![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
parlor question: history edition
Here’s a fun one: what are the ten most important moments/events in world history?
Don’t click the “read more” if you want to think about it for yourself first; I share some reasonable answers below.
*
*
*
*
*
The boy & I discussed it for a while at a cafe a while back. Our list looked roughly like so:
1. The *results* of WWI (e.g., setting the stage for Germany to get plunged into a debt crisis and eventually go world-a-warring again)
2. Constantinople & its associated Christianity
3. Norman conquest of England
4. The Middle East kicking ass while everyone else was in the dark ages, thus preserving a lot of famous Greek/Roman/etc writing
5. World War II
6. Either American Revolution of French Revolution, whichever one you want to mark as “enlightenment/democracy begins here”
7. Mongolia conquering all that stuff or something??? (We felt like we should have some eastern history in here but, uh, are kind of underinformed on the topic)
8. Renaissance
9. Creation of Israel OR the whole partitioning-up-the-middle-east thing that happened during colonialism etc
10. Discovery (“discovery”) of the New World
Really, I was grasping for an event that would reflect the importance of colonialism, because you really can’t understand a great many centuries of world history without it. Best I could come up with was, idk, “the middle passage” / “triangle trade routes” after the New World was a thing.
Anyway, after we made this list, we looked up some lists randos on the internet had made. Some good ones they had that we overlooked were: the Protestant Reformation, Jesus of Nazareth starting his religion, Muhammad starting his religion, and arguably the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Mainly we kicked ourselves for missing “the printing press.” Holy shit! Widespread literacy and cheap books gogogo! That one’s important!
I texted a friend the question, and she came up with an excellent and rather different list:
1. Partition of India and Pakistan
2. Whoever figured out cooking meat is awesome
3. Alexander the Great defeating Darius
4. Yalta Conference
5. Muhammad’s Hijra
6. Mao’s March
7 Americans beating the British at Yorktown
8. Vatican
9. Constantine converting to Christianity
10. Paris Conference after WWI
Someone else looked at both our lists and asked where the hell “the wheel” and “fire” are. Which, okay, fair.
It’s lots of fun to talk and think about, though :) I would be amused to see y’all share your own list(s) in the comments!
Don’t click the “read more” if you want to think about it for yourself first; I share some reasonable answers below.
*
*
*
*
*
The boy & I discussed it for a while at a cafe a while back. Our list looked roughly like so:
1. The *results* of WWI (e.g., setting the stage for Germany to get plunged into a debt crisis and eventually go world-a-warring again)
2. Constantinople & its associated Christianity
3. Norman conquest of England
4. The Middle East kicking ass while everyone else was in the dark ages, thus preserving a lot of famous Greek/Roman/etc writing
5. World War II
6. Either American Revolution of French Revolution, whichever one you want to mark as “enlightenment/democracy begins here”
7. Mongolia conquering all that stuff or something??? (We felt like we should have some eastern history in here but, uh, are kind of underinformed on the topic)
8. Renaissance
9. Creation of Israel OR the whole partitioning-up-the-middle-east thing that happened during colonialism etc
10. Discovery (“discovery”) of the New World
Really, I was grasping for an event that would reflect the importance of colonialism, because you really can’t understand a great many centuries of world history without it. Best I could come up with was, idk, “the middle passage” / “triangle trade routes” after the New World was a thing.
Anyway, after we made this list, we looked up some lists randos on the internet had made. Some good ones they had that we overlooked were: the Protestant Reformation, Jesus of Nazareth starting his religion, Muhammad starting his religion, and arguably the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Mainly we kicked ourselves for missing “the printing press.” Holy shit! Widespread literacy and cheap books gogogo! That one’s important!
I texted a friend the question, and she came up with an excellent and rather different list:
1. Partition of India and Pakistan
2. Whoever figured out cooking meat is awesome
3. Alexander the Great defeating Darius
4. Yalta Conference
5. Muhammad’s Hijra
6. Mao’s March
7 Americans beating the British at Yorktown
8. Vatican
9. Constantine converting to Christianity
10. Paris Conference after WWI
Someone else looked at both our lists and asked where the hell “the wheel” and “fire” are. Which, okay, fair.
It’s lots of fun to talk and think about, though :) I would be amused to see y’all share your own list(s) in the comments!
no subject
two questions to start:
aaand the list:
now let's see what you wrote! :D
_____________
post-read-edit: -does a fist-pump that we were so similar-! :D oh man this turned out even more interesting than I thought. Several further blurbs:
no subject
oh and: scientific revolution! i think that was actually our 10th pick, ultimately (was trying to remember a discussion from a week ago, orz—i remember we labored over whether “medical revolution” counted as an “event” or not and eventually decided smallpox vaccine / penicillin counted)
re: fire/wheel/etc: i am sure someone has studied to try and figure out if fire/wheel/cooking were “created once and then humans scattered all over the place” vs “discovered independently many times”, and i’d be curious what their conclusions are. the *cooking* thing is particularly interesting from this angle—there was a professor at my university whose whole body of research basically argued that the invention of cooking allowed us to have bigger brains, evolve to become more intelligent, etc (because we didn’t need as large of jaws to eat food). my understanding is that, in this professor’s youth, everyone regarded them as vaguely kooky, but apparently we *now* have evidence that cooking started back way further than we thought previously, and the professor’s timelines work out a lot better.
re: Gengis Khan: i think the interesting thing with the super-ancient empires is trying to figure out what their insidious/super-long-term impacts are. i picked Normans conquering pre-modern Britain because that dramatically transformed the English language & dramatically transformed what would become western European culture. i don’t know enough about Asia to really have an idea of what Ghengis Khan changed about the area (did it unify a bunch of previously-squabbling tribes, solidify the Mongolian identity, etc), and i don’t know enough about, say, Alexander the Great to say much other than “he sure did conquer a lot of stuff!” but of course i’m sure there’s more to be said than that :P
funnily enough, i was actually pretty reluctant to put anything American Revolution-related on my list, because like… we *were* just a shitty colony at the time, and we weren’t really a ~*~world power~*~ until WWII. hence me saying “eh, either American Revolution or French Revolution, both of ‘em kind of symbolize the same thing.” but the Yorktown pick in my friend’s list kind of drives home the “hey remember when we *beat the British navy* which like almost never happens and is hugely symbolically important” and like, okay, I guess the American Revolution was in fact a big deal :P
no subject
Otherwise if we're just talking about anything that ever happened, period, I'm gonna cheat and go with "when we evolved big human brains" as my #1.
no subject
no subject