It's hard to pick.

I'd say the Enlightenment Period for the simple romantic image that was the time the European Middle Class really started to blossom. And with it some activities we come to associate as comfortable arising in a very classical setting. I am of course talking about the rise of the coffee house and people going there to casually drink coffee in social setting. There's a sort of warm, mid-summery glow to that sort of picture. Where as the old pubs, taverns, and inns have a sort of older moldier light in that respect. Bars in that respect don't seem to carry the same light as the coffee house which has the romantic image of intellectual advancement flaunted during that era.

Besides the coffee house you have a great shift in thought leading to modern liberalism and the idea of national revolution.

Of course during that period you of course have some of the most violent religiously-inspired conflicts as the Christian World schisms. Never mind the Crusades, that shit was old school with only a few ten thousand being deployed and vague k/d rates. Thirty Years War you get hundreds of thousands moving out and millions dying across central and western Europe in an internalized German religious conflict to an effort to maintain the old-school status-quo.

Alternatively the Cold War era is rather interesting, one put down in a romantic light by Warren Zevon in songs like Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner and Lawyers, Guns, and Money. Together the two songs construct the theme of some of some of the interest in this period. You also have most broadly the factors that most directly dictate the current paradigm of the world. There's a lot of intrigue and back-door conflict to go around on top of that and considerable movement forward in many fields.

However that era seems to fuel the idea that war breeds advancement as looking back at the Cold War people can note a lot of minor conflicts speckled across the globe that may have had the interest of any one of the modern Great Powers or any one of the two (or three, pre-Suez Crisis) Super Powers. This gives the impression I feel that a lot of scientific development was had because involvement in globalized conflicts like Vietnam or Korea or the entire environment of stiff political competition between the Soviets and Americans. And although that may be true, there's still a variety of factors I believe people overlook when considering the pace of technology: namely the communication infrastructure that had come to exist at that time and the globalization of the scientific community so it wasn't all one relatively wealthy person sitting at home reading dusty tomes, it was an effort now of multiple minds and multiple minds below them. People forget that.

And of course there's the typical fascination of the medieval ages. My eyes have lately been drifting over the Slavic, pagan world with a sort of fascination. And of course that period contains some internalized events in the Muslim world that continue to echo even today.