parlor question: history edition

[queenlua]

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.



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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!

Comments

[kradeelav]

... okay, I had to do this one - did this first bit above the edit without taking a look at your post, so I'm going in this truly blind. :P

two questions to start:

• a) what constitutes an 'event'? basically an immediate isolated flash-in-the-pan 24hr-or-less thing or the culmination of plans? (tried to go more for the former since they're more interesting.)
  
  
• b) most important by 'sheer number of lives it's affected at that time' or 'that multiplied by the ones that came after as well'? (second one being heavily weighted towards ancient events...? but then again due to world population explosion, the first is p weighted too... hm. again, went more for the former just because my awareness of modern history is _slightly_ better. :P )

aaand the list:

• first flea to human transmission of black death -> shaped politics of europe, both at that time + later
  
• my islamic history is a bit fuzzy; but that moment when the suuni and shiite families split? shaped a hell of a lot of countries, again, then and now.
  
• martin luther's thesis/usage of gutenburg printing press -> kickstarted information age & shaped major religions of today.
  
• declaration of independence signing -> prob. biggest thing that gave usa leverage to be a world empire? unsure of this one.
  
• assassination of ferdinand guy -> p obvious; ww1/ww2, politics.
  
• hiroshima & nagasaki -> bitchslap in everyone's faces that we're dealing with another dimension of war and/or true annihilation if we're not careful; started cold war and space race.
  
• tiamman square -> my chinese history ain't good either, but given how many folks are in china, seems like it's a flashpoint for censorship + political waves from that? it's either that or mao's inauguration due to the famines, idk.
  
• cuban missle crisis (specifically when the soviet sub captain ignored orders to launch nukes) -> the one 'negative' action of the bunch, meaning the 'what could have been' is more important - imo nukes raised the stakes on this kind of a question because you couldn't impact the number of people at the same time back in the old days.
  
• vaccine/penicilin discovered-> all the lives saved from that + changes to medical industry.
  
• torn between a few like the creation of israel as a country (again, religious/geopolitical) importance, british empire flashpoints, etc. i give up here. :P

now let's see what you wrote! :D
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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:

• Actually thought about the wheel/fire thing! but imo, that feels like it could've been an event that happened several times in isolation among various tribes, so there was no true *single* event that could've had quite the domino effect?
  
• Thought about Mongolia too ... maybe there was a specific event in Gengis Khan's life where the advantage for him turned? The hard bit in focusing on 'specific' events is that you've got these major players in history where it's difficult to figure out what day is most important out of all of their days, hm...
  
• Amused that we had Israel/American Revolution/WWI in common, plus a few similar generalities like Islamic history. Loved the specific ones that your friend had - kicking myself for missing the Yalta conference, durrr.
  
• darkly amused that nuclear events were a high priority on my list compared to others? not sure if that's because of my general focus on military lit or not...

[amielleon]

I'm with "what about the fire and the wheel," because like, seriously what's the odds that the ten most important events in All Of Written Human History (~10k years) happened in the last thousand years (AND in the Western World ;P)?

Anyway, I have a thing for the importance of indirect causes, so I present a very different list:

1) Whenever we decided to burn shit to make energy on an industrial scale --> This has resulted in global warming, which will dramatically affect the course of human history for a few thousand years to come... if it doesn't kill us all. If it kills us all, that's a huge plus to its importance.
2) The development of irrigation in the Tiger/Euphrates valley --> This is the origin of farming techniques for Eurasia and North Africa, which enabled the creation of every single empire outside of the Americas and therefore everything those empires were able to achieve.
3) The development of germ theory --> This is the greatest difference between modern western medicine and every other spiritual understanding of medicine in the world, and it's largely responsible for the biggest population booms we've seen since the development of farming. Insofar as disease was the biggest killer in the densely-populated world until this point--with more people dying of the flu than battle wounds in WWI--the results of this breakthrough have saved an order of magnitude more lives than any single dictator has destroyed. (I guess this is sort of like Krad's "penicillin" answer except I think that the general theory was the biggest part.)
4) Columbus landing in America in 1492 --> I happen to agree with y'all on the importance of this one conventionally important moment. This brought two halves of Earth into contact with resultant profound upheavals on both sides.

idk if I can come up with the next 6 right away. Most things seem kind of petty in scale compared with the above. There are a lot of big modern events like WWI where we can say "this was the first time X happened and it really upped the ante in warfare" but I'm pretty sure that it's not the first time the ante has been upped and it's gonnna be far from the last.

Eta:
5) I'm gonna agree with Krad on the Cold War, but for the actual event I'd choose the disarmament treaty at its end. Without it, odds are in favor of accidental mutual annihilation that would probably snowball into the end of the human race due to environmental effects beyond the scale of the dinosaur extinction. (Though one might argue that the treaty was more likely than not to happen, but eh.)

6) The development of nuclear weapons, because I don't think said treaty will keep the peace forever and we're facing extinction every time we re-arm.

7) I'm gonna rip off myself and choose the development of rice terraces, which happened independently of middle eastern irritation and also powered the rise of many empires.

8) The development of computers. Much of historical power has been about harnessing unskilled physical labor via technology: hence guns over bows, machines over looms. Computers basically allow for the harnessing of unskilled intellectual labor (actual paraphrased quote from a medical school director: "computers can diagnose people; we need our human doctors to provide empathy") and I think they have and will continue to dramatically shape the nature of power in the future.

So far my list looks like "nature is powerful and individual accomplishments are fleeting" lol. Very Chinese American nihilist mathematician. I think a lot of stuff we learn in high school is overrated from a global perspective bc it's about the origins of our fledgling empire (which has been #1 in power for a fleeting 100 years) filtered through our own biases and mythologies. I saw an African tribal mask that basically commented on the importance of free speech in a democracy. The world is very big and very old and I think we give the supposed sources of our current culture undue attention.

(Not to bash on you, though I guess I kinda am.

/hacker answer to icebreaker)

[rabid_bookwyrm]

Here from the 2023 friending meme -

Unordered list:
- invention of spinning
- invention of weaving (whence, ultimately, computers)
- mastery of fire and cooking (this one should actually be first)
- invention of vaccines
- invention of pasteurization
- invasion of the Americas by Europeans; resultant loss of Native peoples, societies, etc
- discovery of antibiotics
- modern use of fossil fuels (starting, say 1900-ish)
- domestication of animals
- birth control (we may recently have rediscovered that one Roman contraceptive plant that we thought they drove to extinction! Paper here: https://www.mdpi.com/2223-7747/10/1/102)