100 Events That Changed the World

Author: Deng Shusheng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-05-01
Features: "The outside world is wonderful." This is a popular saying in Chinese society after the reform and opening-up. Its meaning is not only to express the desire to travel and explore outside but also, on a deeper level, a yearning and pursuit of understanding the world. In reality, being blind to the world and ignorant of current affairs has been criticized. The Ming scholar Wang Fuzhi sighed after reading history: "If one's ears are limited to what they hear, they lose their natural wisdom; if one's eyes are limited to what they see, they lose their natural clarity." The era of closing doors to live out one's days is long gone. The purpose of the "World 100 Series" is to make an effort to help readers understand the outside world. Taking the five aspects of major world events, wars, figures, works, and cultures as the framework, it outlines a rough picture of the development of human history. The development of human history is a long and complex process of negating oneself, overcoming oneself, and gradually improving oneself. How many figures have played positive and negative roles on the stage of world history? How many major events, both accidental and inevitable, have occurred in the long river of history? How many wars that have advanced or hindered historical development can be recorded in books? How many chapters of books and classics that have survived disasters can be counted? How can the colorful and diverse ancient and modern civilizations of humanity be contained within artificially divided categories? With 100 as the fixed number, the series inevitably leaves much to be desired. Gathering like grains of sand from the vast ocean, and also limited by the length of the books, the five books included in the series—"100 Figures Who Influenced the World," "100 Events That Influenced the World," "100 Wars That Influenced the World," "100 Books That Influenced the World," and "100 Cultures That Influenced the World"—can only select 100 relevant topics from foreign perspectives that have influenced the world, with each article being around 3,000 words, and each book being over 300,000 words. The five books together total over 1.5 to 1.6 million words, though not a massive work, it is still quite substantial. "100 Events That Influenced the World" spans more than 5,000 years, from ancient scripts that emerged over 3,000 years ago to the information revolution of today. It includes major events from ancient, modern, and contemporary world history. The book features many stories that remain historically fascinating despite their distant origins. For example, the ancient Greeks' "Trojan Horse" strategy, Greece's "Golden Age," the short-lived transcontinental campaigns of Alexander the Great, and the "barbarians" who destroyed the Roman Empire and ushered in a new era of world history. Modern history begins with the execution of King Charles I by the British bourgeoisie, where the emerging bourgeoisie of the world staged grander tragedies and comedies than the feudal class. This includes the rise of the French Enlightenment in the 18th century, the independence of the United States from Britain, and the 1848 Revolution that swept across Europe. Contemporary history opens with the birth of socialist state regimes in the midst of the great conflict, followed by turbulent world situations: Mussolini's fascist forces seizing power in Italy, the Japanese fascist soldiers' "February 26 Incident" armed mutiny, and the outbreak of World War II. The post-war period ushered in a new stage of modern history, with a dizzying array of events: the ups and downs of the United Nations, the assassination of Kennedy in Dallas, the upheaval in Eastern Europe, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, the wars and peace in the Middle East, and the Balkan powder keg once again smoldering. A distinctive feature of this book is the significant emphasis placed on new international phenomena, such as the United Nations peacekeeping forces, HIV/AIDS becoming the plague of the 20th century, three technological revolutions, humanity's landing on the moon, and the "information revolution" that heralds the dawn of a new technological era at the turn of the century.