Not much going on
In his first address to the United Nations in
September, US president Joe Biden urged global co-operation through “a decisive decade for our world”. In response, University of Oxford historian Peter Frankopan (@peterfrankopan) asked: “Which was the ‘least decisive decade’ in the past 2,000 years?” As you’d expect, the answers were suitably imaginative and wide-ranging.
Rich (@pibasedlifeform) replied: “‘It must be 1430 to 1440. According to the history I was taught at school, nothing happened from Agincourt to the start of the Wars of the Roses – certainly nothing worth talking about.” Priya Kale (@priya_kale) commented: “I always feel that 1900 to 1910 was the boiled egg white of historical decades – insipid, boring, and frankly, no one pays it any attention unless one has no other choice.” Historian and author Rebecca Rideal (@RebeccaRideal) was similarly forthright: “Controversial one, but the 1650s in England. Loads happened but, in the end, a lot remained the same.”
Looking further afield, Rutger K (@AnotherAspirin) tweeted: “In the Carolingian corner [the dynasty that ruled western Europe from the eighth to tenth century]? The years 780 to 790… lots of (in-) fighting, but little by way of decisions. I’m sure some stuff happened and they wrote a bunch, and I’m sure things were decided but mostly it was – just a decade.”
University of Cambridge PhD student Nick Wise (@nickwizzo) offered a fascinating response, drawing on a tool used in the fields of computational linguistics and probability known as “n-grams”, which look for repeated words and phrases in a sample of text or speech. He tweeted: “‘According to n-grams, the 1990s were the most decisive decade, while no decades before the 1940s were decisive. Decisiveness has been increasing over the past decade since a low in the mid-2000s.” Adam Tyndall (@Adam Tyndall) came to a similar conclusion, albeit for different reasons: “Surely the least decisive decade in the past 2,000 years is the most recent one? All of the others have had a decisive impact on it, but it has impacted no other decade (yet). [Spot the philosophy graduate amongst the historians.]”
But D Allen History (@dallen_history) wasn’t sure. “True,” he replied, “but could you not argue that it has had a major impact as time in the previous decade would have been spent planning for it, and thus major ‘decisive’ decisions have been made because of it?
Or is that going too far?” And so it went on. Maybe next time we might ask which was the most decisive decade? Although, as Bill Tompson (@william_ tompson) put it: “All decades are decisive, but some decades are more decisive than others”!
I always feel that 1900 to 1910 YCU VJG DQKNGF GII white of historical decades