Previously on the OnlineClock.net blog, we took a look back through history at some famous dates and times and made note of some of the critical events that have helped shape our culture and world. That blog post sparked a lot of “where were you when…” conversations around our offices and homes, but it also birthed one pressing question: What did the people of yesteryear talk about?
Approximately 18 billion years ago, there was an astronomical event that set this whole world in motion. Between the time of that Big Bang and today, several millennia of history has passed. This blog post isn’t about what our grandparents spoke about. This post isn’t a bit of nostalgia for your great-grandparents. This blog post is about historic events that our ancestors remembered and that we still talk about. We put out heads together and thought about history and the repercussions of certain critical events.
We collectively thought about the “death of thought” in 399BC when Socrates was forced to drink Hemlock tea. Socrates challenged the establishment. He was beloved by some and the disdain of others. The lessons he offered are still being taught, debated, and discussed today. One can only imagine what other intellectual gems would have come out of his mind in 400BC had he been allowed to live.
The death of a single man, although a great one, is oft remembered by academics and others and yet a devastating earthquake that hit Northern Africa in 217BC is barely a blip on anyone’s radar. This earthquake destroyed 100 cities and killed approximately 50,000 people. Even without modern technology an event of this magnitude would have been discussed all over the world.
It's Julius Caesar, please. Don't call him Orange.
Sometimes the death of a single man is felt all over the world especially when one factors in the imperialistic tendencies of ancient societies. Abraham Lincoln wasn’t the only leader who should have skipped the theatre. In 44BC Julius Caesar fell to the blades of rival and jealous senators while he held an unread parchment that contained a warning of the devious plot. (Alanis Morissette has nothing on Julius Caesar when it comes to irony.)
Rome never properly recovered from Caesar’s death and the social structure of the society was in shambles when the stadium collapsed in 27AD. Anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 people died because a contractor cut some corners on the foundation of the stadium. To this day, civil engineers will look to that historic note as a reminder to do things right the first time. The Roman engineers learned their lesson in just enough time to have the city wiped out by a massive fire in 64AD.
History is littered with important events that fascinate scholars. The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79AD was an ancient tragedy and a modern goldmine for archeologists. In the third century, the library in Alexandria transmogrified from “intellectual Mecca” to rubble.
The real Mecca experienced a brutal massacre in 930AD when a Muslim reformist sect, “Karmathians”, rebelled against the orthodox ruling class. 30,000 people were killed during that attack.
Genghis Khan: Some say he knew how to party.
For centuries, natural disaster, assassination plots, and crusades filled our history books with death and destruction. Genghis Kahn dominated the late 1200s with his expansive “you’re either with us or against us” leadership style. His armada bore witness to a moment in history that ingrained itself in our language. Most of us don’t realize that a modern word came from August 14, 1281. Khan had taken over most of the mainland. He had a massive empire under his thumb, but he wanted an island that had eluded his blade. An armada of about 900 ships and 40,000 warriors set out to conquer Japan. A plague spread over the Mongol ships and reinforcements arrived in June. Over three thousand ships battered Japanese fortifications. The Japanese fought back as best they could even though they were at a technological disadvantage and were grossly outnumbered.
On August 14, 1281 a “divine wind” (AKA “kamikaze”) coated the waters off the coast of Japan with a fine mist. The winds picked up and the seas turned rocky. Kahn’s armada found themselves fighting during an epic typhoon. Once the kamikaze subsided only about 200 ships were seaworthy enough to limp back to the mainland. In a few more centuries a man-made “divine wind” would be used to attack Pearl Harbor. Whenever we reference kamikaze pilots or kamikaze tactics, we’re remembering Genghis Kahn.
To the batcave! It's Vlad the Impaler.
Another historic moment and figure that seeped into our culture when we weren’t looking was a young prince. On April 2, 1459, a young prince entered a small town and ordered his soldiers to start impaling people and those were the prince’s orders on a good day. The atrocities birthed from the mind of Vlad II (better known as “Vlad the Impaler“) served as the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s fictional vampire Dracula. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the sine qua non of modern day Vampiric lore. On many levels it’s rather tragic to know that the current “sparkling” love-sick Vampires of modern fiction are a descendant of a man who’d nail hats to heads when people would refuse to remove them or host a banquet surrounded by burning and impaled victims.
Vlad II isn’t the only historic figure or event that has been watered down to a punch line in history. An event that began in 1478 fed Monty Python an unexpected joke. It’s an unexpected joke, because “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” For hundreds of years, people were tortured and questioned in a world-wide “Torquemada”. Torture as a means of gaining confessions has, sadly, not fallen out of fashion.
The Inquisition, regrettably, wasn’t the only time someone tried to wipe out an entire religious group. The German Holocaust of course killed millions and millions of Jews and must never be forgotten.
It’s impossible to cover all of history in a single blog post. It’s not even possible to cover all of the events that have modern day ramifications. The Irish Potato Famine resulted in numerous deaths and birthed a strong Irish culture that’s still alive in the USA. When Castro gained power in Cuba, the USA gained Cuban enclave communities.
These are some of the historic events that are still remembered and felt centuries after the fact. We like to just call them “Famous Dates And Times in Ancient History“.
The steadfast hands of clocks keep ticking.
They keep circling the numbers and march on into the future.
Pages of calendars flutter past and all we can do is gaze at our clocks and wonder: what will be remembered in the year 2500 or 3000?
Will we still be talking about the terrorists attacks on September 11, 2001?
Will we be talking about the earthquake in Haiti or China? Will there be a plague, famine, or vicious dictator that forever shapes history?
Let’s all pull together and hope that our great-great-great grandchildren remember the cure for cancer and AIDS just as we remember September 28, 1928 when Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin!
Whatever soon-to-become famous dates and times come at us in the future, rest assured that the Online Alarm Clock will be here to show you the time and wake you up or remind you.
P.S. – The image at the very top of this blog post and the one below are of course taken from the cartoon segments with Mr. Peabody & Sherman from the old Rocky & Bullwinkle T.V. Show. We hope that at least some of you remember their hilariously cool journeys back in time with their Wayback Machine! They’ve served as our inspiration for this blog post. 
