Years That Changed Human History

Imagine the whole of human history as a concept album released by a really self-important band. Each year is a track, and each track's style fits its content. So 1929 might be a riotous Jazz track that suddenly ends with the sound of the stock market crashing to Earth. 1969 could be a triumph of rock music and LSD-influenced lyrics; while 1347 (the year the Black Death hit Europe), would be nothing but the groans of dying peasants remixed into a seriously gloomy orchestral piece. And the less said about 1939, the better.

But of all the tracks in this album of human history, what would be the number one hits? The triple platinum years that listeners return to, time and again? These would be the years so significant that they changed the very foundation of what it means to be human. Just like a great song will leave an earworm you might never be rid of, here are the years still stuck in humanity's collective consciousness.

Man, isn't writing just the best? No writing, and you have no records, no novels, and definitely no amusing websites. But writing didn't just pop into existence alongside language. For a long time, having a favorite story meant having one you'd memorized from start to end. It wasn't until sometime around 3,200 BC that actually recording stuff became possible, and it's all thanks to some long-dead accountants.

As Archaeology notes, it was scribes working in Uruk, present day Iraq, who were the first to make indentations on tablets and say, "Guys, these little drawings actually mean stuff." Known today as cuneiform (pictured), it wasn't quite writing as we'd recognize it. Instead of using shapes to indicate letters, it used a complicated series of pictograms, meaning its audience was limited to other scribes.

Still, it was the wellspring everything else came from. By around 1850 BC, a group of Phoenician merchants had created a system for writing consonants known as abjad. From there, it was just a short, 900 year wait for the Greeks to finally come up with the concept of written vowels (via History).

Of all the influencers of history, perhaps none can lay claim to being as influential as Confucius. The teachings of the fifth century BC Chinese philosopher were at the heart of policy making from at least the first Han Dynasty (via Biography) all the way to the fall of the Qing Dynasty – a period of over 2,000 years. Even today, Confucius's ideas so permeate Chinese culture that around 1.4 billion people live in a world he helped shape.

So yeah, Confucius: big deal. But he very nearly wasn't. As Britannica explains, at the age of 56, Confucius grew so frustrated with China's inability to appreciate his work that he stomped off into exile for nearly 12 years. He only returned in 483 BC, at which point he began writing the books that would eventually form his legacy.

That means 483 BC could almost be the Chinese equivalent of the year Jesus returned to Galilee to get his miracle on. Imagine how vastly different the whole of Western culture would be without the New Testament. That's Chinese and southeast Asian culture without Confucius's teachings.

When the Prophet Muhammad died in 632 AD, he died the guy who'd managed to unite almost the whole of Arabia under his new religion (via Britannia). Unfortunately, he also died a guy who'd failed to name a successor. Almost immediately, two candidates presented themselves. One was Ali, married to Muhammad's favorite daughter, and favored by the group we'd now call the Shiites. The other, favored by the Sunnis, was Abū Bakr. When Bakr finally got the top job, it marked the beginning of a divorce that would divide the entire Islamic world.

NPR has the story. Although Ali managed to become the fourth caliph, his selection sent all this mutual resentment bubbling over into war. After Ali was assassinated in 661 AD (pictured), it crystallized for many of his followers that the Sunnis were absolutely not to be trusted. It took a while to all come together, but eventually the Islamic world split permanently into Sunni and Shia.

While the two sides sometimes got along, they often didn't. In the modern world, the Sunni-Shia split has been at the heart of much of the crazy violence engulfing the Middle East.

Oh, hey, look. Another historical greatest hit, only one that today comes with more baggage than watching Birth of a Nation or dancing to Gary Glitter. On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed a ship in the Bahamas, discovering the New World for Europeans. A few decades and a whole ton of smallpox later, and the fate of the Americas was sealed.

History has the details, just in case you'd recently received a traumatic head injury and forgotten the whole of your elementary school education. Columbus was trying to chart a route to East Asia, which would've enabled the Spanish crown to get filthy rich through trade. Instead, he accidentally bumped into America, allowing the Spanish to instead get filthy rich through plundering and looting. Not that Columbus was aware of the detour his expedition had taken. He left the Americas convinced Cuba was China, and Hispaniola (the island Haiti and the Dominican Republic today share) Japan. Oh, and he brought a bunch of "Indian" slaves back with him, because that's just how things rolled in the fifteenth century. Whoo! 'Murica!

Let's just get this out of the way: there's no definite start date for the Industrial Revolution. 1760 is the commonly accepted year, but it's kinda arbitrary and varies depending on regional factors. But whether it was 1760, or 1761, or even 1770, it's a year that can't be left out. That's because, once the Industrial Revolution hit, the whole of humanity got a planet-sized injection of good news.

You might be picturing Victorian slums in London wallowing under thick black clouds of soot and thinking, "Err... good news?" Well, just check out this graph from Vox. By plotting all the good stuff (like percentage not living in poverty, or total life expectancy) against the passage of years, you get a whole bunch of lines that start out mostly flat, then suddenly go bananas around 1760. 

That's because the arrival of the Industrial Revolution transformed the lives of everyone on the planet. As technology improved, the gains and riches it brought surpassed comprehension. Today, the average person's life is more comfortable than that of a fifteenth century pope. Suck on that, Innocent VIII.

Wherever there have been slaves, there have been slave rebellions. But while some managed to be successful in the short term (stand up, Rome's Servile Wars), they all wound up getting crushed in the end. With one major exception. In August 1791, a slave uprising exploded in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Hundreds of thousands of slaves attacked mansions, slaughtered white families, and burned sugarcane fields. Nearly 13 years and countless deaths later, Saint-Domingue declared independence, becoming the new nation of Haiti (via Slate).

Although many expected France to retake the colony, the Napoleonic Wars kinda got in the way and, by the time Paris had recovered from the Seventh Coalition's epic smackdown at Waterloo, Haitian independence was just kind of a thing.

The importance of this can't be overstated. Haiti was the first independent black nation in modern history (via BBC), and the second New World colony to throw off its European shackles. It also put the wind into the sails of the abolitionist movement. By 1807, public pressure had forced the British Empire to abolish the slave trade in its dominions. Thanks, Haiti!

It was only the size of a beach ball, but Sputnik 1 had a similar level of impact on history as the Chicxulub asteroid had on prehistoric Earth. On October 4, 1957, the USSR beat Washington to the punch by lobbing the first man-made satellite into orbit. As NASA describes, it was a technical achievement that changed the course of civilization. Suddenly, the Cold War had found a new, far-less deadly front to be fought on. Instead of stockpiling nukes like crazy, the USSR and USA found themselves locked in the longest-distance race: the Space Race.

The list of firsts that followed on from Sputnik's launch is incredible. In 1959, the Soviets landed the first probe on the Moon. In 1960, they brought the first animals back alive from orbit. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human in history to enter space. It wasn't until 1969 that the Americans stopped dozing and placed a man on the Moon. Think of every time you today use a satellite in some way (hint: it's every day). Now thank 1957 and Sputnik 1.