History
Imitated by writers as varied as Winston Churchill and Isaac Asimov, Edward Gibbon’s seminal Decline and Fall, published between 1776 and 1788, chronicled the gradual dissolution of this once-powerful state.
What is the Roman Empire?
This Polish anthropologist, although known primarily as the widely regarded “founder” of modern ethnography, perhaps resides in coining this term for a basic parent-child social unit, as separated from an extended unit.
What is the “nuclear family”?
One associated with rigorous argumentation, formalism and analysis, philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Frege, and the other associated with critique and interpretation, literary style, philosophers such as Nietzsche and Foucault, these are the divisions that define these two schools of philosophy.
What is the continental school and the analytic school?
It was lucky that Chaucer could read French and Italian, for he adopted this type of metric line from their respective poetic traditions and became the first to use it in English, later exemplified by Shakespeare.
What is iambic pentameter?
William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream plays at “the Theatre” in Shoreditch, London.
John White establishes Roanoke Colony, which will be mysteriously depopulated in three years.
Hernán Cortés and his conquistadors invade the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.
What is the 16th century/1500s?
Alongside The Black Jacobins, an influential Marxist history of the Haitian Revolution, Trinidadian historian C. L. R. James also wrote Beyond a Boundary in 1963, considered one of the best books ever written on this English sport.
What is cricket?
A Frenchman who studied trade in the south pacific, this anthropologist described society as achieved via solidarity through the social bonds created by gift exchange.
Who was Marcel Mauss?
In 1814, Arthur Schopenhauer first read Anquetil-Duperron’s Latin translation of these ancient Sanskrit texts, which he considered of the “highest human wisdom” and compared to his own philosophical ideas.
What are the Upanishads?
Some debate exists as to who invented this narrative device, employed first by either Aeschylus or Euripedes, which literally translates to “god from the machine” from Latin.
What is deux ex machina?
Lady Murasaki Shikibu writes The Tale of Genji, sometimes considered the first novel.
William, Duke of Normandy, defeats King Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings.
Avicenna publishes The Canon of Medicine, a medical authority in Asia and Europe thereafter.
What is the 11th century/1000s?
Many consider this historian the father of Chinese historiography, covering over 2,500 years of Chinese history, from the Yellow Emperor to Emperor Wu of Han, in his Records of the Grand Historian or Shiji.
Who is Sima Qian?
Name this Hopkins anthropologist whose work Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, and theories of state-created pain, made her an important founding figure in Medical Anthropology.
Who is Veena Das?
Considered a founder of pragmatism and semiotics, this American logician, mathematician and philosopher worked for five years at Johns Hopkins from 1879 to 1884.
Who is Charles Sanders Peirce?
In a letter to his brothers George and Thomas, this English poet coined the term “negative capability” to describe an artist’s ability to pursue beauty and ideas that lead to irrationality, rather than philosophical certainty.
Who is John Keats?
Eratosthenes calculates the circumference of the Earth.
Ashoka the Great defeats the small independent feudal kingdom of Kalinga.
The Epi-Olmecs succeed the Olmecs as the preeminent power in modern-day Veracruz, Mexico.
What is the 3rd century BCE/-200s?
Although famous for such films as Rome, Open City and Voyage to Italy, by the 1960s this Italian director believed cinema had reached a “dead-end” and devoted himself to educational history films for TV, covering figures like Socrates and the Medicis.
Who is Roberto Rossellini?
Cultural Anthropologist, Margaret Mead, wrote heavily about adolescence and described coming-of-age, gender roles, and child raising practices on this island in the southern Pacific.
What is Samoa/Bali/New Guinea?
Among the Pre-Socratic thinkers, Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus (sometimes also Xenophanes and Empedocles) composed this philosophical school, which promoted metaphysical monism.
Who are the Eleatics/Eleatic School?
Although among the most famous rhetoricians lived during Antiquity, the use of rhetorical devices extends thousands of years earlier, including by this Akkadian high priestess, the earliest named author in history.
Who is Enheduanna?
Kharijite preachers incite a Berber revolt against their Ummayad Arab rulers.
Leo III the Isaurian enacts the first phase of Byzantine iconoclasm.
Bodhisena, a Buddhist monk, becomes the first Indian to visit Japan.
What is the 8th century/700s?
This book of universal history by Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, written in 1377 but only translated into English in 1958, constitutes the foundational work of Islamic historiography, sociology, demography, and even economics.
What is the Muqaddimah?
In the 1970s Clifford Geertz defined this trademark term as an explanation of human social action that describes not just physical behaviors, but their context seen by others or its given context as understood by an outsider.
What is Thick Description?
Just as Beatrice Erskine Lane promoted theosophy in Japan, so too did her much more famous husband, a Japanese writer and scholar, transmit the teachings of Zen Buddhism to Western audiences.
Who is D. T. Suzuki?
The story of Robinson Crusoe and the archetypal “robinsonade” was inspired partly by this Arabic philosophical novel, about a marooned boy and his antelope; after the Quran and 1001 Nights, this is the most translated Arabic text.
What is Hayy ibn Yaqdhan/The Improvement of Human Reason?
Usman dan Fodio leads a successful jihad against the Hausa Kingdoms.
Sunthorn Phu writes the 48,700-line epic Thai poem Phra Aphai Mani.
Vasily Zvyozdochkin creates the first matryoshka doll.
What is the 19th century/1800s?