History Atlas
Claims this atlas currently marks as unsettled or as tested and found false. A debated fact is one scholars hold competing positions on; a debunked one has been checked against the record and found not to hold. Both are kept in view rather than quietly smoothed over, with the reasoning that put each one where it stands.
145 statements.
The Paleolithic Period, End Year-9700
The Paleolithic Period, Eras
Standing
Concerns End Year
Currently States -9700
Conventionally closed with the end of the Pleistocene epoch, about 11,650 years before present; the boundary is geological rather than cultural and its calendar date depends on the dating convention used.
Source Wikipedia
The Post-Classical and Medieval Period, Start Year476
The Post-Classical and Medieval Period, Eras
Standing
Concerns Start Year
Currently States 476
476 CE, the conventional end of the Western Roman Empire, is the most common starting point, but some historians prefer 500 CE as a round marker, and the transition itself is regional and gradual rather than a single dated boundary.
Source The Cambridge Medieval History
The Post-Classical and Medieval Period, End Year1453
The Post-Classical and Medieval Period, Eras
Standing
Concerns End Year
Currently States 1453
1453, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, is the traditional endpoint, but some historians prefer 1492, Columbus's first Atlantic voyage, or 1500 as a round marker for the beginning of the early modern period. There is no single agreed transition.
Source The Cambridge Medieval History
The Printing Revolution, Year1440
The Printing Revolution, Events
Standing
Concerns Year
Currently States 1440
Gutenberg's exact date of invention is not precisely documented. Historians generally place it between 1440 and 1450, with his printed Bible, completed around 1455, as the first securely dated major product of the press.
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Punic Wars, Death Toll, Low Estimate150000.000000
The Punic Wars, Events
Standing
Concerns Death Toll, Low Estimate
Currently States 150000.000000
Refers specifically to the Third Punic War's final siege and destruction of Carthage (146 BCE), not the three Punic Wars combined. Ancient sources (via Appian) put Carthage's population at the siege's start anywhere from roughly 200,000 to 700,000, with about 50,000 survivors enslaved after the city fell; modern historians regard the ancient figures as likely inflated and treat any resulting death-toll estimate as an order of magnitude, not a count.
Source The Cambridge Ancient History
The Reformation, End Year1648
The Reformation, Eras
Standing
Concerns End Year
Currently States 1648
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648, ending the Thirty Years' War, is the most commonly cited close; other historians end the period earlier, with the Peace of Augsburg in 1555.
Source Wikipedia
The Renaissance, Start Year1350
The Renaissance, Eras
Standing
Concerns Start Year
Currently States 1350
Conventionally traced to Petrarch and fourteenth-century Italian humanism; other historians place the meaningful start later, in the fifteenth century.
Source Renaissance (Britannica)
The Renaissance, End Year1600
The Renaissance, Eras
Standing
Concerns End Year
Currently States 1600
Conventionally closed around 1600 as the Northern Renaissance gives way to the Baroque and the Scientific Revolution; some historians extend it into the early seventeenth century.
Source Renaissance (Britannica)
The Roman Republic, End Year-27
The Roman Republic, Polities
Standing
Concerns End Year
Currently States -27
The exact end of the Republic is debated. Some historians prefer 44 BCE, the assassination of Julius Caesar, or 31 BCE, Octavian's victory at Actium, over 27 BCE, when Octavian took the title Augustus and the Senate formally restored constitutional government under his controlling influence.
Source The Cambridge Ancient History
The Scientific Revolution, Start Year1543
The Scientific Revolution, Eras
Standing
Concerns Start Year
Currently States 1543
1543 (Copernicus De revolutionibus) is the conventional opening date and the one this atlas carries, but historiography is genuinely divided into named traditions: Herbert Butterfield (Origins of Modern Science, 1949) helped fix the sharp-break narrative starting here; Pierre Duhems continuity thesis argues medieval Scholastic natural philosophy already contained the revolutions seeds, denying any clean start; Steven Shapin (The Scientific Revolution, 1996) opens by disputing that a single coherent, datable Revolution occurred at all, treating 1543 as a useful convention rather than a real threshold.
Source Scientific Revolution (Encyclopaedia Britannica), Encyclopaedia Britannica Editors
The Scientific Revolution, End Year1687
The Scientific Revolution, Eras
Standing
Concerns End Year
Currently States 1687
1687 (Newtons Principia) is the conventional close and the one this atlas carries, but some historians extend the period into the early Enlightenment (through the 1700s-1720s) to include the Principias reception and Newtonianisms spread across Europe, while others hold the synthesis essentially complete at publication.
Source Scientific Revolution (Encyclopaedia Britannica), Encyclopaedia Britannica Editors
The Viking Age, Start Year793
The Viking Age, Eras
Standing
Concerns Start Year
Currently States 793
Conventionally dated from the 793 raid on the monastery at Lindisfarne, though modern scholarship increasingly treats Scandinavian expansion as a longer, gradual process without one sharp start date.
The Warring States Period, Start Year-475
The Warring States Period, Eras
Standing
Concerns Start Year
Currently States -475
The starting point of the Warring States period is a periodization convention rather than a single agreed event. Historians have used at least three anchors: 481 BCE, where the Spring and Autumn Annals traditionally end; 475 BCE, Sima Qian's choice and the most often cited, which the atlas follows; and 403 BCE, when the Zhou royal court formally recognized the partition of the state of Jin among the Han, Zhao and Wei lineages, the convention Sima Guang used centuries later in the Zizhi Tongjian. Some sources instead mark 453 BCE, the year of Jin's effective (if not yet formally recognized) partition.
Source Wikipedia: Warring States Period
Thirty Years War, Death Toll, Low Estimate4500000.000000
Thirty Years War, Events
Standing
Concerns Death Toll, Low Estimate
Currently States 4500000.000000
The lower end of the range general histories cite for total deaths across the war zone from combat, disease and famine combined; a count of direct military dead alone would be substantially smaller.
Source Europe's Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War, Peter H. Wilson
Thirty Years War, Death Toll, High Estimate8000000.000000
Thirty Years War, Events
Standing
Concerns Death Toll, High Estimate
Currently States 8000000.000000
The higher end of the same range, consistent with estimates that close to a quarter of the population of the German lands died as a result of the war, overwhelmingly to disease and starvation following the collapse of civil order rather than to battle itself.
Source Europe's Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War, Peter H. Wilson
Tulip Mania, DescriptionA period in the Dutch Republic, peaking in the winter of 1636 to 1637, during which contract prices for tulip bulbs, especially rare virus-streaked broken varieties, rose to extraordinary levels before collapsing in February 1637. Traditionally presented as history's first recorded speculative bubble and a byword for irrational market mania, it sits inside the Dutch Golden Age, the same decades of commercial wealth, colonial trade and civic pride that produced the Dutch Republic's rise as a maritime and financial power. The scale of the traditional account is itself a live dispute among economic historians: Peter Garber and others working from surviving notarial and contract records argue the episode was a much smaller, largely futures-market phenomenon among specialist growers and traders rather than an economy-wide mania, a revisionist reading that has not displaced the traditional account in general reference works.
Tulip Mania, Events
Standing
Concerns Description
Currently States A period in the Dutch Republic, peaking in the winter of 1636 to 1637, during which contract prices for tulip bulbs, especially rare virus-streaked broken varieties, rose to extraordinary levels before collapsing in February 1637. Traditionally presented as history's first recorded speculative bubble and a byword for irrational market mania, it sits inside the Dutch Golden Age, the same decades of commercial wealth, colonial trade and civic pride that produced the Dutch Republic's rise as a maritime and financial power. The scale of the traditional account is itself a live dispute among economic historians: Peter Garber and others working from surviving notarial and contract records argue the episode was a much smaller, largely futures-market phenomenon among specialist growers and traders rather than an economy-wide mania, a revisionist reading that has not displaced the traditional account in general reference works.
The traditional irrational-mania account is the one repeated in most general reference works; the Garber revisionist reading, based on surviving notarial and contract records, holds the episode was far narrower in scope. Both readings are live in the secondary literature.
Source Tulip Mania (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Vlad the Impaler, Birth Year1431
Vlad the Impaler, Death Year1476
War of the Third Coalition, Death Toll, Low Estimate62050.000000
War of the Third Coalition, Events
Standing
Concerns Death Toll, Low Estimate
Currently States 62050.000000
French and allied forces' own killed, wounded or captured across the 1805-1806 campaign, per the aggregate casualty figures on record for this conflict. This is the SMALLER of two reasonable readings of the war's toll; see death-toll-max for the combined-both-sides figure.
Source Wikipedia: War of the Third Coalition
War of the Third Coalition, Death Toll, High Estimate222050.000000
War of the Third Coalition, Events
Standing
Concerns Death Toll, High Estimate
Currently States 222050.000000
Combined killed, wounded or captured across BOTH sides (allied forces 160,000 plus French and allied forces 62,050), the larger of two reasonable readings; see death-toll-min for the French/allied-only figure. The two numbers answer different questions (one side vs. both) rather than representing a genuine high/low disagreement about the same quantity.
Source Wikipedia: War of the Third Coalition