50 Defining Events in World History

[peter]

Can any of you guys throw in any suggestions for a list I'm trying to compile of the above. I'm of course a westerner and thus can't help but see a list skewed toward a western perspective and maybe here is where some outside help would be most usefull.

I'm going to pitch in with a few ideas, and perhaps reasons why they warrent inclusion and any mistakes you see in my reasoning or any candidates you'd like to pitch in would be greatly appreciated.

1) I'll start with the development of cave painting [circa 30,000 BC]. Ok - it's strictly 'pre-historic' but I think warrents inclusion because it is our first depiction of ideas graphically and intended to convey information from individual to individual by a medium other than speech. It is representative and perhaps the very first evidence of the 'cognitive revolution' said to have occured some time prior to this.

2) The Crucifiction of Christ [29AD]. Little can be known of the facts of Jesus' life, but that he was put to death by Roman Consular order around the time stated above there can be little doubt. This event, irrespective of your beliefs, would be hard to deny as one of the most significant in world history. If Jesus had not been crucified or otherwise executed, it is hard to see that the world shaping movement of Christianity could ever have gained the momentum which it subsequently did - and the course of world history would have been irrevocably different thereby.

3) Charles Martel and the Battle of Tours [AD 732] Regarded as the 'turning point' at which the ever north and eastward movement of Islam was finally halted, the Battle of Tours in which Martel defeated and ended the influence of Abdul Rahman al Ghafiqi is seen by many historians as the decisive event that 'preserved chistianity in Europe'.

4) The American Revolutionary War [AD 1775 - 1783] The war which in many senses ushered in the modern world. Increasing dissatisfaction with being ruled by a distant power that legislated in it's own favor and used it's colonies as no more than a source of revanue for self-enrichment, this was the war in which the Americans truly became a people and stood up to their British overlords and said 'enough is enough!'. Frenchmen who had seen the power of 'the people' when united returned to France from this conflict with the ideals of liberty and freedom deeply burned into their minds. Thus was the modern world born.

5) The Renaissance [Europe 15th Century]. Forming a bridge between the Middle ages and modern times, this flowering of intellectual and humanist thought, freed for the first time from the stifling effects of religious dogma and patronage, owes much of it's stimulus to the 'rediscovery' of classical works brought about by increasing trade links with cultures in the east by an emergant merchant class. The resultant increase in knowledge, particularly by the studies of 'natural philosophers' in what we now call the sciences, paved the way for 'The Enlightenment' of the 17th Century.

6) The Industrial revolution [Great Britain 18th Century]. The transition from traditional cottage industries where goods were produced largely by hand, to a mechanised process whith division of labour and powered machine tools, began in the UK and rapidly spread to Western europe and North America and transformed the world beyond recognition. The increased standard of living resulting from cheap mass produced goods was a while in coming but is still with us to this day in the form of the mass consumerism in which we daily indulge.

7) The Theory of Evolution [Europe 19th Century]. Culminating in the Publication of "The Origin of Species by Natural Selection" in 1859, the laying down of a scientifically testable theory that accounted for the diversity of types encountered in the natural world placed the final nail in the coffin of church authority in the dogma of Creation. Building on a process that had begun with Coppernicus displacing the earth from the center of the Universe, following the publication of Darwins book it became increasingly difficult to ignore the significant divergence between the stories of revealed scripture and the evidence of hard scientific study. These developments literally changed the way we thought and the way we saw our place in relation to our own world and our place in the Universe.
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If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it. (Mark Twain)

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard

[Avatar]

I'll see your number 1 with the shell middens on the coast of South Africa. The earliest evidence for shellfish collecting, dating to 164,000 years ago. It was the exploitation of this stable and nutritionally valuable food source that got us to where we could make cave paintings in the first place.

The Manhattan project would probably be one, Alfred's (start of the) founding of England, Genghis Khan's empire and the subsequent founding of Yuan dynasty by his grandson in China, the decline and fall of Rome, the Eastern Roman empire and the barbarian diaspora before Atilla, the Reformation, the Peninsular wars...

Lemme think about it.

--A
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It's easy to judge. It's more difficult to understand.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+



1985 - Shigeru Miyamoto gives the world Super Mario Bros.
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[Avatar]

Hahaha, I like it.

--A
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It's easy to judge. It's more difficult to understand.

[peter]

All good ideas Av - many thanks. Perhaps it'll help focus this thread [even if just for me] if I outline what my purpose is in this. My [step] grand-daughter is 10. She exibhits both an interest in history and in art - and loves to play card games. I have a friend at work who can do printing etc, so my idea is to take 50 or 52 key events from history and find appropriate pieces of art to illustrate them. I'll write short accounts of what event the picture shows or relates to and then devise a game to play that involves some knowledge of the event account [or maybe just incorporate the card into a standard 'deck' in some way [it's a 'work in progress' as you can see ]. One problem I've encountered so far is how easy it is to slip into just a list of technological inventions, the wheel, the printing press, the silicon chip etc etc, so I'm going to try to avouid that if I can. The printing press I think has to be in because it resulted in a huge increase in literacy that in turn made universal education possible.

I'll number my entries just to keep track of where I am, but if anyone has additions to make please do so as you see fit - actually no I won't number any more, I'll just pitch 'em in.

The invention of the printing press for the reason given above. [Holy Roman Empire 1440]

The system of 'democracy' [ancient Greece 6th C. BC].

The Bretton Woods Conference [New hampshire USA, Nov 1944.]

Abolitionism [England 18th C.]

Universal Sufferage [new Zealand 1893].

European Colonialism [Europe 16th to 19th C.]

The combination of mathematics and experiment in the study of science [Italy 17th C.]

It's terribly easy to just retreat into 'isms' when putting together a list like this; as I sit here they come flowing in thick and fast, and it's not that they're not important - they're just not events [and certainly not events with which to hold the attention of a ten year old!].

The Silk Road [1st C. BC to 15C. AD.]

Discovery of The Americas [Columbus 1492]

The Sykes-Picot Agreement [1916]

The French Revolution [Paris 1789]

The Treaty of Versailles [France 1919]

The Russian Revolution [Russia 1917]

The British Agricultural Revolution [Gt. Britain 18th C.]
_________________
If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it. (Mark Twain)

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard

[Hashi Lebwohl]

[peter]

Fair point Hashi - I should have said the 'rediscovery of the Americas by Columbus'. [That has to be the significant one because the world never really looked back from that point on, where the vikings never really capitalised on their find; Are there, by the way any Native American stories told that describe the Viking presence. Surely the two would have had contact if the Norsemen traveled as extensively as the finds indicate?]
_________________
If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it. (Mark Twain)

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard

[Frostheart Grueburn]

Not folklore but related to the question above.

news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/11/101123-native-american-indian-vikings-iceland-genetic-dna-science-europe/

[Fist and Faith]

The internet.
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We are not required to save the world. We are required to stand up as truly as we can for what we love. -SRD

All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest -Paul Simon

[Hashi Lebwohl]

[Frostheart Grueburn]

[Hashi Lebwohl]

[peter]

[Avatar]

That's what it was called. Within 6 months, more personal communication was being sent by it than the research data it was developed to transmit.

--A
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It's easy to judge. It's more difficult to understand.

[peter]

The triumph of reason over madness methinks
_________________
If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it. (Mark Twain)

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard

[Linna Heartbooger]

[Vraith]

Do you mean only things peeps have DONE? Or are you including things that just happened?
Cuz there's the Plague....

On human but related: penicillin can't be overrated.

And mass sanitation [including especially indoor plumbing]

Penicillin and sewer systems together---without them, we'd probably have less than half the peeps we do, and they'd be dying young, nasty, and in a cesspool.
[[admittedly, penicillin is more noble and prettier ]]

Also---leather. There's more than one ancient way, but without leather/tanning [and also weaving/cloth] we'd have had a hard time expanding and evolving---
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Sig-man, Libtard, Stupid piece of shit. change your text color to brown. Mr. Reliable, bullshit-slinging liarFucker-user.

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"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
the hyperbole is a beauty...for we are then allowed to say a little more than the truth...and language is more efficient when it goes beyond reality than when it stops short of it.

[peter]

I'm going to try to limit it in the main to events or people - because if you get into the 'tech' or 'ideas' fields the list becomes endless and the sorting almost pointless. By sticking to people and events I hope to take the [normally considered by kids] 'boring bits' and fix them to images of power and beauty. The girl has shown no small interest in bits of history already [she knows all about Henry VIII and can name all of his wives and their particular form of demise] and has also enjoyed looking at the 'big pictures' in The National Gallery in London. I'm going to try and tie these two together such that when she starts her 'history proper' [ie at exam level], she will already have pictures in her head of what is being refered to.

{As an aside I used to play a game with her where I'd say "Look - I'm King Midas; every thing I touch turns to Gold!" I'd then touch about ten different gold coloured things in the kitchen affecting shock as I did so. Last term her final lesson was - nothing other than the story of King Midas and she already knew it better than the teacher! }

I think by the way Napoleons 18 Brumaire Coup will have to feature in the list; As the point at which the Revolution was ended and Napoleons power was consolidated across Europe it has to be one of the turning points of world history.

[The plague has to be in V. with it's massive impact on population levels and the subsequent freeing of labour to sell itself to the highest bidder rather than being bound in feudal servitude to one given individual.]
_________________
If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it. (Mark Twain)

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard

[Linna Heartbooger]

[peter]

It was good Linna.
_________________
If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it. (Mark Twain)

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard