Events that shaped our world
Take a walk back in time
An irony of studying history is that we often know exactly how a story ends, but have no idea where it began.
1914
The First Word War
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1. The war led to the growth of the armaments industry as each country had to ensure its army had enough supplies.
2. It was a war of innovations in manufacturing, chemistry and communications.
3. It was a war of destruction, an estimated 16 million soldiers and civilians dead and countless others physically and psychologically wounded.
1918
The Spanish Influenza Pandemic
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1. The global death toll for the Spanish flu is have been as high as 100 million.
2. The Spanish Flu didn’t start in Spain.
3. The pandemic occurred in three waves in 1918 and 1919, possibly starting in Austria in 1917.
1929
The Great Depression
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1. The Great Depression started on Wall Street.
2. About 15 million Americans were jobless and almost half of the United States’ banks had failed by 1993.
3. The Great Depression caused social upheaval and political unrest.
1941
The Attack On Pearl Harbor
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1. Americans fired the first shot.
2. The attack on pearl harbor lasted for about two hours.
3. The attack on pearl harbor led to us entering world war II
1945
The Attack On Hiroshima And Nagasaki
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1. The bombing had killed an estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima, and a further 74,000 in Nagasaki.
2. It takes around 10 seconds for the fireball from a nuclear explosion to reach its maximum size, but the effects last for decades and span across generations.
3. Most victims died without any care to ease their suffering. Some of those who entered the cities after the bombings to provide assistance also died from the radiation.
1965
The Vietnam War
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1. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
2. More than 3 million people were killed in the Vietnam War, and more than half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians.
3. The nation spent more than $120 billion on the conflict in Vietnam from 1965–73.
1969
The First Man On The Moon
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1. It took the men over 4 days to reach the Moon.
2. The astronauts did not land at their planned site.
3. An estimated 650 million people tuned in to watch the event world wide.
1991
The Introduction Of The Internet
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1. The first web page was created and, much like the first email explained what email was, its purpose was to explain what the World Wide Web was.
2. The first search protocol that examined file contents instead of just file names was launched, called Gopher.
3. The MP3 file format was accepted as a standard.
2000
The Dot-Com Bubble Burst
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1. The internet became a river of investment opportunity and potential profits for dot-com developers and entrepreneurs.
2. Most of the business models were based on intangible concepts and therefore linked with a certain risk of failure. But during the rise of the bubble, nobody thought about that risk.
3. The American Federal Reserve increased the interest rates nearly six times in early 2000 with contrast to that of mid 1990's interest rate.
2008
The Great Recession
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1. The Great Recession was unprecedented in the postwar period for its severity and duration.
2. Employment losses in the Great Recession were greater among men and the young.
3. Fiscal stimulus tempered the length and the depth of the Great Recession.
2020
The Coronavirus Pandemic
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1. In December 2019, a new coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, China.
2. It has since infected thousands across the globe, and the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic.
3. It can be deadly, particularly in people over the age of 60 or with underlying health symptoms such as fever, cough, and difficulty breathing.
The world is driven by tail events. A minority of things drive the majority of outcomes. Demographics, inequality, and information access will have a huge impact on the coming decades. How those Big Things end is a story yet to be told. But when it’s told we’ll have a better idea of where it began.
