The last 1000 years (in your opinion)...

I have a book similar to what you describe called 1000 years, 1000 people and it kind of does the same thing your discussing here. Here are my top five of the last 1000 years.

5-2 are not in order of importance. I agree with Scarlett that Guttenberg is deservedly #1.

5. The inventor(s) of the internet. In the same way that the printing press opened books and learning to all of humanity, the internet is causing us to throw open the floodgates of information to all of humanity again. What path this free flood of information of ideas has on the human race remains to be seen.

4. Charles Martel (The Hammer). If he doesn't stop the Muslim invasion of Europe at Tours we're all speaking arabic and praying five times a day towards Mecca.

3. Martin Luther introducing his ideas of the individuals ability to have a relationship with God independent of the hierarchy of the church has reshaped almost every area of life and our views of a persons relationship to God.

2. Henry Ford, Orville and Wilbur Wright, and Thomas Alva Edison. The ideas of this group has given us the American century. Hopefully we will have the courage and character as a people to insure a second American century in this 21st century.

1. Guttenberg. How desperate and sad our world would be without books.

 

Some major ones.

1. The Renaissance. The revival of classic learning, Roman engineering, and mathematics was the stage for the rise of Europe.

2. The rise of capitalism and it's consequence, the Industrial Revolution.

3. The Baconian revolution in science. Islam had come to the threshold of modern science, and stopped. Bacon went over the threshold and put and end to it.

4. Battle of Manzikert. That was the effective death knell of the Eastern Roman Empire and the opening for Western Europe. Henri Pireinne's Mahommet et Charlemagne makes clear how there would not have been a unique Western European civilization without the rise of Islam and the eclipse of Byzantium.

My purely Eurocentric opinion, of course.

 

The Printing Press (with movable type)
Discovery and harnessing of Electricity
Telecommunications
Discovery of Antibiotics
Translation of the Bible into so many languages

 

Shoot - only 1K years? I wanted to say Belisarious but he's just out of range.

From a rather military-centric point of view since I think history is generally not much more than a drama of continual conflict punctuated by all-too brief periods of peace where combatants rest up for the next war.

5. Nuclear weapons which temporarily changed the face of war.
4. AK-47, cheap reliable small arm. Just as Colt is said to have won the west, I think Kalishnakov could be said to have won the world.
3. Mao Tse Tung (influenced by the ancient Sun Tzu) for making nuclear weapons obsolete before they were conceived with _On Guerrilla War_. The fact that some still have not caught on that nukes are obsolete does not make it less true.
2. The Reformation which gave rise to the great democracies.
1. Gutenberg who provided the means for the spread of the reformation thinking.

 

I was thinking too - Renaissance and Reformation were both mentioned - I think they were both equally great events - the Renaissance being the evil twin of the Reformation.

The Renaissance sprouted from humanist roots and the Reformation from theistic roots. One represented the ascendancy of man as the chief end of all things while the other emphasized the rule of God in all things.

 

Charles Martel fought the Battle of Tours c.732, which is obviously not in the last 1000 years.

 

I go for information technologies.

Guttenberg and the printing press are a major step.

Automation of the printing press

Newspapers and magazines

Library systems

Electronic media and world wide web

 

Mr. Mills forgive my error. You have shamed me beyond my ability to comprehend. Congratulations you win a prize.

 

5. W. Francis Mcbeth whom I consider to be the greatest living composer of band music today anywhere in the world.
4. Nuclear Technology
3. The United States of America
2. Ronald Reagan
1. Democracy (Right to fair, free elections, right to free speech, and the right to emmigrate).

 

Charles Martel fought the Battle of Tours c.732, which is obviously not in the last 1000 years. </font>[/QUOTE]However, along the same lines - the Albanian leader George Kastrioti "Scanderbeg" who's guerrilla tactics kept the Ottoman Turks far too busy at the height of their power to plunge past the Balkans. He is within the past 1K and fits the mold of Charles Martel.