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100 Greatest Events

What to do

  1. Look at the list of events on the right.
  2. Pick the 30 most important events. This step may require some research.
  3. Create playing cards with them. The cards should each include 
    • The event
    • The date of the event
    • A picture related to the event
    • A few sentences of description of the event

The Dates

  1. 3650 BC - Wheeled vehicles appear in Mesopotamia
  2. 2400 - Babylonians invent the abacus
  3. 2000 BC - Abram born
  4. 1700 BC- Code of Hammurabi
  5. 1600 BC - Phonecians develop the first alphabet
  6. 1184 BC - Fall of Troy
  7. 1000 BC - David starts to reign in Jerusalem
  8. 776 BC - First Greek Olympics
  9. 753 BC - Rome founded
  10. 399 BC - Death of Socrates
  11. 330 BC - Alexander the Great conquers the Persian Empire
  12. 146 BC - Carthage is destroyed by Scipio
  13. 44 BC - Julius Caesar assassinated
  14. 27 B.C. - 180 A.D. - Pax Romana
  15. 2 BC - Jesus Christ born in Bethlehem
  16. 313 - Constantine issues Edict of Milan
  17. 325 - Council of Nicea organizes a formal, unified Christian doctrine
  18. 610 - Mohammed states he has a vision of the angel Gabriel
  19. 732 - Charles the Hammer (Martel) wins at the Battle of Tours/Poitiers
  20. 800 - Charlemagne crowned emperor
  21. 988 - Vladimir of Kiev converts to Christianity
  22. 1066  - Norman William defeats Harald at the Battle of Hastings
  23. 1093 - Anselm becomes Archbishop of Canterbury
  24. 1095 - Pope Urban II calls for a crusade to capture the Holy Land.
  25. 1202 - Fibonacci publishes Liber Abaci - popularizes Arabic numbers and the concept of zero.
  26. 1212 - Children's Crusade
  27. 1215 - King John signs the Magna Carta
  28. 1248 - Roger Bacon publishes formula for gunpowder, originally developed by the Chinese.
  29. 1280 - Roger Bacon "invents" gunpowder
  30. 1337 - Beginning of the Hundred Years War
  31. 1347 - William of Ockham/Occam dies
  32. 1347-1351 - Black Death
  33. 1348 - Black Death strikes Europe wiping out about a quarter of the population
  34. 1382 - John Wycliffe finishes his translation of the Bible
  35. 1440-1455 - Johann Gutenberg perfects his printing press using movable type.
  36. 1453 - Constantinople, and the Byzantine Empire, fall to the Ottoman Turks.
  37. 1469 - Ferdinand and Isabella marry and unite Spain
  38. 1492 - Christopher Columbus "discovers" America.
  39. October 31, 1517 - Martin Luther nails 95 Theses to a church door in Wittenburg 
  40. 1522 - Part of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition returns to Spain after circumnavigating the globe
  41. 1588 - Spanish Armada defeated by the English
  42. 1598 - Edict of Nantes gives religious toleration to the French Huguenots
  43. 1637 - Rene Descartes argues cogito, ergo sum
  44. 1648 - Peace of Westphalia, granting religious toleration in Germany.
  45. 1707 - Acts of Union unite England Scotland into Great Britain
  46. 1760 - Beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England
  47. July 4, 1776 - First Continental Congress signs Declaration of Independence
  48. 1776 - Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations
  49. July 14, 1789 - Bastille stormed, which is considered to start the French Revolution
  50. 1796 - Edward Jenner develops the smallpox vaccine
  51. 1802 - Richard Trevithick patents the steam locomotive
  52. 1807 - British slave trade is ended
  53. 1809 - Braille invented
  54. 1814-1815 - Congress of Vienna
  55. 1815 - Battle of Waterloo
  56. 1836 - Samuel Colt invents the revolver
  57. 1837 - Samuel Morse patents the telegraph
  58. 1848 - Karl Marx publishes Communist Manifesto
  59. 1859 - Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species is published
  60. 1867 - Nikolaus August Otto develops the internal combustion engine
  61. 1869 - Opening of the Suez Canal
  62. 1876 - Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for the telephone
  63. 1878 - Thomas Edison invents the incandescent light bulb
  64. 1881 - Louis Pasteur isolates anthrax virus, develops vaccine
  65. 1893 - New Zealand women get the right to vote
  66. 1896 - first modern Olympics
  67. 1903 - Wright Brothers take flight
  68. 1905 - Einstein publishes his theory of relativity
  69. 1914 - Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassinated, triggering First World War
  70. 1917 - Russian (October) Revolution establishes first Communist state.
  71. November 11, 1918 - Armistice ends First World War
  72. October 1929 - New York stock market crashes, beginning the Great Depression
  73. 1937 - The Hindenberg explodes while docking
  74. 1938 - Z1 created, a binary, digital computer using punch tape
  75. 1938 - Otto Hahn receives Nobel Prize for splitting the atom
  76. September 1, 1939 - Germany invades Poland, starting Second World War
  77. 1942 - "Final Solution" brought forward
  78. June 6, 1944 - Allies land on beaches at Normandy.
  79. August 6 and 9, 1945 - US drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
  80. October 24, 1945 - Founding of United Nations
  81. 1957 - European Economic Community formed
  82. 1945-1989 - Cold War
  83. September 18, 1947 - CIA founded
  84. May 14, 1948 - Modern nation of Israel founded
  85. April 4, 1949 - Founding of NATO
  86. October 1, 1949 - Communists take over the government of China
  87. 1960 - Use of The Pill is approved.
  88. 1962 - Cuban Missile Crisis
  89. 1969 - Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to walk on the moon
  90. 1969 - Concorde jet breaks the sound barrier
  91. August 1969 - Woodstock music festival
  92. 1973 - U.S. Supreme Court legalizes abortion
  93. February 1, 1979 - Ayatollah Khomeini returns to Iran
  94. 1979 - Death of John Lennon
  95. 1982 - Commodore becomes the best selling computer of all time.
  96. 1989 - Fall of the Berlin Wall
  97. September 9, 2001 - Islamic fanatics attack New York and Washington with aircraft.
  98. 1991 - Fall of the Soviet Union
  99. 2004 - Facebook founded
  100. 2007 - First iPhone
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