Disputed Statements

Taiping Rebellion, Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll, High Estimate

Currently States 70000000.000000

Demographic historian Cao Shuji's 2001 reconstruction of Qing-era population records put the total toll as high as 70 million; Stephen Platt reports this figure alongside the standard 20 to 30 million range while noting how uncertain any single total is once Qing record-keeping collapsed across the war zones. Both bounds draw criticism, the low end for undercounting indirect famine and disease deaths in areas that stopped keeping records, the high end for extrapolating too far from incomplete regional data; this entry records 70 million as the documented upper bound rather than a preferred figure.

Source Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War, Stephen R. Platt

Teutonic Order, Organizations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Dissolved

Currently States 1809

1809 is the year Napoleon secularized the Teutonic Order's remaining German territorial state, ending it as a political and military power. This is not the end of the Teutonic Order itself: the religious order survived the loss of its state and continues today as a Roman Catholic institute based in Vienna, now devoted chiefly to charitable and hospital work rather than knighthood or territorial rule. The dissolved-year recorded here describes the STATE, not the still-living religious order.

Source Wikipedia: Teutonic Order tier 2

The Age of Discovery, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 1418

Conventionally opened with the start of Portuguese maritime exploration in the early fifteenth century; the exact opening year varies by source.

Source Wikipedia tier 2

The Age of Discovery, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1620

Different historians close the period anywhere from the early to the late seventeenth century.

Source Wikipedia tier 2

The Ancient Near East and Bronze Age World, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Description

Currently States The Ancient Near East and Bronze Age world covers the roughly two thousand years, from about 3200 to 1200 BCE, in which the first cities, states, writing systems and empires arose in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean. It takes its name from bronze, an alloy of copper and tin that was the era's dominant material for tools and weapons, and whose trade networks linked civilizations from Britain to Afghanistan. Sumerian city states, Egypt under the pharaohs, the Hittite empire in Anatolia, Babylon under Hammurabi, and Mycenaean Greece all flourished within this period, developing law codes, monumental architecture, organized religion and long distance diplomacy conducted partly in cuneiform, a shared diplomatic script. The era ends with the Bronze Age Collapse, a still debated wave of destructions, migrations and state failures around 1200 to 1150 BCE that brought down or badly weakened almost every major power of the eastern Mediterranean within a few decades.

The Ancient Near East and Bronze Age World, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States -3200

Marked conventionally by the earliest Sumerian cuneiform writing, around 3200 BCE, the same regional boundary that closes prehistory. Historians disagree on whether the boundary belongs at the invention of writing or at the emergence of the first true cities somewhat earlier.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica

The Ancient Near East and Bronze Age World, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States -1200

The Bronze Age Collapse unfolded over decades rather than a single year, roughly 1200 to 1150 BCE, and its causes, including drought, invasion by the so called Sea Peoples, internal revolt and the breakdown of trade networks, remain actively debated among historians and archaeologists.

Source The Cambridge Ancient History

The Angevin Empire, Polities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1204

The loss of Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Touraine to Philip II of France in 1204 is the year most historians treat as the empire's practical end, since it broke the personal union of England with its continental heartland. Aquitaine itself remained an English holding long afterward, and some historians instead close the Angevin period at John's 1216 death or at the final loss of Poitou in 1224.

Source John, King of England (Britannica)

The Black Death, Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll, Low Estimate (%)

Currently States 30.000000

Historian estimates of Black Death mortality across Europe range from roughly 30 to 60 percent of the population; this entry records the commonly cited low end of that scholarly range.

Source Wikipedia: Black Death tier 2

The Black Death, Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll, High Estimate (%)

Currently States 60.000000

Historian estimates of Black Death mortality across Europe range from roughly 30 to 60 percent of the population; this entry records the commonly cited high end of that scholarly range.

Source Wikipedia: Black Death tier 2

The British Empire, Polities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 1583

1583 (Humphrey Gilbert claim of Newfoundland) is one commonly cited starting point; historians also date the Empire from the 1600 East India Company charter or the 1707 Act of Union, since expansion was gradual and multi-stranded rather than founded at one stroke.

Source British Empire (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

The British Empire, Polities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1997

1997, the handover of Hong Kong, is the conventional symbolic close, but decolonization was gradual from Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947 onward, and Britain still holds fourteen British Overseas Territories, so no single end date is agreed.

Source British Empire (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

The Bronze Age Collapse, Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Year

Currently States -1150

Historians disagree about the relative weight of drought, invasion, earthquake and systems failure as causes, and about whether collapse is the right description for a process that unfolded over several decades rather than as a single catastrophe.

Source The Cambridge Ancient History

The Byzantine Empire, Polities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 330

330 CE, when Constantine founded Constantinople, is a common starting point, though some historians instead date the Byzantine Empire's distinct identity to 395 CE, the permanent administrative division of the Roman Empire, or even to 476 CE, the fall of the west.

Source The Cambridge Medieval History

The Cold War, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 1947

The Truman Doctrine, announced 12 March 1947, is the conventional marker for open confrontation, but the wartime allies' cooperation had already broken down over Eastern Europe and Iran in 1945 and 1946, and some historians date the Cold War's origins to the differing occupation policies both powers adopted immediately after Germany's surrender in 1945.

Source We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Gaddis, 1997), John Lewis Gaddis

The Cold War, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1991

The Soviet Union's formal dissolution on 26 December 1991 is the conventional end date, though the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and the joint US-Soviet declaration that December that the Cold War was over are also widely treated as its effective close.

Source We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Gaddis, 1997), John Lewis Gaddis

The Contemporary Period, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 1945

1945 is the most common starting point, but some historians instead date the contemporary period from 1989 or 1991, the end of the Cold War, treating 1945 to 1991 as a transitional late twentieth century era in its own right.

Source The Oxford History of the Twentieth Century

The Crusades, Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Year

Currently States 1095

The narrower and more common scholarly periodization runs from Urban II's November 1095 call at Clermont to the May 1291 fall of Acre. A broader camp of historians extends the crusading era well past 1291, to the Baltic crusades against pagan Prussia and Lithuania, the fifteenth century Hussite crusades within Bohemia, and Ottoman-era crusades into the sixteenth century, since the papacy kept preaching and granting crusading indulgences for wars far beyond the Holy Land. This entry records the narrower Levantine window, 1095, and names the broader camp rather than adopting it.

Source God's War: A New History of the Crusades, Christopher Tyerman

The Crusades, Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll, Low Estimate

Currently States 500000.000000

Historians of the crusades are explicit that they distrust any single precise figure spanning nearly two centuries of intermittent campaigns across three continents. This lower bound reflects the low end of the spread found across general reference estimates rather than a scholarly consensus count.

Source God's War: A New History of the Crusades, Christopher Tyerman

The Crusades, Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll, High Estimate

Currently States 2000000.000000

The higher end of the same spread, contested by an order of magnitude against the lower bound, which is itself the point: no single total for the crusading era commands scholarly consensus. Indirect deaths, in the societies the campaigns disrupted, likely matched or exceeded combat deaths.

Source God's War: A New History of the Crusades, Christopher Tyerman