What is the most major historical event/person/etc that has been forgotten or is inadequately recognized?

reconstruction isn't forgotten but it's definitely widely misunderstood.

*poker face*

i meant uh "who now remembers the armenians?" of course.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington

xpost the turkish party line is that the armenian genocide was largely made up or least exaggerated to make the turks look bad and jeez it's not like nobody else ever did anything bad not that the turks did anything bad get off our backs already it was like 10,000 armenians tops.

they get mentioned a fair bit. probably more than anything else mentioned on this thread so far. but no, it's not one of america's proudest moments.

well at least its mentioned in american history books, and the victims got an official apology and compensation from the US government. unlike in japan where war atrocities are written out of textbooks, and where the government hasn't made any official apologies for war crimes and kidnapping/forced-prostitution of korean, chinese, filipino women.

Or, alternately, pass the buck on to the Young Turks.

The question doesn't really take into account that most nations are pretty bad at remembering other places' history. What's interesting is stuff from your own country's history that gets overlooked. Examples - the "Glorious" Revolution of 1688 and the events surrounding the Union of England and Scotland don't seem to have much resonance for the British (not Irish) public, considering they were probably the key events in shaping our present day political system.

The big question is, when are we gonna get our first Turkish Googler going "Armenians? Who us? Nah, never happened mate."

What would you have them say? I don't think it's forgotten, it's just an effect that leads towards forgetting all these "brown people dying" incidents, that we're not likely to talk about the people involved all that much anyway. I think it's definitely on the record, if you asked people about the worst natural disaster of the last ten years, I don't think they'll be saying "Katrina, no wait, there's something else... no, it's gone". Though it's come loose in time a bit, it might not feature on a list of Winter 2004 news.

Examples - the "Glorious" Revolution of 1688 and the events surrounding the Union of England and Scotland don't seem to have much resonance for the British (not Irish) public, considering they were probably the key events in shaping our present day political system.

Is it actually true that schools are taught that 1066 is the last 'real' invasion?

I think that eg All Quiet On The Western Front (as well as "Explain me WWII") will keep WWI in mind to a certain extent, far more than the Armenian massacre.

I'd suggest the Santa Clara judgement, interpretation of which has lead to corporations being considered legally people.

I, on the other hand, would strongly disagree with this. The tsumani got extensive coverage at the time, and two things "helped" that. First, it was a relatively unique natural disaster -- when was the last time there was a tsunami anywhere near that magnitude? Centuries, at least. Second, it wasn't like, say, that earthquake in Iran a few years ago that killed tens of thousands of people -- it happened in an "open" country (more than one, in fact, which also helped), so there was plenty of opportunity to both GET film of the actual event and subsquently report from the scene.

I think people's willingness to be cynical about their own society gets the better of themselves sometimes...

I don't know if schoolkids are taught that 1066 was the last invasion of Britain, but it's the kind of asinine "fact" that gets bandied about when you're a kid.

The Civil War gets plenty coverage, including all those Sealed Knot folks that like to go and play soldiers every weekend. But the stuff that happened post-Civil War - say from the middle of the 17th to the middle of the 18th Century - has had far more effect on the current political system of the British Isles and is comparatively unfamiliar to the English.

Not to be pedantic, but I think of the Armenian genocide as a part of World War I.

Perhaps the Armenian genocide is the most famous "forgotten genocide" in history. I have heard people mention it many times, but always in the context of how no one talks about it.

But yeah, history is shaped by trends, and the current world situation affects how we view the events of the past. When the Armenian genocide occurred, the word genocide did not exist. If you talk about it now, the whole history of the holocaust and the rise of the concept of genocide will frame how the events are viewed.

Oddly enough, one of the first big internet spamming incidents involved someone doing almost that - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdar_Argic

Also on the natural-disaster front, the strongest recorded earthquakes in the lower U.S. were not in California but southeast Missouri in 1811 and 1812 -- the area wasn't too heavily populated then (mainly Frenchies, a few English farmers and Native Americans), but the quakes (at least 8.0, probably much more) rang church bells in Boston. A similar quake today would be disastrous for Memphis & St. Louis.

http://asms.k12.ar.us/armem/richards/

haha it's well known as a restaurant in nyc.

As for Armenia, I'm always fascinated by the way it's against the law in Austria to say that one holocaust never happened, and also against the law in another country to say that another holocaust DID happen...

http://cbs2.com/topstories/local_story_114211612.html

Johannes Kepler, whose fame is dwarfed by e.g. Copernicus and Galileo, proved that planets travel in elliptical orbits. The revered Greek scientific tenet of circular orbits had persisted for 2000 years. Kepler destroyed that notion once and for all. He also attempted to explain *why* the planets move as they do (the concept of a "force" was revolutionary for his time), thereby helping to re-incorporate dynamics (to go along with kinematics) into physics and astronomy after nearly 2000 years.

John Harrison solved the longitude problem by inventing the first reliable maritime clock. The longitude problem went unsolved for decades and was probably the largest science and engineering undertaking in human history to that point.

In case anyone is thinking about it: don't bother mentioning Rosalind Franklin here. She didn't do shit.

(this might partly be a local thing - Harrison lived only a few miles from me for most of his life, and at least one of his surviving clocks is nearby too, still in its original location and still working with virtually no maintenance needed)

(Kepler, incidentally, was an important precursor of Newton - he noticed the link between planetary orbital distances and periods which implied that the force causing it obeyed the inverse square law)

* http://www.genocideevents.com/index.php?file=event&ic_id=1460&type=state
seems to be concetrated in burbank and wilshire but also 'little armenia'.

Ooh, an opportunity to tell the story of my great-great-great uncle Edward Butler, who exhibited plans for a gas-powered three-wheeled motor vehicle in 1884, two years before Karl Benz received a patent for a very similar vehicle, generally considered the first car, and a year before Daimler's motorcycle. Butler's Petrol Cycle was hindered by the fact that in Britain at the time there was a law called the Red Flag Act, which said that any such vehicle travelling on British roads has to have a man walking and waving a red flag in front of it. So he couldn't test it properly and in the end it was sold for scrap.

http://pages.zoom.co.uk/elvis/butler.html

Of course, I'm not saying this was a major overlooked historical event, Butler was a failed contemporary of Daimler and Benz and not the "true" inventor of the car or anything. But luck often has a lot to do with who gets the credit, I suppose. And why I am not an heiress.

How could I have forgotten that!

That's on a par with one of my favourite Deaths Of Great Scientists: Sir Francis Bacon, died of pneumonia after trying to invent frozen food (by stuffing a chicken with snow)

If memory serves it was a village in France or Italy that was completely wiped out by a landslide. Killed a couple thousand people.

Actually, the term "communism" came before the Paris Commune.

Goodwyn Barmby coined the word "communist" in 1840, after the French word communisme, while discussing the egalitarianism associated with Gracchus Babeuf and Abbé Constant. Barmby, who founded the London Communist Propaganda Society in 1841, was a correspondent of Friedrich Engels.

- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism

Paris Commune was in 1871.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_Race_Riot

The incident and a semester of exposure burned into Tsurumi's memory a disturbing view of the future president. "His strong prejudices soon set him apart.... Most business students are conservative, but they are not inhumane or unprincipled. George Bush came across as totally lacking compassion, with no sense of history, completely devoid of social responsibility and unconcerned with the welfare of others."

awesome

paul mcgrath

specifically paul mcgrath vs italy