Fate's Intersections

How many points were there in history that were decisive in determining how the world about us came to be the way it is? Many would be an answer but how many are at the very top in importance? I suggest these.

1. The First Human
2. Assyrians Turn from Jerusalem
3. The Greeks Stop the Persian's Conquest of Their Homeland
4. Roman Emperor Constantine Converts to Christianity
5. Barbarian King Clovis Converts to Christianity
6. Muslim Invasion of France Turned Back at Poitiers
7. Gutenberg Brings Printing Press to Europe
8. Lorenzo the Magnificent Energizes the Renaissance
9. Columbus Discovers America
10. China Outlaws International Commerce, Science Research and Development
11. United States Declares Independence
12. The Battle of Britain
13. The Space Age

Some of these took place over time; some occured in moments.  A few comments on my list:

Who the first human was and when did he/she first exist is unknowable but we can infer from the surrounding evidence that at some point we must say, "this was a human".

While the introduction of the printing press was an important event, civilizastion would have gone the way of the Chinese and the Muslim World without the Renaissance and all that it did.

China's decisions curtailing extermal trade and exploration together with curtailing research negated a thousand years of decision points and progress and condemned it to the second rank of world civilizations until the closing decades of the 20th. century.

What will happen to the human race in the future depends largely upon decisions that will be made regarding space?  Humanity can be either a space-faring civilization or bound to just this one planet.

Collective Memory

Just discovered an essay on how our collective memory (i.e. history) is molded, shaped and preserved.  This from ThinkShop blog.

Interactive Storytelling

The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 is just an platform for Books & Ideas.net to interview David Armitage about how to use modern tools to let readers/viewers go through historical stories on their own.

Telling a story uses a linear formula: beginning, middle, end.  The methods discussed there allow readers/viewers to order their own bits and pieces of stories as they go along.

Why Commemorating the Past Is Important

In the blog Care for the Future: Thinking Forward through the Past, two professors from the University of Exeter in England give their reasons why.

Why Economics Need History

This is in from Institutions and Economics.  Too often economics are just theory but history is actual experience.  Like the Aristotle natural philosophy of old, theory must be rest upon observed phenomena.