Worth it in part

The words algebra and algorithm both trace to one Baghdad scholar, yet almost nothing about his personal life survives beyond a bibliographer's secondhand book list.

1193

Columbus died still insisting he had reached Asia, and the continent he crossed the Atlantic to find ended up named after a different Italian entirely.

Almost everything known about the king who built Angkor Thom comes from monuments he commissioned himself, celebrating a ruler no independent chronicle ever describes.

Freud built an entire theory of the mind from case histories whose patients he sometimes treated with the same certainty he applied to his conclusions about them.

Simon Bolivar founded a union of South American republics meant to outlast him, then spent his final years being voted out of the offices he had created for it one by one, a dissolution the record notes without fully explaining.

Deciphered in the 1830s, the emperor's own carved words went unattributed to him for another eighty years until one inscription finally named its author.

938

732

1776

A modest twenty ounces of gold near a creek in 1858 built a territory within three years, and the same rush of settlers set in motion the pressures that led, six years later, to a massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people at Sand Creek.

1997

Historians cannot agree when it started, cannot agree when it ended, and disagree over whether it was even one movement rather than several running in parallel.

1993

1431

A debt dispute over oil prices ended with a forty-two nation coalition and burning oil fields still visible from space.

800

Working-class Parisians did most of the street fighting, a wealthy cousin of the deposed king took the throne instead of the crowd's own choice, and the arrangement pleased almost no one who had actually fought for it.

1998

The Roman Curia has been rewritten by nearly every kind of pope going, and the latest version, in force since 2022, quietly let a nun run one of its departments for the first time.

Rome's own historians wrote its early conquest of Italy centuries after the fact, and modern archaeology increasingly disagrees with the story they told about it.

The Roaring Twenties is a name applied after the fact to a decade that farmers, miners and most Black Americans experienced very differently from the cities that gave the label its evidence.

A contest with no agreed winner, because the two sides were competing for different kinds of proof: American landings against Soviet firsts.

1842

1763

1783

1957

The betrayed governor, the outraged father, the defiant king's speech: none appear in any source written near the actual conquest, only in accounts compiled centuries later.

The ancient histories that describe Qin's conquest of six rival states report casualty figures running past a hundred thousand dead at a single siege, numbers the Wikipedia article itself flags as unsourced and that no independent record survives to confirm.