Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0457: Learning world history: Where to start

Episode Date: December 8, 2015

Gretchen asks about memorizing overall world history. What is the best starting point for learning a general historic timeline of the whole world? I describe why starting by memorizing landmark wars is the best place to start in memorizing history. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd […]

Master of Memory 457. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Gretchen asked a question about learning world history and choosing where to start. I think it's hard to be objective in prioritizing when you're confronted by a subject like world history, because if you think about it, world history is basically all the information in the whole world and not restricted to today. That's a lot of information. So choosing what's most important to tell us what's most important about what got us to where we are now and where the whole world is now is a bit of a project. Now, as I've talked about in

previous episodes, I think it's really important when you're presented with lots of information to find landmark information that gives you checkpoints or milestones that let you see everything around it in better context. Applying that to this project, if we choose landmark events throughout history and we just learn those few events, then anything else in between those events will fall into a context, into a framework that we've set up in our minds. Now, my landmarks for world history would be significant wars. So the idea of nations that rise and fall, the idea of different ideologies going around, artistic movements and everything, they happen based on individual cultures. But there's nothing quite as overturning

as a war, or at least in the case of past human history. It's generally been wars that tend to change people's minds the most and that tend to redefine territories and nations and things like that. So wars are what I would probably go with if I was to choose just some single category of landmark event from the past. Now, what I'm doing in this episode is I'm not presenting any mnemonics, but I'm presenting 21 wars that I've chosen throughout world history that I think are probably very important. At the very least, they do provide landmarks throughout history. Now, the thing is, I'm just going with the last 2,000 years, so I'm not even going to try to cover before 0 AD. I'm just going with the last 2,000 years,

so this is 21 wars from the last 2,000 years. You'll notice that nine of the wars are 20th century wars, and only two of them happened before the year 1000. But I had a pretty difficult job of selecting these wars. In fact, this was one of the episodes that took me the longest to prepare, and I'm not even giving you mnemonics. It just took me so long to prepare because it's so hard to choose the right events from history. Now, I've tried to remain objective in determining the wars that are most important as landmarks in history, and I've considered various factors, including death counts of wars, which is at least something measurable that you can use to determine the importance of a war, even if it's not pretty much from Western websites, so it's somewhat biased, I have to say. I mean, I've tried to choose important history worldwide, but to be honest, this is probably important world history from the perspective of Europe and the Americas. So at least the

way that things are right now, this is what I would first teach if I was teaching world history, and this is what I will focus on learning myself just as far as getting some perspective in world history. These are the 21 wars. First of all, you have the Three Kingdoms War in China from 184 to 280. And you will notice in this list that there are a lot of wars in China. There are actually many more wars with enormous death tolls, but I've focused on some that kind of, I think, overturned the country and end up being internationally significant. And then next I would have the Umayyad conquests in Europe. So these Muslim invasions and conquests in Europe in the mid-8th century, so in the mid-700s.

And it's hard for me to give exact year labels to these conquests, but in particular, the way they took over the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal, or what are now Spain and Portugal. So that's the next big war or big series of conquests that I would put there. Next, we have the Norman invasion of England by William the Conqueror in the year 1066. And that's significant because of how significant England is on the world scene in later years, obviously. Then we have the Mongol conquests of China in the years 1206 through 1337. Next, we have the Hundred Years' War in Europe from 1337 to 1453. Kind of interesting that that happened right after the Mongol conquests of China.

And then we have the conquests of Tamerlane in Europe and Asia. So another big Muslim conquest of Europe and Asia in 1370 through 1405. Then we have the Ottoman Wars in Europe from 1451 to 1606. And next I would put the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in the Americas from 1519 to 1527 that kind of established the, well, what is now basically Latin America. My next war is the Thirty Years War in Europe from 1618 to 1648. Then we have the US Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1783. Then the Napoleonic Wars in Europe from 1803 to 1815. Then we have the Taiping Civil War in China, an enormous civil war that not many people outside of China know about, but with incredible death tolls and huge significance for the country between 1850 and 1864. Then we have the conquests

of the Empire of Japan from 1894 to 1945. We have World War I in Europe from 1914 to 1918. We have the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922. We have the Chinese Civil War from 1927 to 1950. And then we have World War II, which covered the entire world, from 1939 to 1945. And then we have the Korean War in 1950 to 1953, the Vietnam War in 1955 to 1975, and then the Soviet War in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, and then the second Congo war in Central Africa from 1998 to 2003. Again, this is just coming from our perspective where we are in history and from my perspective in what I was able to look up as a Westerner in a Western world, but I think at least all of these wars are objectively significant in some way, even if they aren't necessarily the top 21. And they give you some good landmarks throughout history around which you can base your study of really any date or

anything that you learn about history because you can see which wars it was between, what was kind of going on in the world at that time, and based on which wars it's between, what the state of the country was like. So yeah, that's what I'd start with, and then I'd start working on filling in other information from there. It's good to have some big, broad perspective before learning details. Now everyone, make sure to check out masterofmemory.com slash Mandarin to see what we have going on with our project for learning Mandarin Chinese. Meanwhile, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question and I'll talk to you again soon.