from Paramount's management that the franchise would not continue as it did under Rick Berman's tenure.
• DVDs were invented in 1996, but by 2006, they had made the VHS format completely obsolete. The last mainstream film to be released on VHS to the public was A History of Violence, while the last film to hit VHS overall was Cars. And while DVDs are still in use today, DVD has strong competition from other services like Blu-Ray and streaming.
• The original cancellation of Toonami in 2008 is considered to be the end point of the 1990s anime boom. While other animation blocks with a focus on Japanese animation existed before and since, the Cartoon Network run of Toonami is the second longest-lasting of these (only surpassed by its own revival on [adult swim]) and is credited for giving a large number of action anime mainstream exposure before the advent of streaming sites such as Crunchyroll, due to being on a general family channel rather than a Niche Network.^note Granted, "animation-only" is still a niche, but a less restricting one than, say, Syfy's (then Sci-Fi Channel)... in theory, anyway.
• The announcement that Studio Ghibli might be closing its doors for good and Hayao Miyazaki's possibly permanent retirement is seen by many as the definitive end of an age for Japanese animation. Later subverted, when Miyazaki announced he'd be working on a new movie.
  • Still, Ghibli would see a true end of an era with the death of Isao Takahata, the studio's other primary film director, in 2018. Takahata had already retired following My Neighbors the Yamadas in 1999, only briefly returning to direct The Tale of the Princess Kaguya in 2013 and produce The Red Turtle three years later but nonetheless, his passing was widely considered the definitive end-point of a career that was just as vital of a foundation for Ghibli as Miyazaki's.
• 2014–2015 was considered to contain the end of an age for several types of late-night shows:
  • David Letterman's announcement in April 2014 that he'd retire from hosting The Late Show in 2015 (his final show aired May 20, 2015) led some to believe it marks the end of an age in late-night television stretching as far back as The '60s when Johnny Carson began hosting The Tonight Show.
  • Stephen Colbert taking up the mantle is another since it meant the end of The Colbert Report after a decade of dominating the news pundit scene in its unique parody way.
• Saturday Morning Cartoons slowly started to decline around the early 2000s as station affiliates (namely NBC, Fox, ABC, The WB, CBS, and finally the CW) began ceasing their animation blocks with the rise of digital cable channels such as Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and ToonDisney (now Disney XD), and Moral Guardians lobbying for more educational shows (which is a rather defeatist strategy because most kids utterly hate these educational shows, as they want to watch cartoons, not have to sit through what is essentially school on the weekends, especially since these Saturday morning educational shows tend to be much more bland than the Edutainment shows that are the rule on PBS Kids, Nick Jr., and Disney Junior), mainly those of Litton Entertainment. The Vortexx was the last of these and even then was made up of reruns of previous shows. However, in 2014, its spot was bought out by Litton, thus bringing an end to the era of Saturday Morning Cartoons.
• In 2015, the Sazae-san anime switched entirely to digital animation, marking the definitive end of cel animation in mainstream media. The format had previously been dying out in the '90s (for animated movies) and 2000s (for TV shows) and had already been dead in the West since 2004, when Ed, Edd n Eddy switched to digital.
• The rise of Netflix, Redbox, Hulu, and other sites geared towards renting/streaming movies and TV shows online led to the decline and eventual extinction of Blockbuster and other video rental stores. Well as franchises anyway, there is still one manager-owned store left in Oregon. The independently owned video store chain Family Video did quite well for a while (to the point of actually taking over old Hollywood Video storefronts) until they announced that they're gonna be closing all their stores in early 2021.
• Around the latter half of the Turn of the Millennium and continuing into The New '10s, Soap Operas in the United States began to decline, with the end of Guiding Light in 2009, As the World Turns in 2010, All My Children in 2011, and One Life to Live in 2012. Days of Our Lives ended its NBC network run in 2022, but new episodes continue to be made for NBC's Peacock streaming service. Today, only a few soaps remain on US television: The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful on CBS, and General Hospital on ABC. Multiple reasons are cited for the decline of the genre, including the rise of women in the workforce (meaning fewer people watching TV in the early afternoon hours), the original audience aging and dying off (and the nature of the genre making it difficult, or even impossible for a new audience to catch up), the changing landscape of television, the 1988 writer's strike, the O. J. Simpson trial, and the rise of Reality TV.
• With Curb Your Enthusiasm ending in 2024 marks the end of a Larry David -led comedy series airing on TV, that began with Seinfeld back in 1989.

Gaming

• There are a pair of video game age endings that happened during The Sixth Generation of Console Video Games:
  • "The Death of the Dream"— the end of the Sega Dreamcast— saw Sega go from a major console developer to a third-party game publisher, ending the rivalry between them and Nintendo that stretched all the way back to 1989 and that had defined the medium during the early '90s. As a sign of just how radically SEGA's place in the industry changed, their last Sonic the Hedgehog game to be released on their own hardware, Sonic Adventure 2, became the first Sonic game for a Nintendo platform via an Updated Re-release on the Nintendo GameCube.
  • Concurrently with the fall of SEGA came the rise of Microsoft as a console maker via the Xbox, ending 18 years of Japanese developers being the main players in the hardware business. For the first time since the early '80s, an American-made console had become a major figure in the console war, and Microsoft would take its place alongside the skyscrapingly-popular Sony and the cult favorite Nintendo among gaming's "Big Three."
• Nintendo's Wii marked the end of an age for the company where their consoles would compete directly with other consoles based on horsepower and instead by distinguishing itself from the competition. The Nintendo 64, while an influencal console and rather successful given the amount sold, sold only a third of Sony's PlayStation 1, and when Nintendo released their GameCube in 2001, despite being more powerful than Sony's PlayStation 2 and Sega's Dreamcast while being roughly on par with Microsoft's Xbox, it was the second worst-selling console of the 6th generation (ahead of the Dreamcast, which was already dead in the water by the time the GameCube came out, meaning it was the worst-selling console out of the three still being produced during the generation), and for their next console, they turned to the late Gunpei Yokoi's development philosophy of "lateral thinking with withered technology" and applied it to their console line. As a result, the Nintendo Wii was the only console of the 7th generation not to feature HD graphics and was severely underpowered compared to the competition, but despite this, it was the best-selling system of the generation thanks to its motion control capabilities winning over casual gamers and even people who don't normally play video games, to the point where Sony and Microsoft tried to get into the motion control market (and ultimately failed). The Wii U and Nintendo Switch would follow the Wii's lead on prioritizing unique player experiences over having the fanciest graphics.
• The shutdown of the original Xbox Live marked the end of both the original Xbox and Xbox-era Halo (officially, at any rate; some people kept going while their consoles still worked). December 2021 also marked the official end of Xbox 360-era Halo, as the online servers for Halo 3; Halo 3: ODST; Halo Wars; Halo: Reach; Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary; Halo 4; and Halo: Spartan Assault were shut down by 343 Industries later that month.
• Strategy guides were quite commonplace in the 80s and lasted well into the 2000s. Strategy guides could quickly be referenced when needed and they had detailed maps, item locations, and other info the player would need. By the late 2000s, the internet was a lot faster and more accessible to the general public, which also meant people could upload their own strategies and walkthroughs in text and video form for free. On top of that, it became the norm for video games to recieve patches to fix bugs or add additional content, something that would make a strategy guide outdated whereas an online guide can easily be edited to accomodate the changes made to the game. With everyone publishing free guides and hints online and the games themselves constantly being updated, strategy guides were seen as redundant and they quietly got phased out.
  • Strategy Guides are still published, albeit on a smaller scale. However, these current versions are seen more-or-less as merchandise for many players/fans to get for their favorite games.
• The release of the Nintendo Switch in 2017 marked the end of Nintendo having separate home and handheld gaming systems, which went back to the release of the Game Boy in 1989.

Music

• The success of Kanye West's Graduation in 2007 and failure of Curtis by 50 Cent (both released on the same day) marked the end of the Glam Rap boom and the rise of Alternative Hip Hop as the dominant force in rap music, setting a trend that would grow in prominence during the 2010s.
• The death of David Bowie in 2016 not only marked the end of one of the longest-lasting and most influential careers in popular music but also signaled the end of rock's wider influence on popular music as a whole. Analysis of rock became more skeptical in the years following Bowie's death, with many decrying its former dominance as having been marked by undercurrents of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Consequently, positive reception of rock in a post-Bowie era is typically reserved for acts like Bowie himself who pushed social boundaries and openly supported groups that mainstream rock typically eschewed.

Politics

• The 2008 financial crisis marked the end of the (unopposed) laissez-faire neoliberal form of economics that had dominated Western Europe and the Americas since the 1980s. The collapse of such high profile banking giants, forcing governments around the world to bail them out, the austerity that happened as a misguided attempt to recover the economy, and the failure to throw anybody responsible in jail afterwards, led the public to turn on the economic system that had brought an end to the Cold War and marked the return of banking regulations, as well as numerous populist political movements. Francis Fukuyama, who wrote "The End of History" in 1992 amid post-Cold War optimism, later revisited the topic with a noticeably gloomier outlook.
• Much is said about how the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was a turning point in the 21st Century, a before and after in understanding the most controversial and polarizing politics that came in the years following, particularly from 2014 onwards, especially in regard to the rise of identity and postmodern narratives that gained prominence in nearly all aspects of politics and entertainment. Although the OWS movement itself didn't achieve concrete political changes in terms of financial regulation, it did inspire other movements and groups to focus on similar issues of economic and social justice. Movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have found inspiration in the tactics and goals of Occupy Wall Street. Likewise, it revealed how a relatively decentralized movement through social networks can be possible. Additionally, the movement underscored the importance of protest and social activism in the struggle for change. The tactics used by Occupy, such as occupying public spaces, inspired other groups to employ similar methods to draw attention to social and political issues.
• While it was already on shaky ground after the killing of Trayvon Martin three years prior, the 2015 Charleston church shooting marked the definitive end of the "post-racial" idealism that had encapsulated much of the Barack Obama era. The explicitly ethnonationalist motives of the perpetrator made it clear to a mainstream public that white supremacy was still alive and active in America, embodied by a now-infamous CNN segment just after the shooting where black reporter Don Lemon displayed both the Confederate battle flag and the n-word, uncensored, as a commentary on American perception of racism. The uptick in racist hate crimes and greater awareness of police brutality during the subsequent Donald Trump presidency only further hammered in this reality.
• In December 2014, US President Barack Obama and Cuban leader Raúl Castro announced their plans to normalize relations between their two nations by re-establishing one another's embassies (the first US embassy in Cuba opened July 1, 2015), effectively ending a 50-year embargo.
  • Fidel Castro's passing in November 2016 also marked this to some. Many saw him as the Last of His Kind, thanks to his status as the last surviving Marxist-Leninist world leader. Vox elaborates on the subject:
    "Castro matters because he was the last living symbol of the Cold War at its peak. His death puts an exclamation point on the end of the Cold War-style of ideological conflict between capitalism and communism. In some ways, it's the most 2016 thing imaginable."
• The Petrobras scandal in 2014 marked the end of an era of optimism in Brazil. For much of the 2000s and early 2010s, Brazil under President Lula da Silva experienced an era of economic prosperity that lifted millions out of poverty and made Brazil a rising power. However, Operation Car Wash shattered this public confidence when it revealed that Petrobras, the state-owned oil corporation, along with many of Lula's allies, accepted millions in bribes from contractors to provide overpriced and substandard services that resulted in billions of wasted taxpayer funds. The fallout of the largest scandal in Brazilian history contributed to both the impeachment of Lula's successor Dilma Rousseff and the election of far-right Jair Bolsonaro. While Lula was cleared of culpability and defeated Bolsonaro to win a third presidential term in 2022, it became clear the Brazil won't return to the era of peace and prosperity anytime soon.
• The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was the end of an unbroken line of US Presidents who'd all served in some sort of government office, the military, or both prior to taking office as president.

Sports

• The Minnesota Vikings' 41–0 loss to the New York Giants in the 2000 NFC Championship Game was for all intent and purposes, the final nail in the coffin of the Dennis Green era. Within the next 12 months, Robert Smith retired, John Randle was a Seattle Seahawk, Korey Stringer died, Cris Carter played his final snap in purple, and Green was gone as the Vikings' head coach.
• Professional Wrestling:
  • WWF's purchase of WCW in March of 2001 brought an end to WCW the Monday Night Wars. It also brought an end to there being any real competition to WWE; there's been a couple pretenders to the throne, but since 2001 (or really since 1999) WWE has been the #1 promotion in the world in terms of revenue, profit and name brand recognition with no one else having even come close.
  • Depending on who you ask, WrestleMania X-7 (2001), Survivor Series 2001, the beginning of the WWE brand split in April of 2002 or the retirement of the WWF name in May of 2002 signified the end of the Attitude Era.^note A few people would say it ended in October 1999 when Vince Russo bolted for WCW
  • The Chris Benoit Pater Familicide in June 2007 led to the end of the Darker and Edgier programming that had been around since the Attitude Era, as WWE would shift towards less violent family-friendly programming after that.
  • The death of Eddie Guerrero, the Benoit murder-suicide, the Signature Pharmacy scandal (where many professional athletes, including several high profile wrestlers, were found to have purchased PEDs from a Florida "anti-aging clinic"), and pressure from Congress mostly ended the "steroid era" in wrestling. WWE instituted their Wellness Policy (in other words, drug testing) in 2006, and while there's been accusations that it's been ignored for some people^note And there's documented cases of this, Brock Lesnar's failed drug test during his brief return to UFC proved he's exempt from it and forced WWE to basically say "We don't bother testing him because he only works 5 matches a year" there's also been some notable guys that were suspended. Simply watching a wrestling show today compared to one 25 years ago will quickly show that wrestlers have got a lot smaller.
  • The Undertaker's defeat at the hands of Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania XXX marked the end of Takers' winning streak.
  • WWE completed a merger with Endeavor (parent company to the UFC) in late 2023, subsequently reducing chairman/former-CEO Vince McMahon to minority ownership and ousted from any creative involvement^note This being the result of McMahon having resigned and retired in 2022 amidst various sexual harassment and financial scandals, only to force himself back into the company in early 2023 based on his majority holding of company shares amidst contract expirations and discussions of possible purchases; these shenanigans posed risks that led Endeavor to keep him involved, but out of the way, before he resigned from the company entirely in January 2024. This not only marked the end of Vince's reign over the company since its boom period in the '80s, it also marked the end of the company being owned by a member of the McMahon family^note Stephanie McMahon briefly stepped into co-CEO position following her father's departure in 2022, but stepped down following his return and hasn't been seen in the company since. The closest holdout to the McMahon dynasty would be Stephanie's husband/Vince's son-in-law Triple H, who was promoted to head of creative following Vince's retirement, and maintains the position even following the Endeavor merger.
• The New York Yankees' defeat by the Arizona Diamondbacks in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series ostensibly marked the end of the Yankees' championship dynasty that began in 1996. While the Yankees did once again win the American League pennant in 2003 and the World Series in 2009, they never again (at least the core that was led by shortstop Derek Jeter) had that aura of invincibility.
• Super Bowl XXXVI on February 3, 2002 was the final National Football League game to be called by the broadcasting team of Pat Summerall and John Madden, who first worked together back in 1979 and on a regular basis beginning in 1981. Summerall and Madden called eight Super Bowls together, five for CBS and three for Fox. Afterwards, Summerall retired while Madden would move over to ABC's Monday Night Football. In total, Pat Summerall broadcast 26 Super Bowls either on television or radio. Super Bowl XXXVI was also the final Super Bowl played on the first-generation AstroTurf surface, being that it was played at the Superdome in New Orleans.
• At the end of the 2012-13 Premier League season, Sir Alex Ferguson retired from his post as Manchester United manager, a job that he'd held since 1986. Having taken them from a group of nearly-men living in the shadow of bitter rivals Liverpool to the most successful team in English football, for many people, he was Manchester United.
  • Chelsea's erstwhile captain John Terry, who'd been at Chelsea since the late 1990s and had won every trophy going, left the club in 2017 to spend his final season as a player at Aston Villa.
  • Arsenal's long-serving manager Arsène Wenger retired at the end of the 2017-18 season.

Technology & Transport

• In 2001, both Microsoft and Apple, the two remaining competitors in the Computer Wars, released new versions of their operating systems that abandoned the legacy OS technologies both of them had been using since the introduction of the original IBM Personal Computer and Apple Macintosh in the early 1980s.
  • Apple launched the UNIX-based Mac OS X, replacing the classic Mac OS that started out on the original 1984 Macintosh. This was a much anticipated and long-overdue move since the classic OS lacked key features such as preemptive multitasking and protected memory. Steve Jobs cemented this at the 2002 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), where he staged a mock funeral for Mac OS 9. Mac OS X, or macOS as it is now called, still serves as the Mac operating system to this day and became the basis for all of Apple's later OSs, including iOS, tvOS, and watchOS.
  • Microsoft launched Windows XP, the first consumer version of Windows to not run on top of MS-DOS, ending of the age of DOS that started with the first PC. XP was instead based on Windows NT, a line of operating systems that Microsoft had created for businesses during The '90s, while continuing to serve the consumer market with DOS-based Windows. Similar to Steve Jobs' Mac OS 9 funeral, Bill Gates declared at a Windows XP launch event that it was "End of an Era" for DOS and symbolically typed "exit" on a DOS prompt for the last time, all while DOS tried to talk him out of it HAL-style.
• In 2005 Apple announced that they were transitioning the Mac to Intel CPUs, meaning that Macs would no longer have distinct hardware from PCs, and would even be able to boot Windows. In a broader sense, it also meant the end of challengers to the Intel/x86 architecture in the desktop space. Though the performance and efficiency advantages of Intel's chips were indisputable at that time, many Apple fans lamented that Apple's computers no longer "Thought Different" than the competition.
  • 15 years later, Apple announced another CPU transition, this time from Intel to its own in-house designed ARM chips, which they have branded as "Apple Silicon". This in turn could mark the end of another era, not just for Apple, but for PC industry as a whole; that of the dominance of x86-based chips in the desktop and laptop sphere, which had reigned since the mid-to-late '80s when the IBM Personal Computer and its clones took over the industry, with Apple being the lone holdout using other architectures until they too switched to Intel. It remains to be seen if ARM-based CPUs will take off for Windows computers^note Microsoft first supported ARM with the release of Windows RT in 2012 alongside Windows 8, but that was a heavily stripped-down and limited version of Windows more akin to a tablet OS than a desktop one. They would finally offer a fully-fledged version of Windows on ARM with Windows 10, though software and hardware support remain an issue; it's generally thought that Microsoft's greater dependence on supporting legacy technology than Apple will make supporting a new architecture more difficult, but Apple has grown to be such a significant part of the market that even if it's just them that makes the switch, it will have profound impacts on the industry as a whole.
• Western Union officially ceased offering telegram services in 2006—a mere year before the launch of the iPhone.
• The switch from analog to digital television. For decades, television programs were broadcasted with an analog signal and many people watched their programs with antennas on their TV sets. By the 2000s, when high definition started to take off, many television sets produced at that time were made with digital signals instead of analog, which meant the sound and picture came out more crisp. TV programs took advantage of the digital signal for better quality images and sound (including HD formats) and by 2009, the federal government ordered that all basic programs/television channels had to convert to digital formatting in order to free up space on the analog spectrum for emergency services that needed them (such as firefighters and police). The transition looked likethis. It also meant the end of "cable ready" televisions, meaning television sets that need only a coaxial cable to access cable TV programming; nowadays, every older TV set needs a converter box in order to access digital cable or satellite (newer, usually LCD-based or Smart TV based televisions usually have the signal converter built-in to the TV hardware). (Unless maybe you live in a very remote, rural area that's still analog or mostly analog.)
  • The 2009 mandate only applied to full-power stations; low power stations could continue broadcasting in analog until July 2021, when the FCC mandated that they switch to digital too, finally making analog television fully extinct in the US.
• The landing of STS-135 at Cape Canaveral on July 21, 2011 marked the end of the space shuttle program. More significantly, it represented the end of an era of NASA sending astronauts into space on American soil. For the rest of The New '10s, American and European astronauts would have to piggyback on Russian spacecraft to get to and from the ISS. However, this situation wasn't permanent: the SpaceX Crew Dragon made its first manned flight in 2020.
• With the Windows XP OS officially having support from Microsoft cut off on April 8, 2014, many people consider the end of XP to be the end of the golden era where many people to this day still consider XP as the best OS by Microsoft. While Windows 7 has come close to being what an upgraded XP would be, and Windows 10 is now considered a worthy successor to both when compared to the ill-fated Windows 8, XP itself is considered the standard.
  • On top of that, the desktop computer market which Windows XP was tied to has been sent into a slow decline by the rise of smartphones and tablets. Microsoft's failure to get a meaningful foothold in the mobile arena has led to them going from the primary way people got on the Internet to account for only about 1/5th of Internet access worldwide. Pretty much the only thing propping the consumer^note Businesses still depend heavily on Windows due to the amount of specialized software that only runs on it desktop computer market up are gamers, which companies such as Alienware and Asus have gladly capitalized on.
  • It is also marked the end of a stand-alone computer or computer-like system (tablets and smartphones included), where updates are pretty much mandatory and delivered as soon as possible due to the ubiquity of internet connection.
• The automotive world saw a number of brands retired:
  • Ford closed down its mid-range Mercury sub-brand in 2011.
  • General Motors, following its entry into bankruptcy protection in 2009, rationalised its brand lineup. This saw the retirement of the Pontiac and Saturn nameplates in 2010, and the sell-off (Opel/Vauxhall) or closure (Saab) of most of its foreign divisions over the next several years. Earlier, GM had discontinued Oldsmobile in 2004.
  • Chrysler retired the Plymouth brand in 2001 after its final model, the Prowler, fell well short of projected sales.
  • The bankruptcy of MG Rover in 2005 marked the end of volume car manufacturing by wholly British-owned brands. While cars are still mass-produced in Britain, all of them are foreign-owned (eg, JLR, Nissan and Stellantis) or niche brands (eg, McLaren and Caterham).
  • The announcement that Holden would close down its factories in 2017 marked the final chapter of car manufacturing in Australia, which had been in operation for well over a century. Over the previous decade, other major car companies including Ford, Toyota and Mitsubishi had also ceased manufacturing operations due to a myriad of factors, continuing on as strictly car importers.

Other/Multiple Periods

• Chinese scholars have described China as this since the time of Confucius himself, if not before. This hasn't been affected by the fact that China's had at least three Golden Ages since unification.
• The idea that man is in a state of cultural degeneracy from a perfect golden age is Older Than Feudalism. Plato complained that the youth of his age were degenerate and anti-authoritarian.
• Hesiod, above, was writing during the age after the Dorian conquest. They brought iron with them, but a lot of things were lost from the previous age — like writing. So, it was the dark Iron Age.
• Due to an asymmetry in the space of all events, we perceive time as flowing from a state of low entropy to a state of high entropy.
• Atlantis in new-age/pop-culture/pseudohistory.
• Mass Extinctions as a whole.
• A Growing Up Sucks example is when your most significant role models in childhood start succumbing to the mortal coil. David Bowie's death due to cancer on 10 January 2016, is a prime example. The passing of celebrities Lemmy and Natalie Cole during the final few days of 2015, and Alan Rickman, Glenn Frey, Paul Kantner, and Terry Wogan within weeks of Bowie – and each other – compounds the sense of loss. Later in the year, there were the passings of Prince, Garry Shandling, Muhammad Ali, Gene Wilder, Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds (Fisher's mother), Leonard Cohen, George Michael and Anton Yelchin, among others. In particular, 2016 has been cited as being significant because the celebrities involved represented a golden era of bold cultural risk-taking, coupled with the increasing ubiquity of social media. Additionally, earth-shaking political events that year like the Brexit referendum and the election of President Donald Trump created a rather cynical climate, which made the 2016 deaths feel more impactful than otherwise.
• Since the rise of rock music in the '50s and its legitimization in the '60s, each decade has had its own defining event for the end of its music scene:
  • The Day the Music Died, which saw the simultaneous deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper in a 1959 plane crash, marked the end of the '50s in terms of music, creating a void in rock music that would not be filled again until the emergence of The Beatles a few years later.
  • In turn, the breakup of The Beatles in 1970 marked the end of the '60s music scene, creating its own void that would remain unfilled until the rise of David Bowie two years later.
  • The '70s was musically taken out by a mix of Disco Demolition Night in 1979 and the murder of John Lennon in 1980. The void left by those two events wouldn't be filled until the rise of MTV in 1981.
  • In a way, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal movement of the late 70s/early 80s served as the last time that the United Kingdom would serve as the main player in Rock Music and Heavy Metal, a position it held since The British Invasion. While the UK would later go on to host the main scenes of Oi!/Street Punk, D-Beat/Crust Punk, Grindcore (at least for a little while), and Britpop, it would never again be so central to Rock as a whole as it was in The '60s/Seventies. (One could make an argument that British bands have had a disproportionate influence on Indie Rock, but that's sort of its own thing.)
  • The music scene of the 80s in turn died with the Milli Vanilli lip-syncing scandal in 1990 and subsequent surprise success of Nirvana the following year.
  • The '90s are an interesting case in that their music scene had two clearly-defined "eras" that are so starkly different from one another that they feel like their own mini-decades:
    • The "edge" era of the early '90s was killed off by the suicide of Kurt Cobain and the murders of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G., all of which delegitimized grunge and Gangsta Rap as mainstream forces, resulting in the more eclectic and fragmented music scene of the late '90s to start taking hold.
    • The "whatever goes" era of the late '90s first started to end with the high-profile release of both Kid A by Radiohead and The Marshall Mathers LP by Eminem in 2000. Both albums openly rejected the styles that brought their respective artists to fame in the late '90s^note melancholic Alternative Rock for Radiohead, fratboyish comedy rap for Eminem, shedding off those skins to do the same for the broader music scene, and laid the groundwork in re-legitimizing Electronic Music and Darker and Edgier Hip-Hop in the mainstream eye.
  • Speaking of Eminem, he was responsible for the end of shock-rock; by being a Hardcore Hip-Hop artist with a Teen Pop audience, he broke shock into the mainstream pop world, forcing later pop stars to incorporate vulgarity into their image. The overturning of "The Real Slim Shady" vulgarity case in 2001, in which a radio station was sued for playing a Clean version of "The Real Slim Shady" in a ludicrous decision that was later overturned by a massive outcry from the music industry, marked the end of the moral panic about hip-hop.
  • In turn, the breakups of R.E.M. and The White Stripes in 2011 marked the final death knell of the 2000s musically, as while that decade's scene was also fairly nebulous, the ends of R.E.M. and the White Stripes marked the dying breath of rock as a mainstream force, galvanizing the grip that hip-hop, pop, and EDM already gained in the 2000s and allowing them to take over as the dominant forms of mainstream western music as the 2010s progressed.
• When the Boston Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, it ended 86 years of misery (the alleged "Curse of the Bambino" that supposedly arose when the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees) for them and their fans, creating a golden age for the Red Sox as they won the title 3 more times after ending their drought: one in 2007 a 2nd in 2013 and more recently in 2018. It also signaled the rise of the Curse-Buster era in American sports, when several teams ended long droughts since their last title if they had even won it at all,^note Longest current droughts as of 2023: Arizona Cardinals in the NFL (76 years), Cleveland Guardians in MLB (formerly the Indians, 75 years), Sacramento Kings in the NBA (71 years), and the Toronto Maple Leafs in the NHL (56 years). The Minnesota Vikings of the NFL are the current record holder for oldest "Big 4" team to never win a title, playing their first season in 1961. One more notable sports drought: no Canadian team has won The Stanley Cup since 1993 including:
  • MLB
    • The 2005 Chicago White Sox (88 years)
    • The 2006 St. Louis Cardinals (24 years)
    • The 2008 Philadelphia Phillies (28 years), bonus points for this being Philadelphia's first major title in 25 years.
    • The 2010 San Francisco Giants (56 years, dating back to when they were based in New York)
    • The 2015 Kansas City Royals (30 years)
    • The 2016 Chicago Cubs (108 years)
    • The 2017 Houston Astros (55 years)
    • The 2019 Washington Nationals (50 years, dating back to their beginnings as the Montreal Expos)
    • The 2020 Los Angeles Dodgers (32 years)
    • The 2021 Atlanta Braves (26 years)
    • The 2023 Texas Rangers (62 years, dating back to its foundation as the Washington Senators)
  • NHL
    • 2008-09 Pittsburgh Penguins (17 years)
    • 2009-10 Chicago Blackhawks (49 years)
    • 2010-11 Boston Bruins (39 years)
    • 2011-12 Los Angeles Kings (45 years)
    • 2017-18 Washington Capitals (44 years), bonus points for this being D.C.'s first major title in 27 years.
    • 2018-19 St. Louis Blues (52 years)
    • 2019-20 Tampa Bay Lightning (16 years)
    • 2021-22 Colorado Avalanche (21 years)
  • NBA
    • 2005-06 Miami Heat (18 years)
    • 2007-08 Boston Celtics (22 years)
    • 2010-11 Dallas Mavericks (31 years)
    • 2014-15 Golden State Warriors (40 years)
    • 2015-16 Cleveland Cavaliers (46 years), bonus points for this being Cleveland's first major title in 52 years.
    • 2018-19 Toronto Raptors (23 years), bonus points for this being both Toronto and Canada's first major title in 26 years.
    • 2020-21 Milwaukee Bucks (50 years)
    • 2022-23 Denver Nuggets (56 years, dating back to its founding as the Denver Rockets in the ABA)
  • NFL
    • 2005 Pittsburgh Steelers (26 years)
    • 2006 Indianapolis Colts (36 years, dating back to when they were based in Baltimore)
    • 2007 New York Giants (17 years)
    • 2009 New Orleans Saints (42 years)
    • 2013 Seattle Seahawks (37 years), bonus points for this being Seattle's first major title in 35 years.
    • 2015 Denver Broncos (17 years)
    • 2017 Philadelphia Eagles (57 years)
    • 2019 Kansas City Chiefs (50 years, dating back to before the NFL-AFL merger)
    • 2020 Tampa Bay Buccaneers (18 years)
    • 2021 Los Angeles Rams (22 years, having won their previous title during their time in St. Louis)
• Early in 2017, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus, the "Greatest Show On Earth!", announced it would cease performing, citing a massive drop in audiences (and thus, profits) arising from the elimination of their elephant, and increased pressure from animal rights groups. This did not become permanent, however, as the circus would be revived in 2023, albeit without the animals.
• The history of the Universe itself. Several events as the separation of the four fundamental forces of Nature, the formation of stars and galaxies, and the apparition of dark energy marked the final of different epochs, and unless it ends before, it will pass through eras whose ends are marked by the death of all stars, proton decay, finally the evaporation of black holes... and, as Science Marches On and new theories are developed, later who knows.
• Jeopardy!:
  • The 1993 Tournament of Champions was the last to invite the top winners of only the preceding season. Starting with the 1994 Tournament of Champions, the eligibility period for TOCs became the entire time between tournaments.
  • The 1996-97 season was the last to use the synthesizer theme from its 1984 premiere, the last to use the classic Jeopardy! Thinking Music from the Art Fleming era, and the last to use the "Grid Set" which was introduced in the 1991-92 season.
  • The 2000-01 season was the last full season to use the original scoring system ($100-$500 in the "Jeopardy!" round and $200-$1000 in the "Double Jeopardy!" round). During the 2001-02 season, those values were doubled to where they've stayed ever since.
  • The 2002-03 season was the last season in which players were able to win up to 5 games before being retired as undefeated champions. Starting in the 2003-04 season, the show introduced a "sky's the limit" rule, where winners could keep playing until they were defeated, which led to Ken Jennings's 74-game winning streak stretching across the 2003-04 season and the 2004-05 season.
  • The 2014-15 was the last to use the "co-champion rule", where players tied for first place could each return the next day to play. It was dropped due to several players becoming co-champions, and all ties are now broken with a "sudden death" question, much to the chagrin of fans.
  • The 2017-18 season was the last full season that Alex Trebek hosted before he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in March 2019. The 2019-20 season was stopped early due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, and he died from his cancer in November 2020, midway through the 2020-21 season. After his last shows aired in early 2021, the remainder of the season has had several guest hosts filling in for him before Mayim Bialik and Ken Jennings succeeded him as co-hosts in the 2021-22 season.
• Boxing has been in a slow but steady decline since its heyday in The '70s, where the likes of Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, and George Foreman duked it out in epic heavyweight fights, for numerous reasons:
  • The greater understanding of the dangers involved in the sport have led to a big downturn in the number of young men taking the sport up. It used to be the case that especially for poor black urban youths, boxing was a legitimate way of getting out of the ghetto. These days black youths with athletic ability are far more likely to opt to take up American football, basketball, or other sports where the dangers are far less.
  • The proliferation of ranking bodies, increase in the number of weight divisions, and adding more types of belts have diluted the sport — there are now over 100 'championship' belts spread across the sport, making each one far less prestigious than the earlier versions.
  • The lack of a unified heavyweight champion. It's said that boxing as a whole follows the heavyweight division's lead and there hasn't been a unified (as in someone holding all four major title organisations' heavyweight belts) since the retirement of Lennox Lewis in 2000 — over twenty years without one.
  • The lack of any "big personalities" able to attract attention from people who were not fans of boxing since the retirement of Mike Tyson. No one since (aside from possibly Floyd Mayweather Jr.) has had anything like the same sort of mainstream profile.
  • The rise of the "undefeated" boxer. Promoters have realised that having a boxer who's never lost is very lucrative and have sought to skew a fighter's bouts in order to make sure they are very unlikely to lose. This was exemplified in the career of Floyd Mayweather Jr. who won 50 fights with no losses by only fighting on the most favourable terms possible and not fighting anyone who could legitimately challenge him, ducking them until the odds were well in his favour. This contrasts to earlier boxing history where the profile and value of a fighter was based on them taking on the toughest challengers possible. This has led to a lot of cynicism about the sport as a whole.
  • The slow decline of skills and training. As fewer and fewer young men are entering the sport, there haven't been nearly as many opportunities for retiring boxers to become trainers. Boxing, like most martial arts, depends heavily on skills being passed down the generations by hand — boxers are trained by excellent trainers, then become excellent trainers later in their career — it's simply not possible to become a good or great boxer without hands-on training from a good trainer. Boxers today might well be bigger and stronger than their earlier contemporaries but simply lack their skills and abilities, the knowledge has simply been lost over time as previous generations have died.
  • The rise of Mixed Martial Arts and UFC, which has sapped away a lot of talent that likely would have otherwise become boxers, and more importantly a lot of the money and pop culture relevance from boxing, especially in North America. A lot of Americans that are training in boxing have no intention of ever stepping foot inside a boxing ring because they're also training in Brazilian Ju-Jitsu or some other form of grappling at the same time.
  • Ongoing issues between the International Olympic Committee and the International Boxing Association mean that the number of boxers at the 2024 Olympics will be reduced by 11.5%. There's persistent speculation that the sport may be dropped completely in the future. This is exacerbated by the vast differences between the Olympic boxing rules and the rules for professional boxing, meaning professional boxers are unlikely to compete. The 2016 games were dogged by allegations of bout fixing and corruption to the point the International Boxing Association was stripped of its right to organise the 2020 contest under the auspices of the Olympics; instead an ad hoc task force took over. In April 2023, amid the continuing row between the IOC and IBA, more than 25 national governing bodies, most from Western countries, bolted from the IBA to form a competing governing body, World Boxing. That June, the IOC stripped the IBA of its status as the recognized governing body for the sport, marking the first time a governing body was expelled from the Olympic movement. Boxing at Paris 2024 will again be overseen by an ad hoc task force.
  • All of the above have caused a massive decline in the profile of the sport outside of its die-hard fans who are falling in number every year. In The '70s, even someone who was utterly indifferent to the sport would have been able to name several high-profile boxers such as Ali, Frazier, Foreman, etc. without any issue. Asking a non-boxing fan today who one of the heavyweight champions is will probably get a "no idea" response.
  • The probable final nail in the coffin of boxing as a mainstream sport is the rise of "gimmick" bouts, such as Mayweather's one-sided bout against MMA fighter Conor McGregor and his exhibition match against YouTube celebrity Logan Paul (who prior to their match also fought fellow YouTuber KSI in two highly-publicized matches, one amateur match and a professional rematch). These are rapidly making the sport a laughing stock and driving away fans looking to see legitimate bouts between good fighters.
  • All of the above mean boxing is unlikely to ever return to the same profile it enjoyed through much of the twentieth century and it is very likely to become a niche sport, of interest only to a minority of sports fans and even fewer members of the general public, essentially becoming the equivalent of jazz in sporting terms.
• The James Bond films had several eras and clear ends to them:
  • Diamonds Are Forever (1971) was the final Bond film:
    • To star Sean Connery in the Eon Productions series.
    • To feature Big Bad Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his organization, SPECTRE. Those were taken away by lawsuits, and would not officially come back to the Eon series until Spectre 44 years later.
  • The Man with the Golden Gun was the final Bond film to be jointly produced by both Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. Saltzman left out of financial, personal, and health issues, the franchise had gone an uncertain/unconfident route under his tenure since Diamonds are Forever before bouncing back with The Spy Who Loved Me.
  • Moonraker (1979) was the final Bond film to:
    • Have a main theme sung by Shirley Bassey.
    • Feature large sets by Ken Adam. More down-to-Earth locations would prevail afterwards.
    • Feature Bernard Lee as M.
  • For Your Eyes Only was the final Bond film to be distributed by United Artists as a stand-alone company. They were facing financial problems due to the failure of the infamous Heaven's Gate the year before and merged with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer not long after the release. And since then, all future Bond films have been distributed by MGM in some form.
  • A View to a Kill (1985) was the final Bond film:
    • To feature Roger Moore as Bond. He contemplated quitting the role several times before due to his age but was always lured back by Cubby Broccoli. Not this time.
    • To feature Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny. She was there since Dr. No all the way back to 1962.
  • The Living Daylights (1987) was the final Bond film:
    • To feature a blonde Bond Girl (or if you're feeling punny, a Blonde Girl) in a lead role, until Léa Seydoux as Madeleine Swann in Spectre 28 years later.^note Die Another Day subverted this with Miranda Frost, who seemed to be the lead Bond Girl until it's revealed she's The Mole.
    • To feature the Soviet Union as a major player.^note The last Bond film before the dissolution of the Soviet Union was Licence to Kill, but it takes place in the Americas, and the USSR is not involved. The USSR makes its final Bond appearance in GoldenEye, with a brief prologue set nine years before the main action of the film. Most of the rest of the film is set in The New Russia, and it's a sort of love letter to the "Soviet Union as major players" trope.
    • To be based off a piece of Ian Fleming's original Bond fiction (in this case, a short story), until Casino Royale was finally made to reboot the franchise with Daniel Craig as Bond.^note Licence to Kill used elements of Bond novels including The Man with the Golden Gun, Casino Royale, and Live and Let Die, and featured a character from the short story "The Hildebrand Rarity", but was largely an original story.
    • To feature the legendary John Barry's music; he retired from the series after this film.^note The James Bond Theme doesn't count as it is officially credited to Monty Norman.
    • To receive a PG rating from the MPAA; the much grittier Licence to Kill would receive a PG-13 rating and all subsequent films in the series would follow suit.
    • To feature Walter Gotell and Geoffrey Keen in the recurring roles of KGB head General Gogol and UK Defense Minister Frederick Gray, respectively, after appearing in each film from The Spy Who Loved Me through this.
  • Licence to Kill (1989) was the final Bond film:
    • To be produced by Albert R. Broccoli. By the time GoldenEye was being made, his health issues (which would kill him seven months after the film's release) prompted his daughter Barbara and his stepson Michael G. Wilson, already a co-producer in Licence to Kill, to take over the reins.
    • To feature Richard Maibaum as a scriptwriter. He had contributed to all but three of the previous Bond films and suffered a fatal heart attack in January 1991. (You Only Live Twice, Live and Let Die and Moonraker were the only ones he didn't contribute to.)
    • To open in the summer. It faced tough competition from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Batman (1989), Lethal Weapon 2, Ghostbusters II, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and The Abyss at the summer box office, and ever since, Bond films have opened in autumn or winter. Due to production delays, No Time to Die would have been the first entry since Licence to Kill to open at a different time of the year, with a release originally set for April 2020. But along came COVID-19... and not one, not two, but three release date changes, first to November 2020, then April 2021, and then October 2021.
    • To have Maurice Binder design the opening title sequence, as he died of lung cancer in April 1991. He had done every title sequence for the series up to this point, save for From Russia with Love and Goldfinger, and was succeeded by one of his alumni, Daniel Kleinman, in GoldenEye.
    • To feature a Bond Girl - Carey Lowell - born before the franchise began with Dr. No in 1962.
    • To be made before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War.
    • Also the last film to use the classic office sets for M and Moneypenny (at least until Skyfall).
    • To feature Smoking Is Cool throughout the film.
    • Not to have any CGI (and thus, also the last to feature cheesy rear projection shots).
    • To feature Timothy Dalton as Bond. He was signed to star in three Bond films, but the franchise entered Development Hell in the early 1990s and his contract expired, with Pierce Brosnan replacing him as Bond in GoldenEye.
    • To have a male actor playing M until Spectre 26 years later not counting the ending of Skyfall, where Ralph Fiennes takes over from Judi Dench after the latter's death.
  • The World Is Not Enough (1999) was the final Bond film:
    • Of the 20th century.
    • To be made pre-9/11.
    • To have Desmond Llewelyn as Q. Bar one film, he's been around since 1963. Even moreso since the actor died in a car accident a few weeks after the film's release.
  • Die Another Day (2002) was the final Bond film:
    • Of the whole "continuity" (so to speak) that started in 1962. Casino Royale would reboot it.
    • To star Pierce Brosnan.
  • No Time to Die (2021) was the final Bond film:
    • To star Daniel Craig.
    • To be released during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, who would pass away in September 2022, thus making this the last time Bond was serving on Her Majesty's Secret Service.
• Doctor Who has had many of these over its sixty-year history, typically when one actor playing the Doctor leaves the show and is replaced with a new Doctor actor:
  • "Mission to the Unknown" in 1965 was the last story to be overseen by original producer Verity Lambert.
  • "The Tenth Planet" in 1966 marked the end of William Hartnell's tenure.
  • "The War Games" in 1969 marked the end of Patrick Troughton's tenure and the black-and-white era of the show in general.
  • "Planet of the Spiders" in 1974 marked the end of Jon Pertwee's run. The next story, "Robot", saw the departure of his show-runners Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks.
  • "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" in 1977 marked the end of Philip Hinchcliffe's tenure as producer, widely considered to be the show's golden age.
  • Though "Shada" was never broadcast after production was halted in 1979, it marked the end of the following features of the show from a production standpoint: the 1967 arrangement of the theme by Delia Derbyshire, the tunnel opening sequence by Bernard Lodge and the diamond series logo introduced in "The Time Warrior", Graham Williams' tenure as producer, Douglas Adams' tenure as script editor, Dudley Simpson's tenure as incidental music composer, David Brierley as the voice of K9, the Fourth Doctor's multicolour scarf and brown frock coat, the TARDIS prop designed by Barry Newberry and the use of six-part stories.
  • "Logopolis" in 1981 marked the end of Tom Baker's lengthy seven-year reign, the longest of any actor to play the Doctor. Combined with Baker's status as the most popular Doctor in the show's history, there was genuine concern over whether or not audiences would accept the idea of another actor taking over the role, given that a significant chunk of them were too young to remember any of the previous Doctors.
  • "The Caves of Androzani" in 1984 marked the end of Peter Davison's tenure.
  • "The Ultimate Foe" in 1986 marked the end of Colin Baker's tenure as the Doctor and Eric Saward's tenure as script editor. Baker was unceremoniously fired by top BBC brass thanks to them and audiences associating him with a major Audience-Alienating Era in the mid-'80s, while Saward (who'd served as script editor since 1982) quit midway through the season's production due to Creative Differences with producer John Nathan-Turner.
  • "Survival" in 1989 marked the end of the classic series after a 26-year run. The following year, producer John Nathan-Turner would formally resign from the BBC, ending the longest tenure of any Doctor Who producer to date (having been in the position for a solid decade).
  • "The End of Time" in 2009-2010 marked the end of David Tennant's first tenure as the Doctor and Russell T Davies' first tenure as showrunner, as well as Julie Gardner's tenure as producer.
  • "The Time of the Doctor" in 2013 marked the end of Matt Smith's tenure.
  • "Twice Upon a Time" in 2017 marked the end of Peter Capaldi's tenure as the Doctor, Steven Moffat's era as showrunner and Murray Gold's time as composer. It also marked the end of the show's use of yearly Christmas specials, a tradition which stretched all the way back to the start of the Revival Series in 2005; under Chris Chibnall, the show's holiday episodes would switch to a New Year's Day slot.
  • "The Power of the Doctor" in 2022 marked the end of Jodie Whittaker's tenure as the Doctor and Chris Chibnall's tenure as showrunner.
  • "The Giggle" in 2023 marked the end of David Tennant's second tenure as the Doctor.
• Saturday Night Live: Season 39 (2013-14) was the last to feature Don Pardo as the show's announcer, who passed away in August 2014. He'd served as announcer in every season except season 7 (1981-82). After his death, he was succeeded by former castmember Darrell Hammond.
• As befitting a series about the rise and fall of galactic superpowers, Star Wars has had plenty of eras begin and end.
  • After Return of the Jedi ended the original trilogy, the franchise began gradually winding down:
    • The Star Wars: Ewok Adventures duology was the last live-action production of the original trilogy.
    • The last issue of the Marvel comic was published in 1986, and Ewoks was cancelled the same year.
    • 1987's Star Tours was the last major piece of Star Wars media (that wasn't a Retraux throwback to the OT era) that used the aesthetic of the Original Trilogy, as well as the last time Lucasfilm made a Star Wars ship battle without the use of CGI. While West End's RPG tided fans over, it would take four years until the franchise picked up again with the publication of Heir to the Empire and Dark Horse Comics getting the license with Dark Empire, creating the modern Expanded Universe (now called Legends, as mentioned below)
  • The prequel trilogy, meanwhile, not only showed audiences the end of the Republic and the Jedi, but also ended many things itself:
    • Revenge of the Sith was George Lucas's last film as director, the last mainline film to be released in May (the Sequels and Rogue One were released in December, and while Solo: A Star Wars Story was a May release it was because of Executive Meddling and bombed) and the final piece of Star Wars media to be entirely shepherded by The Maker.
    • Seasons 1-6 of Star Wars: The Clone Wars was the last piece of Star Wars media to have been directly overseen by George Lucas before the Disney buyout, as well as the only one to have migrated over to the New Canon after Disney rebooted the old Expanded Universe. (While Lucas also contribued to Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Star Wars: Underworld, the former was made non-canonical by Disney and the latter was never actually produced beyond test footage)
  • Star Wars Legends filled in the gaps in the history of the Galaxy Far Far Away before it was rebooted by Disney in 2014, who wanted to give their new creative team space to tell their own stories. Even before that, it had its own eras that ended...
    • New Jedi Order was the first storyline to be published by Del Rey, and even more importantly the first to NOT have the The Empire or an Imperial Remnant as its villain. The extragalactic, immune-to-The-Force Yuuzhan Vong took center stage as the main baddies, forcing the Republic and Empire to make peace against the greater enemy. In the following storylines, we'd see the bad guy roles go to giant psychic bugs, a Republic ruled by the Sith and a totalitarian Corellia, and an ancient evil goddess that turns Jedi insane. The next time we see a galaxy ruled by The Empire in the Darker and Edgier Star Wars: Legacy, they're actually one of the good guys (for the most part) fighting against the Sith, and the new emperor is descended from Princess Leia.
    • Legacy of the Force was the last time Karen Traviss wrote about Mandalorians. Her subplot, which was criticized for being out of place in the story, led to fans turning against her interpretations of the Mandos as more noble than the Jedi, and she eventually left the franchise after The Clone Wars (which Lucasfilm had always placed above the rest of the EU in canonicity) established that the Mandalorians had abandoned their warrior ways after a revolution and made the most Traviss-like Mandos into villains.
    • Fate of the Jedi was the last major story arc before the Disney buyout. Star Wars: Crucible, intended to be the last adventure for the main trio of Han, Luke and Leia in the EU before Passing the Torch to their children, was the final novel of the post-ROTJ EU before the reboot. The aforementioned Star Wars: Legacy, set 137 years after the events of A New Hope, is the last story in the timeline. The very last novel to be published before the EU was rebooted was Honor Among Thieves, and the canonical Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir was the last SW comic to be published under Dark Horse's exclusive license and their only canon comic until they became a secondary publisher in 2022. Star Wars: The Old Republic, being an MMORPG that was developed and released before the EU was rebooted, is the last part of Legends that still gets updates due to the Grandfather Clause.
    • LucasArts' final game developed in house was The Force Unleashed II, and the infamous Kinect Star Wars was the final game to be published by the company before Disney bought the company out and cancelled all the projects that were in development. The company now exclusiely exists to license out the IP to other publishers.

---