This week, as some history professionals protested a new suggestion from the College Board that the AP World History curriculum begin in the year 1450, TIME's director of data journalism, Chris Wilson, had a question: if everything before that year is eliminated, which historical figures will be cut from that class?
He checked against a few well-established rankings of the most influential people in history, and found that the list of those who could be cut from class includes people like Joan of Arc, Genghis Khan and Jesus. (The College Board isn't proposing that students should cease learning about those people altogether, but rather, that those figures wouldn't be included in the scope of Advanced Placement World History.) You can click here to see the full list — and be reminded of just how long the story of world history really is.
Here's more of the history that made news this week:
Sensational headlines dominated coverage of Lorena Bobbitt's case in 1993, but the incident also raised awareness about domestic violence
FROM THE TIME VAULT
Today in 2004: Bill Clinton Explains Himself
“Clinton's theory is that he has always lived ‘parallel’ lives. As a child, he hid the deep anger he felt over his stepfather's drunken violence behind a relentlessly sunny facade. He is brutal about his childhood failings. He describes himself as ‘fat, uncool and hardly popular with the girls.’ He writes that he ‘tended to make enemies effortlessly’ and that he was so clumsy, he outgrew his fear of riding a bike without training wheels only as a college student at Oxford. The presidency, he says, was an unconscious return to the self-destructive patterns of his childhood—private anger over the Starr investigation, public optimism about the work of state.” (June 28, 2004)
“The Commonwealth over which Elizabeth II presides is bigger, richer and more populous than that fabulous Empire welded together by the strong-willed ministers of her great-great-grandmother, Victoria. Born of a snug union of Britain and Dominions of European stock, it now has hundreds of millions of brown, black and yellow men. It covers one quarter of the earth's land mass, contains one-fourth of the world's people, and carries on within its confines one-third of the world's trade." (June 29, 1959)
“Under a hot sun broken by violent summer showers, Kosovo is waking to a midsummer's nightmare. The sickly sweet smell of decaying flesh hangs in invisible clouds across the province, and the ground offers up body parts. Bits of ashen bone—a thigh, a rib cage—and chunks of roasted flesh litter the floors of burned-out houses. Corpses, left where they fell, putrefy in fields and farmyards amid the buzzing of flies and the howling of stray dogs. As the first of Kosovo's Albanian refugees stream back across the borders or down from hiding in the hills, they are discovering just how pitiless a charnel house Serbian forces made of Kosovo.” (June 28, 1999)
Important Steps Michael E. Ruane at the Washington Post has the story behind a newly discovered video clip of FDR walking in 1935 — a significant finding, as polio left the President mostly dependent on a wheelchair.
Gross Indecency A new book review from Katrina Gulliver for The American Conservative explains just how dangerous eating could be in the era before food-safety standards.
Musical Journey The New York Times and Farah Nayeri present a guide to London’s history as seen through its blue English Heritage Trust plaques about musicians and composers.
Professor Profile In her Baltimore Sun obituary by Jacques Kelly, read how historian Willie Lee Rose helped shape the way we see the post-Civil War period.
Tick Tock James MacDonald summarizes research into the history of Lyme disease for JSTOR Daily.
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