Top five most significant historical events of the past 2100 years.

[CalledDownLight]

1. Fall of Roman Empire
2. Rise of Christianity (if I could extend it I would say the rise of Catholicism and then the Protestant Reformation, but that begins to just be tracing its growth)
3. French Revolution
4. Industrial Revolution
5. WWII (close over WWI)

[Cablelessray]

my list in chronological order:

1. Constantine's backing of Christianity (4th century)
2. The invention of gunpower (9th century)
3. European Imperialism (hard to put a date on it)
4. Mao Zedong's revolution of China (1934)
5. FDR's Uranium Committee (1939)

reasons:

1. the birth and death aren't the most important and they didn't have world wide effects. the ligitimization of christianity and later the roman catholic church have had huge effects. later events such as the crusades are nonexistant without this key event

2. this one's obvious

3. leads to the spread of european culture everywhere, and general world hate for white men (if you don't agree i can't help you). leads to the desire of germany/italy, etc to "be like the big boys", could be argued leads to WWI and WWII. leads to the existance of america.

4. this one i put in because i think it will be true in the decades to come. china was pathetic before this (after they closed up during the han dynasty). I mean honestly they call their country (in chinese) the "center kingdom" (as in the center of the universe, the center from which all directions flow outward), and the chinese language is called "the central language". Put 1 billion+ people with inferiority complexes and real working drive into a power position and see what happens. if you don't belive me wait 50 years [img]/images/graemlins/shocked.gif[/img]. edit: oh yah, also this leads to the western world throwing BILLIONS of money to a sneaky country that steals it (basically) and improving their infrastructure even more (in the 80's, again in the 90's, again in the 2000's) and then leads to china basically having control of america dollar's value against foreign currency today. (doesn't THAT suck)

5. Uranium committee: basically is the committee that starts and FUNDS the manhattan project, and decides later to move the poject under army control, where it finally blossoms into creating a usable bomb. of course i don't need to write the details of how the bomb has change politics, or warfare.

oh yah, i wanted to address this:

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in the most sincere honesty, and this in no way condones slavery, but the US may easily have never taken off if it never instituted slavery.

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i'm pretty sure all the poor european immigrants (and their children) that worked all those factories during the industrial revolution would disagree.

[RunDownHouse]

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Hell, there is a great deal of immigrant labor in the US which is border-line slavery anyway.

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While I agree that no way should US abolition come near thiss top five, to imply that labor with wages dictated by market forces is even in the same ballpark as forcibly holding a race of people in bondage is ridiculous.

[Jiggymike]

I don't understand how people can leave out harnessing electricity. Our world would be so different without it that it is probably a lot easier to imagine our lives without most of these other things, like religion. This then leads to many of the other amazing inventions of the past 100 years, such as the computer.

Printing press is pretty big as well, probably top 5.

Antiseptics + the rise of modern medecine (not just one event) have probably affected modern life about as much as anything else.

I guess the answers you choose depend on whether you are talking about the 2100 years as a whole or just which ones have shaped modern life the most. For the whole Black Plague debate (which seems to be mostly over), it has basically very little bearing in the present. However, from what I understand it was probably the main trigger that broke Europe out of the Middle Ages and into the Reniassance...pretty big event, IMO.

[tsearcher]

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Hell, there is a great deal of immigrant labor in the US which is border-line slavery anyway.

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While I agree that no way should US abolition come near thiss top five, to imply that labor with wages dictated by market forces is even in the same ballpark as forcibly holding a race of people in bondage is ridiculous.

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Whether one is paid or not does not determine slavery. It rests on what happens if you choose not to work. For some immigrant workers choosing not to work means deportation, separation from family and friends. While not as drastic as what faced the African American slaves before the Civil War, an argument can be made for calling this border line slavery.

[Jack of Arcades]

In the same vein as electricity, there's the first successful, widely copied oil well (1859) that essentially started the oil boom in North America. Given the ubiquitousness of oil today, you could make a pretty strong argument for it.

OK, really, that was just an excuse to use ubiquitousness.

[Peter Harris]

the most amazing docotomy you have is between choosing several mechanical objects without acknowledging turbines, coal/steam power or electricity.

[furyshade]

yes, i think we have to just put Edison's life as a whole in the top 5 because he did so many things that isolating one as the most important is difficult, though lightbulb is probably the front-runner. also, the radio/television and more broadly, Pascal's experimintation and essential proving of the vacuum, which has done so much for science that its hard to quantify

[Jiggymike]

Ooh ooh here's a fun one (although clearly not Top 5 but good because it is a single event):

The publication of the Origin of Speices and the theory of common descent. Not too many books have totally blown up a field of science (biology) as well as influencing the way that people look at the world the way that this book did. Now to move this to SMP and start a sweet religion vs science debate.

[furyshade]

Human Genome Project was kinda important