Seven Eras: A Walk Through the Whole of History

Prehistory has no single agreed starting point, only a shared sense that the human past runs back further than any date can pin down, and it ends only when a region's own written record begins.

The first cities, states and writing systems appear, and the era ends in the Bronze Age Collapse, a decades-long unraveling historians still argue over the causes of.

Greece and Rome dominate a period whose traditional 476 CE end date, the deposition of the last Western Roman emperor, an entire field of Late Antiquity scholarship now treats as too sharp a line.

The medieval period runs from Rome's fall to Constantinople's, a full circle of city falling to empire falling to empire, with its own end date almost as contested as its beginning.

Whether it starts at Constantinople's fall or Columbus's crossing depends on whether the historian telling the story is centering Europe or the wider world.

From the French Revolution to the Second World War, sometimes called the Long Nineteenth Century, with some historians carving out 1914 to 1945 as its own era of crisis.

The postwar era, still running: the only one of the seven with no end-year fact, because by definition it has not ended.