History of the world

World history has never fitted in my head very well. I usually think of it as a travelling promotional roadshow, always happening somewhere, visiting some places more often than others, but never in more than one place at a time.

Let us consider the years up to and of World War I. In the early 1910s, History mainly happened to the Suffragettes in West London, before decamping to central Europe in time for the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. It spent the next few years in France and Belgium, with a citybreak in Dublin for Easter 1916 and a few months in Russia the following year, returning to London in 1918. There the Suffragettes, who had been patiently waiting for another go at History all this time, were rewarded by the 1918 Reform Act.

To widen my view of the world, I started this spreadsheet where events can nestle side by side, sometimes making excuses for each other (the first ever nuclear reactor and Mother Courage both created in 1941), sometimes shaking their heads in dismay (Byron enters the House of Lords as Napoleon enters Moscow), sometimes blissfully ignoring each other (the 1914 deaths of the aforementioned Archduke in Sarajevo, and Martha the last ever Passenger Pigeon in Cincinatti Zoo).