Disputed Statements

The Black Death, Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll, Low Estimate (%)

Currently States 30.000000

Historian estimates of Black Death mortality across Europe range from roughly 30 to 60 percent of the population; this entry records the commonly cited low end of that scholarly range.

Source Wikipedia: Black Death tier 2

The Black Death, Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll, High Estimate (%)

Currently States 60.000000

Historian estimates of Black Death mortality across Europe range from roughly 30 to 60 percent of the population; this entry records the commonly cited high end of that scholarly range.

Source Wikipedia: Black Death tier 2

The British Empire, Polities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 1583

1583 (Humphrey Gilbert claim of Newfoundland) is one commonly cited starting point; historians also date the Empire from the 1600 East India Company charter or the 1707 Act of Union, since expansion was gradual and multi-stranded rather than founded at one stroke.

Source British Empire (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

The British Empire, Polities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1997

1997, the handover of Hong Kong, is the conventional symbolic close, but decolonization was gradual from Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947 onward, and Britain still holds fourteen British Overseas Territories, so no single end date is agreed.

Source British Empire (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

The Bronze Age Collapse, Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Year

Currently States -1150

Historians disagree about the relative weight of drought, invasion, earthquake and systems failure as causes, and about whether collapse is the right description for a process that unfolded over several decades rather than as a single catastrophe.

Source The Cambridge Ancient History

The Byzantine Empire, Polities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 330

330 CE, when Constantine founded Constantinople, is a common starting point, though some historians instead date the Byzantine Empire's distinct identity to 395 CE, the permanent administrative division of the Roman Empire, or even to 476 CE, the fall of the west.

Source The Cambridge Medieval History

The Cold War, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 1947

The Truman Doctrine, announced 12 March 1947, is the conventional marker for open confrontation, but the wartime allies' cooperation had already broken down over Eastern Europe and Iran in 1945 and 1946, and some historians date the Cold War's origins to the differing occupation policies both powers adopted immediately after Germany's surrender in 1945.

Source We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Gaddis, 1997), John Lewis Gaddis

The Cold War, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1991

The Soviet Union's formal dissolution on 26 December 1991 is the conventional end date, though the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and the joint US-Soviet declaration that December that the Cold War was over are also widely treated as its effective close.

Source We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Gaddis, 1997), John Lewis Gaddis

The Contemporary Period, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 1945

1945 is the most common starting point, but some historians instead date the contemporary period from 1989 or 1991, the end of the Cold War, treating 1945 to 1991 as a transitional late twentieth century era in its own right.

Source The Oxford History of the Twentieth Century

The Crusades, Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Year

Currently States 1095

The narrower and more common scholarly periodization runs from Urban II's November 1095 call at Clermont to the May 1291 fall of Acre. A broader camp of historians extends the crusading era well past 1291, to the Baltic crusades against pagan Prussia and Lithuania, the fifteenth century Hussite crusades within Bohemia, and Ottoman-era crusades into the sixteenth century, since the papacy kept preaching and granting crusading indulgences for wars far beyond the Holy Land. This entry records the narrower Levantine window, 1095, and names the broader camp rather than adopting it.

Source God's War: A New History of the Crusades, Christopher Tyerman

The Crusades, Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll, Low Estimate

Currently States 500000.000000

Historians of the crusades are explicit that they distrust any single precise figure spanning nearly two centuries of intermittent campaigns across three continents. This lower bound reflects the low end of the spread found across general reference estimates rather than a scholarly consensus count.

Source God's War: A New History of the Crusades, Christopher Tyerman

The Crusades, Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll, High Estimate

Currently States 2000000.000000

The higher end of the same spread, contested by an order of magnitude against the lower bound, which is itself the point: no single total for the crusading era commands scholarly consensus. Indirect deaths, in the societies the campaigns disrupted, likely matched or exceeded combat deaths.

Source God's War: A New History of the Crusades, Christopher Tyerman

The Digital Revolution, Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Year

Currently States 1975

The Digital Revolution has no single starting date. The choice of 1975 reflects the early spread of personal computing, but its roots extend back to mid twentieth century computing research, and its most transformative effects, including the internet and smartphones, arrived decades later.

Source The Oxford History of the Twentieth Century

The Digital Revolution, Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Common Name

Currently States Third Industrial Revolution

Some historians and economists use Third Industrial Revolution as a synonym for the Digital Revolution; others reserve that term specifically for mid-twentieth-century automation and electronics (roughly 1950s-1970s) and treat the internet/personal-computing era as a later, distinct phase. Not a settled usage.

Source The Oxford History of the Twentieth Century

The Early Modern Period, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 1453

1453 is used here to align with the close of the medieval period, but many historians instead date the beginning of the early modern period to 1492, Columbus's first voyage, or to 1500 as a round marker.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica

The Early Modern Period, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1789

The French Revolution in 1789 is the most common marker for the end of the early modern period, though some historians prefer 1800 as a round number, or treat the transition to the following era as gradual rather than tied to any single event.

Source The New Cambridge Modern History

The Enlightenment, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 1715

Traditionally dated from the death of Louis XIV in 1715, though the movement's intellectual roots reach back into the late seventeenth century and some historians extend the period into the early nineteenth century.

Source Wikipedia tier 2

The Enlightenment, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1789

Conventionally closed with the French Revolution in 1789, though this boundary is not universally accepted.

Source Wikipedia tier 2

The Fall of the Western Roman Empire, Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Year

Currently States 476

476 CE marks the deposition of the last Western emperor, but historians increasingly treat the fall of the west as a gradual process spanning the fifth century rather than a single event in a single year.

Source The Cambridge Ancient History

The Fugger Banking and Merchant House, Organizations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Founded

Currently States 1487

Dated to Jakob Fugger's rise to control of the family business and its Tyrolean silver and Hungarian copper mining interests in the late 1480s; the family's mercantile activity in Augsburg predates this by a generation.

Source Wikipedia tier 2