Curated playlist
Historical eras
- Bronze AgeThe oldest-known bronze comes from the North Caucasus, though a disputed Serbian foil may be older.
- Middle AgesThe Middle Ages got their name in 1469 from a Latin writer's phrase, media tempestas. It means "middle season".
- Cold WarWhy was the Cold War called a war when the two superpowers never fought each other directly?
- Age of EnlightenmentIn 1784, Immanuel Kant answered the question of what enlightenment is with two words: dare to know.
- Upper PaleolithicAround 50,000 years ago, human stone tools suddenly split into specialized types.
- PaleolithicWoolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island until about 1700 years before the present. Then people settled it.
- Mycenaean GreeceLater Greeks thought giants built the walls of Mycenaean Greece. Its boulders weighed several metric tonnes.
- NeolithicSomeone planted figs on purpose in Jericho by 9400 BC. The trees could only grow from cuttings.
- Golden Age of PiracyThe Golden Age of Piracy, a stretch of maritime robbery that shaped the North Atlantic and Indian Oceans between the 1650s and the 1730s, may not have been golden for very long. In his 2005 book The History of Pirates, the historian Angus…
- Viking AgeOn June 8, 793, sea raiders destroyed the abbey on Lindisfarne. Historians mark it as the start of the Viking Age.
- Tudor periodThe Tudor period began when Henry Tudor killed King Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485.
- Early Middle AgesRome once held roughly 450,000 people, but the Early Middle Ages left about 20,000.
- Second Thirty Years' WarSome historians treat both world wars as one long war from 1914 to 1945. They call it the Second Thirty Years' War.
- PeriodizationHistorian Arthur Marwick argued the 1960s began in the late 1950s. He also said they ended in the early 1970s.
- Early modern periodThe early modern period has no agreed birthday. Historians disagree on when this era began or ended.
- Elizabethan eraIn 1588, Spain sent its Armada to invade England, and the plan fell apart. English ships destroyed the fleet.
- RenaissanceFlorence lost nearly half its people to plague in 1348. Yet the Renaissance began there soon after.
- Jacobean eraThe Jacobean era produced its most famous near-disaster on the 5th of November 1605. A group of English Catholics, including Guy Fawkes, meant to hide gunpowder barrels beneath the Palace of Westminster and blow up Parliament in session.…
- ChalcolithicMany Copper Age Europeans carved stone axes shaped like copper ones. Some even copied the casting lines of metal tools.
- Ancient historyWriting arose separately in five places, not just once. Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China and Mesoamerica each did it.
- Pre-Columbian eraHunter-gatherers built the Watson Brake mounds around 3400 BCE. They did it before farming, pottery or permanent towns.
- Neolithic RevolutionEuropeans got shorter after they started farming. Men fell from 178 cm to 165 cm on average.
- Age of DiscoveryOnly 18 men finished the first voyage around the world. Five ships left Spain in 1519 with about 237 men.
- Iron AgeNine iron beads from about 3200 BC came 2,000 years before the Iron Age. They were hammered from meteorite iron.
- Classical antiquityRomans kept calling their state a republic long after it stopped being one.
- Migration PeriodSome scholars argue Rome's fall caused the barbarian migrations, not the reverse. Historian Guy Halsall made that case.
- Georgian eraThe Georgian era began when a German prince who spoke almost no English stepped ashore in Britain.
- Post-classical historyBetween 500 and 1500 CE, the world's population broadly doubled despite repeated waves of plague and invasion.
- Modern eraThe word "modern" was coined shortly before 1585. It first described only Europe and the Western world.
- Contemporary historyHow did fifty years of nuclear dread end in 1989 without a bomb? Contemporary history covers 1945 to now.
- Space AgeThe Space Age began when the Soviet Union put Sputnik 1 into orbit on the 4th of October 1957.
- Gilded AgeThe Gilded Age of United States history ran from about the late 1870s to the late 1890s, and one of its statistics is hard to forget. An average white ten-year-old American boy in 1880 could expect to die at age forty-eight. He would stand…
- Ages of ManHesiod's Ages of Man has one age with no metal name. Its heroes are the only group who end up better off.
- Little Ice AgeIn early 1658, a Swedish army marched across a frozen sea to attack Copenhagen.
- Information AgeIn the late 1980s, less than 1% of stored information was digital. By 2014, more than 99% was.
- Dark Ages (historiography)The term Dark Ages began as one Italian poet's complaint about his own time. Petrarch pushed the idea in the 1330s.