So You Want to Make a List of 100 Most Important Events In History
I spent about three weeks last year wrestling with this exact problem for a project. Turns out it sounds simple and is genuinely miserable to execute well. Here is what I learned. "Importance" is not an inherent property of an event. It is a judgment call imposed by whoever is holding the pen. I watched three colleagues argue for two days straight over whether the invention of the printing press deserved more slots than the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia. Neither of us could produce objective criteria that would satisfy the other person. That is the baseline issue. The second issue is geography. Pick almost any well-known version of this list and you will find it heavily skewed toward Western Europe and North America. A list compiled in 2024 by editors at a major American publisher included zero events from Sub-Saharan Africa before 1800. That is not a mistake. That is a structural outcome of how the question gets framed.
How to Actually Build One Without Lying to Yourself
Start with a rubric. Not a vibe. A written set of criteria that you commit to before you write a single entry. Mine looked like this: Write the rubric down. Share it publicly. Defend it when people push back. This is the only thing keeping you from just picking events you already find interesting and calling that importance. Here is where I ran into a real wall. About halfway through my draft I realized my rubric was silently rewarding events that are documented over events that are significant but poorly recorded. A famine in pre-colonial Southeast Asia that killed maybe two million people ranks below the crowning of a European monarch because we have better sources for the latter. My list was measuring historiography, not importance. I caught this around entry #47.
My workaround was to explicitly cap entries from any single region at roughly 35 percent of the total list, then deliberately leave vacancies to fill with underrepresented regions. That forced me to actually read scholarship on the Ming dynasty's maritime withdrawals and the Mali Empire's trade networks instead of falling back on whatever Wikipedia page loaded fastest. It made the list worse in some obvious ways and better in ways that mattered more.
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Common Pitfalls That Will Ruin Your List
Nationalism is not a methodology. If your list reads like a textbook from a single country, you did not make a list of important events. You made a chapter outline. I had to cut roughly a third of my early entries because they were implicitly praising my own region rather than analyzing global causal chains. Recency bias will eat you alive. Human beings weight recent events heavier than older ones by a noticeable margin even when they try not to. I compared my ranking against a blind peer review and found my Cold War entries were placed an average of twelve positions higher than equivalent pre-modern events. That gap was not justified by the rubric. Conflation of notability and importance. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand is notable. Its importance is derivable but requires you to trace a causal chain through mobilization schedules, alliance systems, and imperial collapse. Most list-makers stop at the first link and call it a day. If your event cannot survive a three-generation causal test, it probably does not belong in a list called 100 Most Important Events In History.
What This Approach Misses
No rubric handles cultural history well. A shift in artistic movement or religious practice might reshape how hundreds of millions of people understand reality over centuries, but it does not fit cleanly into impact scope or irreversibility. I spent too much time on political and military events and not enough on epistemological ones. The Black Death belongs here not because it killed people but because it broke medieval assumptions about disease, labor, and divine order. That is a softer kind of importance and harder to score. If you want a list that leans toward intellectual and cultural history rather than wars and treaties, you need a different rubric entirely. There is no single list that does both well without becoming contradictory.
A Practical Sequence That Actually Works
1. Write the rubric and publish it before drafting any entries. 2. Generate a long preliminary list of maybe 200 events using broad criteria. 3. Score each event against the rubric on paper. Force yourself to assign numbers even when you feel unsure.
4. Drop the bottom half. Re-score the remaining 100 against a tightened version of the same criteria. 5. Run a geographic and thematic audit. If one region or category dominates, you did not follow your own rubric. 6. Publish with the rubric attached. Invite people to prove you wrong using your own criteria.
The last step is not optional. A list of 100 Most Important Events In History without the scoring method attached is just opinion dressed up as authority. The whole point is to make the opinion visible so it can actually be challenged.
What I Would Do Differently Next Time
I would spend more time on events that are structural rather than singular. The spread of domesticated crops, the development of writing systems, the migration out of Africa. These are important in a way that resists the event-based framing entirely. A list built around discrete moments will always underrepresent slow-moving processes that shaped everything else. I accept that trade-off because a list of 100 Most Important Events In History is inherently biased toward things that happened at a specific time, but it is worth stating plainly. If you are looking for something less arbitrary, consult existing academic surveys of historical causation rather than starting from scratch. They are not perfect either but they have survived peer review and multiple editorial passes. My list ended up being useful mainly because I kept the rubric public and revised it publicly when people found holes. The holes are still there. I just know where they are now.
