Curated category
Historical eras
- Bronze AgeThe Bronze Age is the name archaeologists give to a phase in the development of material culture, defined by a single recipe: copper, melted and alloyed with…
- Middle AgesThe Middle Ages stretch across roughly a thousand years of European history, from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the upheavals of the Renaissance…
- Cold WarOn the 16th of April 1947, an influential advisor to Democratic presidents named Bernard Baruch stood before an audience and declared, "we are today in the…
- Age of EnlightenmentDare to know. That short Latin command, sapere aude, sits at the heart of an essay Immanuel Kant published in 1784, titled Answering the Question: What Is…
- Upper PaleolithicAround 50,000 years ago, something shifted in the stone tools that humans left behind. The archaeologist Richard G. Klein, who has studied ancient stone…
- PaleolithicThe Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, stretches from about 3.3 million years ago to roughly 11,650 years before the present.
- Mycenaean GreeceMycenaean Greece was the first distinctively Greek civilization on the European mainland, and it vanished almost completely around 1050 BC, leaving behind…
- NeolithicThe Neolithic period left its first mark around 9500 BC in the Levant, when people who had spent thousands of years following wild grain across the landscape…
- Viking AgeOn the 8th of June 793, the abbey on Lindisfarne, a centre of learning on an island off the north-east coast of England in Northumberland, was destroyed by…
- Tudor periodThe Tudor period began on a battlefield in 1485, when an obscure Welshman named Henry Tudor defeated and killed King Richard III at Bosworth Field and…
- Early Middle AgesThe Early Middle Ages left Rome, once home to roughly 450,000 people, as a near-empty ruin where only around 20,000 souls still lived.
- Second Thirty Years' WarThe Second Thirty Years' War is a periodization scheme that asks a provocative question: what if the two catastrophic world wars of the twentieth century…
- PeriodizationPeriodization is the practice of slicing the past into named, bounded chunks of time so that historians can study them. It sounds like a neutral, technical…
- Early modern periodThe early modern period has no birthday. Historians cannot agree on when it began or when it ended, and its borders shift depending on which corner of the…
- Elizabethan eraQueen Elizabeth I ascended to the throne in 1558, inheriting a nation that had been financially bankrupt and religiously fractured.
- RenaissanceAround 1440, from a single print shop in Mainz, Germany, a machine began throwing off pages by the hundred. Within sixty years that movable-type press had…
- Jacobean eraJames VI of Scotland inherited the crown of England in 1603 as James I. This practical unification of two nations under one ruler marked a profound shift in…
- ChalcolithicThe Chalcolithic is the period in human prehistory when copper first entered the toolkit of stone-age cultures. Copper did not replace stone tools overnight.
- Ancient historyAncient history begins with a single technical breakthrough: the development of Sumerian cuneiform script. From that moment, the span of recorded human…
- Pre-Columbian eraThe pre-Columbian era spans from the first peopling of the Americas in the Upper Paleolithic all the way to 1492, when Christopher Columbus first sailed to…
- Neolithic RevolutionThe Neolithic Revolution began in Mesopotamia roughly 11,700 years ago, just after the last Ice Age ended. The climate turned warmer.
- Age of DiscoveryOn the 3rd of August 1492, Christopher Columbus departed from Palos de la Frontera, certain he could reach the Indies by sailing west across the Atlantic.
- Iron AgeNine small beads, dated to 3200 BC, were found in burials at Gerzeh in Lower Egypt. They were not poured into a mold. They were shaped by careful hammering…
- Classical antiquityClassical antiquity is the name historians give to roughly thirteen centuries of human civilization, stretching from the 8th century BC to the 5th century AD.
- Migration PeriodThe Migration Period began, by one common reckoning, in the year 375, when the Huns swept out of Asia into Europe. It ended in 568, when the Lombards…
- Georgian eraThe Georgian era began on the day a German prince who spoke almost no English stepped ashore in Britain and was handed the keys to an empire.
- Post-classical historyPost-classical history names the stretch of time from about 500 CE to about 1450 or 1500 CE, the centuries world historians place between the ancient and the…
- Modern eraThe modern era is the name historians give to the current period of human history, the stretch of time we are still living inside right now.
- Contemporary historyContemporary history is the slice of the past that runs from about 1945 to the present, the era still close enough to touch.
- Space AgeOn the 20th of June 1944, a German V-2 rocket became the first manmade object to enter space. This brief flight occurred during World War II and remained…
- Ages of ManThe Greek poet Hesiod wrote his poem Works and Days between 750 and 650 BC. Lines 109 through 201 of that text describe five distinct ages of humanity.
- Little Ice AgeThe Little Ice Age left a Swedish army marching across a frozen sea. In early 1658, soldiers walked over the Great Belt strait to attack Copenhagen from the…
- Information AgeThe Information Age began in the mid-20th century, and one date sits at its root. In 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain built the first working…
- Dark Ages (historiography)The Dark Ages is a term that most historians have now abandoned, yet it remains one of the most persistent labels in popular culture.