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10 votes
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Historic manuscripts saved from St. Louis fire
7 votes -
M-16: A bureaucratic horror story
8 votes -
Harvard sued by 'descendant of slave for profiting from photos'
7 votes -
The Lighting Budget of Thomas Jefferson
5 votes -
This, too, was history. The battle over police torture and reparations in Chicago’s schools.
7 votes -
The top six medical inventions during the American civil war
9 votes -
Wild Bill Hickok: He Claimed He Killed 100s, But His Fatalities Were Closer To 10
6 votes -
American History Textbooks' Lies: Everything Your Teacher Got Wrong - Myths, Education (1995)
9 votes -
Revolutionary War fighting ended in 1781. The last shots exploded two months ago.
10 votes -
In 1939, 20,000 Americans rallied in New York’s Madison Square Garden to celebrate the rise of Nazism
16 votes -
The assassination of Fred Hampton
5 votes -
The overlooked history of African American skate culture
6 votes -
How the US has hidden its empire: The United States likes to think of itself as a republic, but it holds territories all over the world – the map you always see doesn’t tell the whole story.
12 votes -
The fatal ensnaring of Dan DePew
7 votes -
Seeking Utopia in Louisiana - The lost story of a group of socialists who built an extraordinary, but flawed, colony
9 votes -
Death and valor on a warship doomed by its own Navy - An investigation into the crash of the USS Fitzgerald
6 votes -
Black mecca or most unequal US city: Will the real Atlanta please stand up?
7 votes -
Noam Chomsky - The Right Turn (1986)
9 votes -
In the 19th century, American theatres provided the stage for a war between high and low culture, the elite and ‘Know-Nothings’ – and Britain and the US. In 1849, events turned bloody.
6 votes -
Children of Ted - Two decades after his last deadly act of ecoterrorism, the Unabomber has become an unlikely prophet to a new generation of acolytes
9 votes -
Mystery blast sank the USS San Diego in 1918. New report reveals what happened
8 votes -
Economic Update: The Great American Purge
6 votes -
A brief history of US dirty wars in Central America that set the stage for the refugee crisis
4 votes -
The Confederacy was built on slavery. How can so many southern whites still believe otherwise?
20 votes -
Jonestown’s victims have a lesson to teach us, so I listened
10 votes -
A toy monkey that escaped Nazi Germany and reunited a family
6 votes -
Who’s behind that beard? Historians are using facial recognition software to identify people in Civil War photographs
8 votes -
At 63, I threw away my prized portrait of Robert E. Lee
9 votes -
A brief history of Nixon's 'Saturday Night Massacre'
12 votes -
American Nazis in the 1930s—The German American Bund
10 votes -
William J. Murtagh, ‘pied piper’ of American historic preservation, dies at 95
3 votes -
In need of cadavers, 19th-century medical students raided Baltimore’s graves
7 votes -
The pyramid scheme that collapsed a nation
6 votes -
The suffocation of American democracy
8 votes -
How mail-order catalogues subverted the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow
8 votes -
Maps have the power to shape history: A groundbreaking female cartographer charted the evolution of the United States—and the dispossession of Native Americans
6 votes -
The history of the electric chair that might soon kill an inmate in Tennessee
6 votes -
How salt helped win the American Civil War
10 votes -
Underwater archaeologists may have discovered the oldest known shipwreck in Lake Erie
6 votes -
Tulsa, Oklahoma mayor reopens investigation into possible mass graves from 1921 race massacre
4 votes -
Thirty-five years ago today, one man saved us from world-ending nuclear war
16 votes -
Philadelphia threw a WWI parade that gave thousands of onlookers the flu
9 votes -
How Midwestern suffragists won the vote by attacking immigrants
7 votes -
“I now know what it’s like to have A 110-story building come down on my head.”
9 votes -
Dealing with an out-of-control president, in 1973
8 votes -
1600s Native American fort is one of the most important Northeast finds
4 votes -
1000 years from now, assuming records still exist, what do you think historians will give as the end date for the American Empire?
The Ottoman Empire ended in 1922. The Roman Empire, 476, though it was survived by the Eastern Roman Empire which lasted until 1453 and the Holy Roman Empire which stuck around in some form until...
The Ottoman Empire ended in 1922. The Roman Empire, 476, though it was survived by the Eastern Roman Empire which lasted until 1453 and the Holy Roman Empire which stuck around in some form until 1806.
Obviously these dates are inexact, but it's a useful historical tool to pick two events and use them as bookends to describe the arc of a given empire or society.
So with the benefit of sufficient hindsight, say 500 or 1000 years from now, what do you think will be the generally accepted date printed in history books for "here's the event that signals the end of this period of history"?
Do you believe it will be some point in the past, or the future? If you think it's in the past, how far back? What event?
If you think it's in the future, how far in the future? What do you predict will happen at that time to be the historical marker?
p.s. don't say "all history will be forgotten because of nuclear war". I agree that's a distinct possibility, but the likelihood of it happening is best addressed as a separate topic from this one. for the purposes of this thread assume we haven't completely fucked ourselves as a species and at least some records of our current time period exist.
25 votes -
Hunter S. Thompson in Chicago, 1968: The battle for the Democratic Party’s soul
12 votes -
Victoria Woodhull: The first American woman to run for President — 150 years ago
10 votes