People

See http://www.karangill.com/interesting-people/

Events

• Balfour Declaration
• Great Race of Mercy
• Famines in India during British Rule
• The Hindenburg Fire – Make sure you both view the newsreel and hear the radio account.
• L’Affaire Dreyfus
• Loving vs Virginia
• Mussolini’s Transformation of Rome and [2]
• Pentium FDIV bug
• Plano Real and [2]
• Last voyage of the Karluk

Violence

• Battle of Bannockburn
• Battle for Castle Itter
• Battle of Talas – Allowed Islam in Central Asia, papermaking in West,
• Baghdad, Mongol Sack of
• Sabra and Shatila Massacre
• Budyonnovsk Hospital Hostage Crisis
• Jallianwallah Bagh Massacre
• Port Arthur, Siege of
• 1938 Yellow River flood

Entities

• Costa Rica – Mesoamerica’s richest nation has no standing army, 100% renewable energy, and lead the world environmentally.
• Great Raft – 250 km long logjam
• Kerala school of astronomy and Mathematics
• Manson Family
• Tonle Sap – Largest freshwater lake in Asia. Replenished every monsoon by flow reversal from the Mekong. Complex hydro-ecological system that drove the Angkor civilization.

Organizations

• 3M: Scotch tape, post-its, and everything in between.
• 7/11: Nondescript but omnipresent. Try their stores in Japan.
• AMD: Battling with Intel, AMD has risen from the ashes several times.

Artifacts

Criteria: Beauty, craftsmanship, expense of raw materials, several owners, lost to time and rediscovered

• Dunhuang Manuscripts: 4th to 11 centuries; Buddhist, Daoism, Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeism, and more;  Khotanese, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Tangut, Tibetan, Old Uyghur language, Hebrew, Old Turkic
• Faberge Eggs
• Golden Stool of the Ashanti
• Peacock Throne
• Phra Bang Buddha: “A symbol of the right to rule Laos, as only a commendable and virtuous government deserves to be caretaker of such a sacred image.”
• Tutakhamen’s Mask
• Samarkand Kufic Quran: Oldest Koran in existence. 8th or 9th century manuscript Quran written in the territory of modern Iraq in the Kufic script. Kept in Tashkent.

Unanswered Questions

Questions that fixated us but lay unanswered for centures.

• How did reproduction occur?
• How was silk made?
• Was the Earth round?

Where was the source of the Nile?