25 Turning Points in History
When They Happened, Why They Mattered, and What the Record Shows

History is often taught as a string of dates. This page takes 25 of them, from the first farms to the end of the Second World War. For each, it asks three things. When did it happen, according to the sources? Why do historians treat it as a turning point? And does a popular claim about it hold up?

The 25 are our selection, not a ranking. They come from different eras and regions, and each changed how large numbers of people lived. Many others could have made the list.

Dates are given the way the sources give them, with BCE and CE, and as a range where scholars give a range.

Where this site already has a full article on an event, the entry is short and links to it. Three of them have longer articles of their own: the end of the Western Roman Empire, the Black Death and the printing press.

Each entry ends with a popular claim and a verdict: TRUE, PARTLY TRUE, MYTH, DISPUTED (when credible sources disagree) or UNVERIFIED. The quick verdicts are in the summary table; the evidence is below.

1. Farming begins, about 12,000 to 11,000 years ago

A 2014 review in PNAS dates the start of farming to the end of the last ice age. Domestication of plants and animals, it says, began around the world about 12,000 to 11,000 years ago.

It is easy to see why this counts as a turning point. For more than 95% of the time since Homo sapiens appeared, people lived mainly by hunting and gathering. The review describes domestication and the origins of farming as what led to our modern way of life.

The claim: farming was invented once, in the Middle East, and spread from there.

Doesn't hold up Farming began independently in many places, over a much larger area than was once thought. The review counts at least 11 regions of the Old and New World as independent centres of origin.

It also warns against picturing a sudden revolution. Domestication was a complex process, and it often took place over a long time.

2. Writing, about 3300 to 3200 BCE

The earliest writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt dates to about 3300–3200 BCE. That is the date in the timeline of Visible Language, a 2010 exhibition catalogue from the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute (now ISAC). The catalogue notes that all its dates are approximate.

Why it mattered: the earliest texts from Uruk, in Mesopotamia, are economic records. An early state kept them to track workers, rations and taxes. Writing gave its officials a memory that outlasted the lifetime of any single priest or scribe.

The claim: writing was invented once, in Mesopotamia, and spread everywhere else.

Doesn't hold up Mesopotamia’s writing is among the oldest, but it was not the only beginning. The catalogue says writing “was invented independently at least four times”. Those four are Mesopotamia, Egypt, China at the end of the second millennium BCE, and Mesoamerica by the middle of the first millennium BCE.

It counts these four as pristine systems, invented with no previous exposure to writing. It leaves out the Indus valley script, because both its status as a writing system and the influence of Mesopotamian cuneiform on it remain uncertain.

3. The laws of Hammurabi, about 1792 to 1750 BCE

Hammurabi ruled as king of Babylonia from around 1792 to around 1750 BCE. The Louvre, which holds the basalt stele carrying his laws, gives the same reign dates and a height of 225 cm.

A French expedition found the stele at Susa, in Iran, in 1901–1902. An Elamite king had carried it there as a trophy in the twelfth century BCE.

Why it mattered: of the cuneiform law collections known, Hammurabi’s is the longest and most developed. Its prologue says the gods called him to rule “so that the strong should not harm the weak”, in L. W. King’s translation.

The claim: the Code of Hammurabi is the first written law code.

Doesn't hold up It is not the earliest law collection from ancient Mesopotamia, though it is the most famous. The Assyriologist Kathryn Slanski lists three older ones: the Laws of Ur-Namma (about 2100 BCE), of Lipit-Ishtar (about 1930 BCE) and of Eshnunna (about 1770 BCE).

Samuel Noah Kramer studied a tablet of Ur-Nammu’s laws in Istanbul. In 1952 he called it “the oldest law-code as yet known to man”. On the lowest dating then used, its king reigned some three hundred years before Hammurabi.

The exact gap depends on which ancient chronology a scholar follows, which is why the dates differ.

The famous “eye for an eye” rule did not apply equally to everyone, either. Law 196 says that if a man puts out the eye of another man, his own eye shall be put out. For the eye of a freed man, the penalty is a fine of one gold mina; for a man’s slave, half the slave’s value.

4. Democracy in Athens, 508–507 BCE

Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians, in F. G. Kenyon’s translation, says Cleisthenes “called in the people by giving the franchise to the masses”. In the year Isagoras was archon, his first step was to divide the population into ten tribes in place of the old four. The Yale historian Donald Kagan dates these events to 508–507 BCE.

Why it mattered: Aristotle says the new tribes were meant to mix people from the old ones, so that more people could share in the franchise.

The claim: in Athenian democracy, everyone had a vote.

Doesn't hold up Athens widened the vote, but only to adult male citizens. In Kagan’s words, “the Athenians limited the right to vote, to hold office, to serve on juries to adult males who were citizens”. Slaves, resident aliens, women, and male citizens under twenty had none of these rights.

5. Ashoka and the Kalinga war, 3rd century BCE

The Mauryan emperor Ashoka left his own account of the war that changed him. Rock Edict XIII says Kalinga was conquered eight years after he was anointed king. The edict counts the dead and the deported. Then it says, in E. Hultzsch’s translation: “This is the repentance of Devanampriya on account of his conquest of (the country of) the Kalingyas”.

Devanampriya is how the edicts name the king.

The claim: after Kalinga, Ashoka gave up force.

Doesn't hold up, as stated. His remorse is real, but the same edict keeps the threat of force. It warns the forest peoples within his lands of “the power (to punish them) which Devanampriya (possesses) in spite of (his) repentance”.

What he gave up was further conquest by arms, in favour of what Hultzsch calls conquest by morality. The whole story, edict by edict, is in Ashoka: What His Own Edicts Say, and 8 Popular Claims Checked.

6. Qin unites China, 221 BCE

The Qin dynasty ruled from 221 to 206 BCE, ending the Warring States period. The historian Sima Qian records the moment in four characters. The King of Qin, he writes, “first united all under heaven” (our translation of 秦王初并天下).

Why it mattered: the Qin created a single state, with a central administration and one standard for the writing script, weights and measures. Sima Qian lists the same measures. Laws and measures of weight and length were made one, carts had the same axle width, and writing used the same characters (our translation of 一法度衡石丈尺。車同軌。書同文字).

The first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, died in 210 BCE.

The claim: Qin Shi Huang built the Great Wall.

Partly He built walls on a huge scale, but not the Great Wall that stands today. Sima Qian says that once Qin had united the country, the general Meng Tian led 300,000 men north. They built walls from Lintao to Liaodong, stretching more than ten thousand li (our translation of 起臨洮，至遼東，延袤萬餘里).

UNESCO describes the same work more modestly. Around 220 BC, under Qin Shi Huang, sections of earlier fortifications were joined together. Building went on up to the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). It says the wall was built continuously from the 3rd century BC to the 17th century AD. It singles out the masonry of the Ming period for praise.

So Qin joined and extended walls; he did not build the Great Wall as it stands. Whether it can be seen from space is a separate question, answered in Real or Myth? 14 Popular Claims, Checked.

7. The end of the Western Roman Empire, 476 CE

In 476 the soldiers in Italy made Odoacer their king. On 28 August 476 he captured and killed Orestes, the commander who had made his own young son emperor.

An early source, quoted by the historians Ralph Mathisen and Geoffrey Nathan, says Odoacer then deposed Augustulus at Ravenna. The chronicler Marcellinus Comes later wrote that the western empire of the Roman people “perished with this Augustulus”, in the English given by Mathisen and Nathan.

The claim: the Roman Empire fell in 476.

Partly Something real ended in 476: the last emperor in Italy was deposed. But Julius Nepos, the western emperor whom Orestes had driven out, lived until 480, and Mathisen argues that he “more rightly deserves the title ‘last western Roman emperor’”.

The eastern half of the empire went on for nearly a thousand years more (see entry 14). What exactly fell, and when, is the subject of The Fall of Rome: What Fell in 476, What Carried On, and What the Record Shows.

8. Baghdad’s scholars and the word “algebra”, early 9th century

The mathematician al-Khwarizmi was born about 780 and died about 850. He worked under the patronage of the caliph al-Mamun. The MacTutor History of Mathematics describes him and his colleagues as scholars at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. What that institution was is debated.

The claim: the word algebra comes from al-Khwarizmi’s book.

Holds up The word does come from his book. MacTutor says his treatise Hisab al-jabr w’al-muqabala “gives us the word algebra”. Our page Algebra, Zero and the House of Wisdom: 8 Claims About the Islamic Golden Age, Checked has more on what he did and did not invent.

9. The Mongol Empire, from 1206

In 1206 an assembly of princes, a quriltay, recognised Temujin’s supremacy. The historian David Morgan calls the empire that followed “the most extensive land empire known to history”.

The claim: Genghis Khan was his name.

Doesn't hold up It was a title. His birth name was Temujin. Ten more claims are checked in Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire: 10 Popular Claims, Checked.

10. Magna Carta, 15 June 1215

On 15 June 1215, in a field at Runnymede, King John set his seal to Magna Carta. Its best-known clause, number 39, begins: “No freemen shall be taken or imprisoned”. It goes on to bar seizing their land, exile and other harm, except “by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land”.

Why it mattered: the idea that a king is bound by law outlived the charter itself. The 1215 charter lasted only weeks. Ten weeks later, Pope Innocent III declared it null and void. The papal letters are dated 24–25 August 1215.

It was reissued in 1216 and 1217, and the 1225 version became the definitive one. A version of 1297 was entered into the official statute rolls of England.

The claim: Magna Carta gave rights to everyone.

Doesn't hold up The 1215 text was written for a narrow group. The US National Archives says it was written “by a group of 13th-century barons to protect their rights and property against a tyrannical king”.

The common man’s interests, it adds, were hardly in the minds of the men who brokered it. Clause 39 speaks of freemen.

The Magna Carta Project, a research team at the University of East Anglia, looked at clause 60. That clause made all lords observe the charter towards their own tenants. Its beneficiaries, the Project says, “would have been very largely free men”. Villeins, the unfree, could still benefit from the charter’s clause on fines.

11. Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage, 1324–1325

Mansa Musa, ruler of Mali, made his pilgrimage to Mecca between 1324 and 1325, stopping in Cairo on the way. His spending there, World History Commons notes, was extravagant.

The claim: his spending crashed the price of gold in Egypt.

Partly The price fell, by al-Umari’s account, but on his figures it was a real fall, not a crash. The Arab historian al-Umari, in Levtzion and Hopkins’s translation, says that before the visit “the mithqal did not go below 25 dirhams”.

Afterwards, he writes, “the mithqal does not exceed 22 dirhams or less”, and this had been so for about twelve years. More on what the sources say, and what they disagree about, is in Mansa Musa’s Gold: What the Medieval Sources Say.

12. The Black Death, 1346–1353

Two research papers, one in PNAS in 2018 and one in Nature in 2022, both date the Black Death to 1346–1353.

The 2022 study analysed ancient DNA from cemeteries in present-day Kyrgyzstan. Their tombstones, dated 1338–1339, give pestilence as the cause of death. The study concluded that the evidence points to an early fourteenth-century source of the second plague pandemic in central Eurasia.

Why it mattered: the Black Death killed an estimated one-third of the population in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

The claim: the Black Death was spread by rats.

Still argued Rats have long been central to the story, and the experts still disagree. A 2018 study by Katharine Dean and colleagues built models of three ways plague could spread.

The model with human fleas and lice was the best fit for death records in seven of the nine outbreaks they studied. It did better than models based on rats or on infection through the air. For the other two, the outbreaks were too small to tell.

The authors present this as “ultimately challenging the assumption that plague in Europe was predominantly spread by rats”. A reply in the same journal that year, by Park and colleagues, disagreed. Its title calls spread by human ectoparasites, such as fleas and lice, “only weakly supported by proposed mathematical models”.

The question is open. Did the Mongols start the epidemic by throwing plague corpses into the city of Caffa? Our Mongol Empire article checks that story. There is more in The Black Death: What Happened in 1346–1353, and What the Record Shows.

13. Printing with metal type reaches Europe, about 1455

The printing of the Gutenberg Bible was probably completed late in 1455 at Mainz. Johann Gutenberg, who lived from about 1400 to about 1468, is generally credited with inventing a way to make uniform, interchangeable metal type. The Library of Congress calls his Bible the first great book printed in western Europe from movable metal type.

The claim: Gutenberg invented movable type.

Doesn't hold up Movable type is centuries older than his press. It was first created by Bi Sheng (990–1051), who used baked clay, according to Columbia University’s Asia for Educators.

The Chinese scholar Shen Kuo (1031–1095) described how it was made. Each character was carved in clay, one stamp per character, then fired to harden it (our summary of 其法用膠泥刻字，薄如錢唇，每字為一印，火燒令堅).

Cast-metal movable type began to be used in Korea in the early 13th century. The oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type, the Bibliothèque nationale de France says, is the Korean Buddhist text known as Jikji. It was printed in 1377, 78 years before the Gutenberg Bible.

So what Gutenberg is credited with is his metal-type process, not movable type itself. There is more in The Printing Press: What Gutenberg Invented, What Came Before, and What the Record Shows.

14. The fall of Constantinople, 29 May 1453

On 29 May 1453 an Ottoman army led by Sultan Mehmed II took Constantinople, after a siege that had begun on 6 April.

The capture brought to an end the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire. The city had been an imperial capital since the Roman emperor Constantine the Great founded it in 330. It went on to be the capital of the Ottoman Empire.

The claim: Greek learning only reached Italy after Constantinople fell.

Doesn't hold up Greek was being taught in Florence decades before the city fell. A review in Bryn Mawr Classical Review of a 2017 study of Renaissance Greek teaching gives the details.

In 1397 the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras was appointed to the chair of Greek at the Studio, Florence’s university. Florentine records show Leonzio Pilato being paid to teach Greek there in the academic years 1360–1361 and 1361–1362.

15. Columbus and the Columbian Exchange, from 1492

The Columbian Exchange is what moved between the Old World and the New after Columbus reached the Americas in 1492. The economists Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian define it as the exchange of diseases, ideas, food crops and populations.

Whether people in Columbus’s day thought the Earth was flat is a separate question, answered in Medieval People Did Not Think the Earth Was Flat.

Why it mattered: the Old World gained new staple crops, such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize and cassava. Europeans brought diseases such as smallpox, measles, typhus and cholera, to which Native Americans had no immunity.

Nunn and Qian put the toll in stark terms. Citing a 2001 study by Newson, they write that “upwards of 80-95 percent of the Native American population was decimated within the first 100-150 years following 1492”. They present this as an estimate, and the range itself shows how uncertain the numbers are.

The claim: tomatoes are native to Italy, and chilli peppers to Asia.

Doesn't hold up Both came from the Americas, though they now feel at home in Old World kitchens. Nunn and Qian list tomatoes and chili peppers among New World foods that are now central to cooking in many Old World countries.

Tomatoes became central in Italy, Greece and other Mediterranean countries. Chili peppers did the same in India and Korea, and, with peanuts and pineapples, in Malaysia and Thailand.

16. Luther and the Reformation, 31 October 1517

On 31 October 1517 Martin Luther wrote to his church superiors about the sale of indulgences. That is the account of the historian Axel Gotthard, writing for Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education. The theses then spread quickly through scholars’ letters, and were printed in several places without Luther’s knowledge.

The claim: Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg.

Still argued Historians still argue about this one. A hammer on a church door is a strong picture, and there is some evidence for a posting. But no one recorded seeing it happen. The first printed account came from Philip Melanchthon in 1546, after Luther’s death, and Melanchthon only came to Wittenberg in 1518.

In the early 1960s the Catholic church historian Erwin Iserloh noticed that Luther himself never mentions posting the theses. He concluded that it never happened. That set off a debate “that has not ended to this day” (our translation), writes Martin Treu of the Luther Memorials Foundation.

The strongest evidence for a posting is a note by Luther’s secretary Georg Rörer, which Treu rediscovered in Jena in the 2000s. It says that on the eve of All Saints’ Day 1517, theses on indulgences “were posted on the doors of the Wittenberg churches” (our translation). Rörer was close to Luther but was not an eyewitness.

Gotthard thinks Rörer was probably echoing the university’s rules, which required theses for debate to be posted on church doors. He calls the nailing “very probably the making of a legend” (our translation).

We read it as open. The case for a posting rests on two accounts written decades later, and Treu thinks Rörer’s note makes it “very much more likely” (our translation). The case against rests on Luther’s silence, and on the letter he sent his superiors that same day. Would he really have gone public, Gotthard asks, before they could reply?

17. The Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires, 16th century

In November 1532 a group of 168 Spaniards seized the Inca emperor Atahuallpa, according to the University of Texas Press. The last muster recorded by Pizarro’s secretary, Francisco de Xerez, gives 164. Hernán Cortés’s siege of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, is described in his own letters.

The claim: a few hundred Spaniards conquered the Aztec Empire.

Doesn't hold up Cortés’s own letters count far more people on his side, most of them Indigenous allies. In his third letter to the emperor, in Francis MacNutt’s translation, he counts his own men at the start of the siege. There were “eighty-six horsemen, a hundred and eighteen bowmen and musketeers, seven hundred and odd foot soldiers”.

He also reports counts of his Indigenous allies. Of one group who joined him, he writes that “according to the account the captains made, there were more than fifty thousand warriors”. Nine claims about both empires are checked in The Aztec and Inca Empires: 9 Popular Claims, Checked.

18. Steam and the Industrial Revolution, from the 18th century

The UK National Archives files its teaching resources on the period under the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1901. The engineer John Farey wrote a history of the steam engine in 1827. He says Thomas Newcomen’s engine was presented to the public by Newcomen himself about 1712. James Watt’s first patent, he notes, bears the date 5 January 1769.

Why it mattered: machines changed work, and not everyone welcomed it. The Luddite protests began in Nottinghamshire in 1811. The workers, the National Archives explains, wanted to get rid of the new machinery that was causing unemployment.

The claim: James Watt invented the steam engine.

Doesn't hold up Newcomen’s engine was working more than half a century before Watt’s patent. What Watt did was make the steam engine far better.

Watt’s patent, as Farey prints it, was for “lessening the consumption of steam and fuel in fire-engines”. It did this chiefly by having the steam condensed in vessels separate from the cylinder. Farey credits Watt with making engines run on much less fuel than his predecessors’ did. He improved the steam engine; he did not invent it.

19. The French Revolution, from 1789

On 26 August 1789 the National Assembly of France approved the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Its first article, in the Avalon Project’s translation, says: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights”.

The claim: Marie Antoinette said “let them eat cake”.

Doesn't hold up The line is older than her time at court. It comes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, Book VI, where he recalls the saying of a great princess (une grande princesse).

Told that the peasants had no bread, she answered qu’ils mangent de la brioche, let them eat brioche. He names no princess. That book was written around 1767, and Marie Antoinette only arrived at Versailles from her native Austria in 1770.

The revolution itself is covered in The French Revolution’s Lessons in Greed and Corruption and its aftershock in The June Rebellion of 1832.

20. The Haitian Revolution, 1791–1804

From 1791 to 1804, enslaved people and their allies in Saint-Domingue fought a long revolution to win independence from France. The rising began in August 1791. Napoleon’s forces regained the colony in 1802 and tried to restore slavery.

On 1 January 1804, Dessalines announced the new nation of Haiti.

Why it mattered: shortly before the revolution, Saint-Domingue was France’s richest colony. It produced roughly 40 percent of the sugar and 60 percent of the coffee imported to Europe.

In 2010 Julia Gaffield, then a Duke University graduate student, found a printed copy of Haiti’s declaration of independence in the UK National Archives. It was an eight-page pamphlet dated 1 January 1804, then believed to be the only known printed copy. A year later she found another, a single poster-sized sheet.

The claim: Haiti is the only country founded by a successful revolt of enslaved people.

Holds up, as far as the sources we read say. Slavery and Remembrance, a site of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, calls Haiti “the only one to have emerged as the result of a successful slave rebellion”.

Duke University’s news office, reporting her find in 2010, put it more narrowly: “the only country in the western hemisphere where slaves successfully revolted to gain national independence”.

21. Ending the slave trade and slavery: 1807, 1833 and 1888

In 1807 Parliament passed an act to abolish the slave trade. Slavery itself went on: an estimated 700,000 Africans were still enslaved in the British West Indies when the act came into force in 1808.

The Slavery Abolition Act received royal assent on 28 August 1833. In Brazil, Law No. 3,353 of 13 May 1888 declared slavery “extincta”, abolished (Lei nº 3.353, de 13 de maio de 1888).

The claim: Britain abolished slavery in 1807.

Doesn't hold up The 1807 act is a real landmark, but it ended the British slave trade, not slavery. Even the 1833 act did not free people at once.

Slave-owners received compensation of £20 million, which the History of Parliament Trust says amounted to 40% of government spending in 1833. The formerly enslaved received no compensation.

Adults were forced into a system called apprenticeship: unpaid labour for their former owners. The system was finally abolished in the British West Indies on 1 August 1838.

22. The Meiji Restoration, 1868

Japan’s National Diet Library traces the change in three steps. Perry’s black ships arrived in 1853. Political authority was formally returned to the emperor in 1867, and the Charter Oath followed in 1868.

The Meiji era that followed brought Japan into the modern international world. It came with Western stimulus and dramatic changes to Japan’s institutions, traditional social organisation and culture.

The claim: Japan was completely closed to the outside world until 1853.

Partly Foreign contact was tightly controlled, but not cut off. The historian Arano Yasunori writes that most Japanese historians today see the Edo period this way. Japan, they hold, kept “active, if indirect, ties with the larger world through not one but four portals”.

Nagasaki handled Dutch and Chinese trade, and three domains handled the rest. Satsuma dealt with Ryukyu, Tsushima with Korea, and Matsumae with Ezo, the land of the Ainu.

He dates the classic period of seclusion from 1641, when the Dutch trading post was moved to the island of Dejima off Nagasaki, to Perry’s arrival.

23. The First World War, 1914–1918

The Imperial War Museums give the war’s dates as 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. Over 30 nations declared war between 1914 and 1918. Over 65 million men volunteered or were conscripted, and an estimated 16 million soldiers and civilians died.

The claim: the First World War ended on 11 November 1918.

Partly The fighting on the Western Front stopped that day. But, as the National Trust explains, the Armistice did not end the war itself. The Treaty of Versailles did that formally, after more than half a year of negotiation.

The treaty with Germany was signed on 28 June 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Separate treaties with the other defeated powers followed at a peace conference that ran from January 1919 to January 1920.

24. The 1918 influenza, 1918–1919

The pandemic spread worldwide in 1918–1919. It was caused by an H1N1 virus with genes of avian origin, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. About 500 million people, one-third of the world’s population, were infected.

The CDC estimates that at least 50 million people died worldwide, about 675,000 of them in the United States. An older estimate is lower. A 2003 article republished by the Pan American Health Organization gives a range from 21 million to 50 million worldwide. The sources we read do not explain the gap, so we give both.

We call it the 1918 influenza rather than “Spanish flu”, because the common name points to the wrong place. It got that name thanks largely to wartime censorship, the Pan American Health Organization explains. The countries at war kept reports quiet, while uncensored newspapers in Spain openly reported on the outbreak.

The claim: the 1918 flu began in Spain.

Doesn't hold up No source we read places its origin in Spain. The name stuck because Spain’s newspapers reported the outbreak openly.

The CDC says there is no universal consensus on where the virus originated. In the United States it was first identified in military personnel in spring 1918.

25. The Second World War, 1939–1945

The Imperial War Museums date the war in Europe from the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later.

Japan’s formal surrender came on 2 September 1945, when Japanese representatives signed the official instrument of surrender.

Why it mattered: the Imperial War Museums call it “the most destructive conflict in human history”. The National WWII Museum in New Orleans puts battle deaths at 15,000,000 and civilian deaths at 45,000,000. It adds that worldwide casualty estimates vary widely in several sources, and that civilian deaths in China alone might well be more than 50,000,000.

The claim: the Second World War began on 1 September 1939.

Partly That is when the war in Europe began. But Japan had been at war with China from 1937, as Columbia’s Asia for Educators notes. When Japan attacked British, Dutch and American territories in December 1941, it was already at war with China.

Which date counts as the start depends on whether you look from Europe or from Asia.

More turning points on this site

These are covered in full elsewhere:

• Lessons from King Leonidas and the 300 Spartans (Thermopylae)
• The Library of Alexandria Was Not Destroyed in One Fire
• Gaius Julius Caesar and Mental Models from History (the Rubicon)
• The Third Crusade, The Battle of Kerak and Salahuddin Ayyubi (Hattin)
• The Battle of Mactan

What the 25 have in common

Three patterns ran through this list.

The first is that many famous firsts were not first. Farming began in several places, and writing was invented at least four times. Older law collections came before Hammurabi’s, and movable type was used in China and Korea before Mainz. A first is usually the first one a particular tradition remembers.

The second is that a single date often stands for a long process. The year 476, 11 November 1918 and 1 September 1939 are real dates. But each marks one moment in something that started earlier or ended later, and the choice of date often depends on where you are standing.

The third is that names and stories stick harder than facts. Genghis Khan was a title, and the Spanish flu did not start in Spain. And a hammer on a church door is a better picture than Luther’s letter to his church superiors.

Why it matters

Each of these dates is real, and each was picked by someone, looking from somewhere. So when a date or a story is used to make a point, it can help to ask three questions. “First” according to whom? “Ended” for whom? And what happened just before and just after?

Sources

Farming and writing

• Larson et al., “Current perspectives and the future of domestication studies”, PNAS 111(17) (2014), 6139–46, doi:10.1073/pnas.1323964111.
• Christopher Woods (ed.), Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond (Oriental Institute, 2010), free PDF from ISAC.

Hammurabi and Athens

• Kathryn E. Slanski, “The Law of Hammurabi and Its Audience”, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 24 (2012) (Yale Law School repository).
• Musée du Louvre, Code de Hammurabi (Sb 8).
• Samuel Noah Kramer, “Law and Love, a Hymn, a Prayer, and a Word to the Wise”, Penn Museum Bulletin XVII/2 (1952).
• The Code of Hammurabi, trans. L. W. King, Avalon Project, Yale Law School.
• Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution, trans. F. G. Kenyon, parts 20–21 (Project Gutenberg #26095).
• Donald Kagan, Open Yale Courses CLCV 205, lecture 12 and lecture 15.

Ashoka, Qin and Rome

• E. Hultzsch, Inscriptions of Asoka (1925), Rock Edict XIII (archive.org scan).
• Columbia University, Asia for Educators, China timeline.
• Sima Qian, Shiji, chapters 6 and 88 (Wikisource); English ours.
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre, The Great Wall.
• Ralph W. Mathisen and Geoffrey S. Nathan, “Romulus Augustulus (475–476 A.D.): Two Views”, De Imperatoribus Romanis.

Baghdad, the Mongols, Magna Carta and Mansa Musa

• MacTutor History of Mathematics, Al-Khwarizmi.
• David O. Morgan, “Čengīz Khan”, Encyclopaedia Iranica; Columbia, Asia for Educators, “The Myth of Chinggis Khan”.
• US National Archives, “Magna Carta”; UK National Archives, “Magna Carta 1214–1225”.
• Magna Carta (1215), clause 39, Avalon Project translation; The Magna Carta Project, clause 60 commentary.
• World History Commons, “Al-Umari’s account of Mansa Musa’s visit to Cairo”, from Levtzion and Hopkins (eds), Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (1981).

Black Death, printing and Constantinople

• Dean et al., “Human ectoparasites and the spread of plague in Europe during the Second Pandemic”, PNAS 115(6) (2018), doi:10.1073/pnas.1715640115; Park et al., PNAS 115(34) (2018), doi:10.1073/pnas.1809775115.
• Spyrou et al., “The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia”, Nature 606 (2022), doi:10.1038/s41586-022-04800-3.
• Library of Congress, “The Gutenberg Bible”; Bibliothèque nationale de France, “Jikji, a treasure of the world of printing”.
• Columbia, Asia for Educators, “Printing and movable type”; Shen Kuo, Mengxi bitan, chapter 18 (Wikisource).
• TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, “Mehmed II”; University of Cincinnati Libraries, “On May 29, the Classics Library remembers the fall of Constantinople” (2019); UNESCO, Historic Areas of Istanbul.
• Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2018.07.04, review of Ciccolella and Silvano (eds), Teachers, Students, and Schools of Greek in the Renaissance (2017).

The Columbian Exchange, the Reformation and the conquests

• Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, “The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 24(2) (2010), 163–88, doi:10.1257/jep.24.2.163.
• Axel Gotthard, “Schlaglicht 1517: der sogenannte Thesenanschlag”, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (2017); Martin Treu, “An den Türen der Wittenberger Kirchen”, Luther2017; English ours.
• Hernán Cortés, Letters, trans. F. A. MacNutt (1908), vol. 2, third letter (archive.org scan); University of Texas Press, James Lockhart, The Men of Cajamarca.

Industry, revolutions and abolition

• John Farey, A Treatise on the Steam Engine (London, 1827) (archive.org scan).
• UK National Archives, “Why did the Luddites protest?”.
• Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), Avalon Project; Rousseau, Les Confessions, Livre VI (Wikisource); The Phrase Finder, “Let them eat cake”.
• Slavery and Remembrance, “Haiti (Saint-Domingue)”; Duke Today, “Duke graduate student discovers Haiti’s original Declaration of Independence” (31 March 2010).
• History of Parliament Trust, “1833 Slavery Abolition Act” (2024); Brazil, Lei nº 3.353, de 13 de maio de 1888.

Japan, the world wars and the 1918 influenza

• National Diet Library, Modern Japan in Archives, “Initial steps toward a constitutional state”; Columbia, Asia for Educators, Japan timeline.
• Arano Yasunori, “Foreign Relations in Early Modern Japan: Exploding the Myth of National Seclusion”, nippon.com (2013).
• Imperial War Museums, “First World War key facts”, “How we made the peace”, “Causes of the Second World War” and “Japan and the Second World War”; National Trust, “What was the Armistice?”.
• US National Archives, “Surrender of Japan (1945)”; Columbia, Asia for Educators, “Japan’s Quest for Power and World War II in Asia”; The National WWII Museum, “Research Starters: Worldwide Deaths in World War II”.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “1918 Pandemic (H1N1 virus)” (archived page); Pan American Health Organization, “Purple Death: The Great Flu of 1918”.

We read each source online on 6 October 2026. Primary texts were read in public-domain translations (King, Kenyon, Hultzsch, MacNutt) or in the original language, with the English ours where marked. Some pages, including the British Library’s Magna Carta pages and parts of the UK Parliament site, would not load for us behind automated bot checks, so we used other institutions’ pages for the same facts. For the Black Death, the printing press and the end of the Western Roman Empire, this page gives only the short version; each has a longer article of its own.

Checked October 2026.