History

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C.

Printing did not begin with Johannes Gutenberg.

The Silk Road was not a single road but a wide network of trading routes that linked China with lands far to the west, including India, Persia, and the cities of the Mediterranean.

In July 1969, Apollo 11 carried three astronauts toward the Moon.

The Great Wall is not one wall built by one ruler.

Thousands of years ago, the rulers of ancient Egypt, called pharaohs, ordered giant stone tombs to be built for themselves.

After conquering territory, Roman armies built and improved roads to connect forts, towns, ports, and administrative centers.

Long before vaccination, communities in parts of Asia and Africa practiced forms of variolation: introducing material from a person with smallpox in hopes of causing a milder infection and later protection.

In the third century BCE, the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt supported a scholarly institution in Alexandria often called the Mouseion.

Before standard time became common, each town kept its own time, often based on the Sun.

In late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century London, coffeehouses offered news, business contacts, and conversation for the price of a drink.

By the late 1700s, scholars could not fully read the hieroglyphs on ancient Egyptian monuments.

In 1799, French soldiers were digging near a town in Egypt.

Before 1840, sending a letter in Britain was awkward work.

In 1900, Greek sponge divers found an ancient shipwreck near the island of Antikythera.

Medieval merchants faced risks when trading far from home.

In 1291, Venice ordered glass furnaces out of the main city, concentrating much of the industry on Murano, an island in the lagoon.

Potatoes reached Europe from the Andes in the sixteenth century.

In 1854, cholera killed hundreds of people around Broad Street in Soho, London.

Before standard time became widespread, towns often set clocks using local solar time.

Around 1200 BCE, the eastern Mediterranean contained kingdoms linked by diplomacy, trade, and war.

About twenty years after conquering England, William I ordered a survey of land and resources.

A day follows the Earth's rotation.

Before modern street lighting, many city streets were dark at night.

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, made an official visit to Sarajevo with his wife, Sophie.

By autumn 1989, East Germany was leaking citizens through new routes to the West.

Across the Inca Empire, administrators kept records on objects called quipu.

For centuries, Timbuktu was connected to trade and scholarship across West and North Africa.

Papermaking developed in China from plant fibers and cloth scraps.

In the ancient city now called Mohenjo-daro, streets followed an organized layout and many buildings were made from standardized baked bricks.

A wampum belt is made from carefully shaped shell beads woven into patterns.

The Inca road system crossed deserts, valleys, and high Andes mountains.

In the nineteenth century, a message between southern Australia and Britain traveled by ship and could take months.

Around Tenochtitlan, farmers built chinampas in shallow lake areas.

Polynesian navigators crossed Pacific areas before modern compasses or satellite positioning.

During the Great Migration, from about 1910 to 1970, millions of Black Americans moved from the South to cities in the North, Midwest, and West.

The Achaemenid Persian Empire covered a vast territory.

In some nineteenth-century Welsh industrial settlements, a row of homes shared a large bread oven.

Before laser tools, many surveyors measured land with a metal chain.

Before rapid communication, a weather observer mainly had local conditions to work with.

In many medieval and early modern European towns, skilled trades were organized through guilds.

For centuries, sailors could estimate how far north or south they were by watching the Sun and stars.

More than two thousand years ago, the Greek scholar Eratosthenes directed the Library of Alexandria in Egypt.

Before radio, ships could send messages with flags.

Before mechanical refrigeration, winter cold could be harvested as a material.

In the neighborhoods of Port of Spain, Trinidad, Carnival musicians spent decades turning available materials into new percussion.

Before electric wires carried news, France built chains of signal towers.

In 1513, the Ottoman sailor and mapmaker Piri Reis completed a map of the Atlantic world.

In Britain, Wednesday, September 2, 1752, was followed by Thursday, September 14.

On January 10, 1863, London's Metropolitan Railway opened between Paddington and Farringdon.

In June 1892, Māori leaders and representatives gathered at Waipatu in Hawke's Bay, New Zealand.

In the 1960s, a new dam on the Nile threatened the ancient temples at Abu Simbel in Egypt.

At a lighthouse, keeping a log was ordinary work.

Long ago, people played a board game now called the game of twenty squares.

A ship traveling between the Atlantic and Pacific once had to round South America to avoid crossing land at Panama.

After World War II, Germany and Berlin were divided.

Around the seventh century BCE, people in ancient Lydia in western Anatolia began using stamped pieces of electrum, a mixture of gold and silver.