What Country Has The Most Interesting History?

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov


See thread title for which is relevant to this thread.

Gee, thanks for pointing that out for me doc.

[:) Smiley]

Were the aborigines all one culture or did they have seperate groups? Unless they were all united under one empire, they'd surely have their own history.

[MrFun]

There was no aboriginal empire.

[JimmyCracksCorn]

Originally posted by Smiley
Were the aborigines all one culture or did they have seperate groups? Unless they were all united under one empire, they'd surely have their own history.

Very separate. Look up Australian Pygmies for an example.

[JimmyCracksCorn]

Originally posted by Boshko

That's such bunk. Australian megafauna went extinct in massive numbers soon after humans started showing up there. Same goes for the Americas. You don't see too many North American camels or South American giant ground sloths anymore. Or giant carnivorous kangaroos for that matter.

True, but to take the argument further... the reason why aborginal and native North American groups were so conservationist and balanced with nature is precisely because they were so reckless when they first arrived... tens of thousands of years ago. I don't think that takes away from their particular view of their place in nature later on.

[Harry Tuttle]

The UK and Italy are a toss up. Ones got modern empire building the others got Rome. More detailed info on the UK of course.

[OzzyKP]

My vote definitely goes to Italy/Rome. That one penninsula gets the birth and center of the Roman Empire, PLUS the Reinassance. Those are two of the largest influences/events in western history. Same spot. That's big. Plus the center of the Catholic church, which dominated Europe for 1500 years and still exerted hella of an influence since then.

Basically since like 200 BC (or whenever), Italy has been behind much of the big things going on in the world.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by OzzyKP
Basically since like 200 BC (or whenever), Italy has been behind much of the big things going on in the world.

Well, except the last 300 years or so.

[OzzyKP]

Reunification is interesting. Mussolini was...around.

Plus lots of people riding around on scooters with no helmet on going "caio"

[Chemical Ollie]

May you live in interesting times!
Ancient Chinese Curse

[Sprayber]

I guess I should throw my own list into the mix.

England
India
China
France
Germany



I brought this up because I started reading a book on Irish history last week and it got me to thinking that I really never sat down to actually read Irish history. All the Irish history I had previously read came from my English history and that amounted to accounts as each English King made his symbolic attempt to settle the Irish question once and for all. Never had I actually read the history from the Irish side. At various times there were numerous forces in Ireland all trying to take what they could. It sheds a little light onto the current situation.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Boshko

That's such bunk. Australian megafauna went extinct in massive numbers soon after humans started showing up there. Same goes for the Americas. You don't see too many North American camels or South American giant ground sloths anymore. Or giant carnivorous kangaroos for that matter.

Yes, but it hasn't been conclusively proved so far that humans were directly responsible:

'In Australia, only a single extinction, Genyornis, had been precisely dated to follow soon after human colonisation about 50,000 years ago.

However, dating the demise of species has been difficult since the standard tool of palaeobiologists, radiocarbon dating, is unreliable for samples older than 40,000 years. So it was not clear if Homo sapiens was at the scene of the crime at the right time to trigger most extinctions.

Ayliffe and Richard Roberts of the University of Melbourne in Victoria and their colleagues used two independent methods to date the sediments buried with the fossils, rather than the fossils themselves. '

http://www.newscientist.com/dailynews/news.jsp?id=ns9999848

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_911000/911408.stm

History is also written by the winners- and the winners in the 19th Century were the industrializing nations. It's not like African, North and South American and Oceanic indigenous peoples have had a consistently good or unbiased press. Look at the way that people in the West treated African scultpure- clearly such 'primitive' types couldn't possibly have created such refined and skilled art, it 'must' have been a lost Roman or Greek or Phoenician or Ptolemaic colony.

Even the impact of Alexander the Great on the history of India is overstated, because of course it's so important in the Graeco-Roman classical tradition taught in so much of the West and its colonies.

Also, any African indigenous influence on Egyptian civilization is discounted or belittled, in favour of an Asian or Semitic or Mediterranean origin- this despite the clear links with earlier civilizations indigenous to the pre-desert Saharan area.

The Kooris had/have an oral history/culture- like much of sub-Saharan Africa and the Celts. We have a cultural bias towards believing written history and devaluing oral history- as if somehow written texts are always a guarantee of objective 'truth'

Australian history is interesting to me as an outsider and someone who has lived there- I suspect Australian history isn't interesting to some people because they don't actually know much about it.

Australian indigenous history is 'terra nullius' because for the most part the colonizing power wasn't interested in it- and why should they be, when they were doing their best to dispossess the people whose history it was?


Anyway- I choose northern Italy and Iran as most interesting for me at the moment.


Least interesting- San Serriffe.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by OzzyKP
Basically since like 200 BC (or whenever), Italy has been behind much of the big things going on in the world.

That's too Euro-centric. If you look at the entire world, Europe was just a backwater spot, until 1800's or so.

[Moral Hazard]

For me it's America because it's the one I know the most about. The thing with history usually the more you know the more interesting it gets.

[Drake Tungsten]

If you look at the entire world, Europe was just a backwater spot, until 1800's or so.

Yeah, Europe didn't have any effect on the world prior to 1800...