Newer Than They Think / History

• Alfred the Great wouldn't receive the title "The Great" until the 16th century, six hundred years after his death.
• The famous "Great Wall Of China" seen would not be built under its modern form until the fifteenth century. While construction of a great wall has existed since the 4th century B.C.E, it would fall into ruin and it would be until the Ming Dynasty thousands of years later that the modern wall seen today would be built.
• Contrary to what Ben-Hur would want you to believe, you could travel extensively through the ancient and medieval Mediterranean without finding a single Slave Galley, but countless of well-paid, well-fed, and generally well-treated professional rowers and sailors. It was in the 16th century when a naval arms race between the Ottoman Empire, the Knights Hospitaller, Spain, and later France made galleys switch nearly entirely to convicts, debtors, and slaves (always from another religion). In the Baltic, where galleys were used until the 19th century by Sweden and Russia, slaves were never employed.
• The Aztec Empire. The kingdom of the Mexica was founded in 1325 - at the time when gunpowder and plate armor were already in use in Europe and the Mongol Empire had disintegrated. The actual Aztec Empire was founded in 1427 (at the time the Portuguese had discovered the Azores) - and it fell in 1521.
  • The last Mesoamerican kingdom, Peten Itza, fell to the Spanish in 1697, about 170 years after the Aztec Empire had dissolved.
• You probably wouldn't expect that the Spanish Inquisition was only founded in 1478, one of the last European inquisitions to be created.
  • The Inquisition generally was actually closer to modern standards of jurisprudence than most civil courts of the time, having rules of evidence, an appeals process, and codified restrictions on the type and severity of punishments that could be imposed. The severity of the Spanish Inquisition was greatly exaggerated by Protestant propaganda—ironically, sometimes from the same countries who accused Spain of being "soft" with non-Christians just a century before (see below).
  • Additionally, they did not consider witchcraft an "excepted crime"; ordinary standards of evidence were required. As a consequence, the only large witchcraze in Spain was the Zugarramurdi Witch Trials, and the friars who cooperated were punished for it by the Inquisition.
• The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, which was actually less of an expulsion than a forced mass Christianization (the Jews who chose to leave were a minority within another minority), wasn't a revolutionary act in itself. Before that, the Jews had already been expelled four times from France (in 1254, 1322, 1359, and 1394), twice from Naples (1288 and 1293), and once from England (1290). In fact, that it took comparatively so long for Spain to do it was the thing most other countries complained about at the time; Spain got an ill reputation, especially in Northern Europe, of being too lenient with the Jews, garnering accusations of being consequently contaminated by Jewish blood and culture. Criticising Spain for being too harsh with the Jews only came about around the time Jews were emancipated in Britain (1829, roughly a decade before Jews were emancipated in Spain in 1840).
• As for witches, the European "witch craze" took place between 1500 and 1700, particularly during the Protestant Reformation, not (as it is so commonly assumed) during the Dark Ages (there were occasional witch trials during that time, but very far from the mainstream). The peak years for witch trials in Europe were from about 1560 to 1630.
  • During the Middle Ages, the position of the Catholic Church, along with virtually everyone with an education, was that witches did not exist, anyone who believed to have the power of sorcery was delusional, and anyone who believed in witches likewise, if not outright heretic. When the Protestant upheavals happened in the 16th century, this trend completely reversed, with the educated classes, (both Protestant and, in France's case, Catholic) accepting that witches were real, and the leading scholars being the most fervent believers in witchcraft.
  • Witchcraft was not considered a criminal offense in the state-wide law until the early 16th century and during actual Medieval times witch trials occurred rarely (witchcraft itself was not an offense, but harm done by 'magical' means was); many people accused of witchcraft were acquitted due to lack of evidence.
  • Most of the attributes commonly associated with witch trials can be traced to a single book, Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer, published in 1486. In it, he argued that witchcraft should be treated the same as heresy and like heresy, be punishable by death (and that's where the connection to witches being burned at the stake comes from). It was the result of Kramer's personal fixations and his attempt to defend them. In 1484, he was involved in a witch trial in Innsbruck where he was embroiled in a personal feud with one of the accused women and was not satisfied when she was acquitted. The local bishop eventually had to order him to leave the city. He also definitely had some sexual fixations; and seeing as he was a priest, other clergymen considered him deranged even at the time. The Catholic Church at large did not really support his views, based on the abovementioned doctrine concerning belief in witchcraft; it was mostly secular courts that subsequently picked up Kramer's methods. And the widespread dissemination of the book and Kramer's ideas was only made possible by the then quite recent (in Europe) invention of the printing press...
  • Part of this confusion about the time of witch trials is also the fact that too many people think the Dark Ages ended in roughly 1800. Nowadays historians deny that there ever was a time such as the Dark Ages, but traditionally they ran from the fall of Rome in AD 476 to the crowning of Charlemagne in AD 800. It is also a term linked closely to Anglophone historiography. In many languages the corresponding term is 'the Age of Barbarian Kingdoms' or 'the Age of Migrations'.
• The "traditional" notion of the role of women as solely mothers and wives didn't come to be until the Victorian era, and even then its implementation was largely a "luxury" available only to those who were reasonably well-off. While sexism certainly existed, the reality of life for the vast majority of people in pre-industrial agricultural society was hard work for both sexes. In Middle Age Europe, for example, wives helped craftsmen husbands and could continue running their business in widowhood. Agricultural work required both sexes to participate — at least, if you didn't want your family to starve to death. Dorothy Sayers pointed out that pre-modern women effectively owned entire industries — many of which the Industrial Revolution had taken away.
• The concept of racial discrimination in the form we know it today is a product of the Age of Enlightenment. Before this, the main form of discrimination was based on class, language, and religion; the closest thing to racism back then would have been more like xenophobia (a general dislike of foreigners, without regard to the color of their skin). A black person in sixteenth-century England might well have encountered prejudice, but a white Spanish person would have suffered just as badly (and given their history of war, probably worse). Ironically, it was only with the rise of greater equality and class mobility in the wake of the English Civil War, the Protestant Reformation and the growth of modern science that racism raised its ugly head. It was primarily used to justify the Atlantic Slave Trade in the light of new "sensibilities" about the topic, even although the trade itself had been around for almost a millennium. Slavery became banned by the Church and seen as anti-Christian, so there needed to be a reason to keep enslaving fellow human beings and other people, and people started to discriminate based on skin colour and ethnicity.
  • Even in the 19th-century United States, race was defined legalistically based on "blood quantums", or the proportion of recent ancestors who belonged to different races, rather than appearance or strict ancestry. The "one-drop rule" became the law only in the early 20th century, in Tennessee, rather than the Deep South. See Pass Fail for more details.
  • The categorization of people based on skin color (white people, black people, etc.) is even newer than that, emerging only in the mid-18th century. Writings from before then rarely mention skin color. The Spanish and Portuguese Empires did produce a bit earlier a long list of terms to differentiate due to their sheer amount of mixes (mestizo, mulatto, caboclo...), but this usually served no real function other than listing your origin and for how long your lineage had been Christian (several priestly orders only accepted white Christians on the basis that convert families were too green on the topic of Christianity to properly enforce it, which is also why the Spanish Inquisition was barred from judging pureblood indigenous).
• The "Hispanic" race is both this and Older Than They Think. Although Spanish-speaking peoples have thought of themselves as una raza since at least the nineteenth century, the term in Spanish meant something more in the line of culture, not race (for instance, a black Hispanic was a Hispanic even if he was black). It was not until the 1970s that North Americans began to officially recognize mestizos as a separate race. Prior to that, people of Spanish ancestry were assigned to whichever race to which their appearance most closely corresponded, with most of them being glossed as "white". And for the record, mestizos were originally the product of natives intermarrying with Spanish, a term which technically refers to those who're ancestrally straight-up Spaniards and thus as European as any German or Brit.
  • Heck, even the Anglo-Saxons themselves arose form the intermarrying of the Angles and Saxon tribes. "Racial Purity" is a straight-up myth.
• No sooner than Courtly Love had been invented than people began to lament its decay from the Good Old Ways of King Arthur's time.
• Despite the mythology and conspiracy theories that claim it to be nearly a thousand years old, if not more, Freemasonry as we know it only dates back to the early 1700s. The same is true of the Masonic Knights Templar, much as fringe historians like to treat them as if they were one and the same with the Knights Templar.
• Until the 19th century, prisons were seen as holding places for criminal suspects until the authorities could determine what else to do with them, whether that be a day in the stocks, whipping, fines, penal labor, execution, etc., or acquittal. Imprisonment as a punishment in and of itself didn't start, at all, until the late 18th century, out of Enlightenment-influenced opposition to state-sanctioned torture. Outside the Western world, imprisonment as punishment remained largely unknown until the mid-20th century.
• Newfoundland didn't join Canada until 1949 (though they'd been part of the initial talks about confederation in the 1860s and the issue kept being brought up periodically).
• The idea that regular, controlled inflation is a desirable and normal for an economy dates only back to the 1950s. Before then, the value of the US dollar was highly erratic, with as many years of deflation as inflation, and no guarantee of inflated value even over long periods of time. For example, the US dollar actually deflated (that is, increased in value) between 1800 and 1900, with an 1800 dollar being worth only 49 cents in 1900. It's only with the rise of monetarism in 20th-century economic theory that steady depreciation (i.e., inflation) of money value became a pursued policy of economic development. There's nothing natural about inflation; its regularity in the post-WW2 world has been effected through continuous government intervention. That said, the intervention is (1) sound—one thing that nearly all economists are agreed on is that avoiding deflation is very important (2) not entirely governmental (it's complicated, but even central banks can't create money; private commercial banks create money by making loans for reasons of basic economics that are fairly easy to understand but require too much verbiage to explain here) and (3) sort of inevitable (if you have pure fiat currency, another way doesn't make any sense).
• Treasure Island also popularized the concept of buried treasure; only one real pirate, William ("Captain") Kidd, is recorded as actually doing so, and it's debatable whether or not he was actually a pirate at all. Captain Morgan (yes, he was a real person) was also said to have buried treasure and is generally accepted to be the trope originator, though this is also known to be patently false. Firstly, Morgan was a privateer rather than a pirate, and the treasure he supposedly "buried" wasn't looted as so much as it was embezzled from his employer, the British Crown.
• The famous "Keep Calm and Carry On" propaganda poster, though printed during World War II, was never actually used^note because it was intended to be used if Britain came under Nazi occupation and was completely unknown until an old copy was rediscovered in a bookstore in 2000. ^note  All modern copies are derived from that specific poster: originals are so rare that a guest on Antiques Roadshow with about a dozen original copies (inherited from her post-office owning parents) was told she had essentially cornered the world's market on them.
  • On a similar note, the American "We Can Do It!" poster (often called "Rosie the Riveter", though it had nothing to do with either the pop song or the Norman Rockwell painting of that name) was created as an in-house morale booster at Westinghouse plants during the war, and was only displayed for a couple of weeks in 1943. It didn't gain iconic status until its rediscovery in the 1980s.
• Nationalism has only been a thing for a little over 200 years. Prior to events like the French Revolution, the concept of having a unified strength and loyalty towards your nation rather than your town or state would have been seen as rather silly. This is because back then, the idea of what constitutes a modern nation-state was a lot more nebulous than we would define it today, and most people weren't involved in politics. After all, it's hard for Germans or Italians in 1850 to have a pride in being "German" or "Italian" when neither of those things existed as unified states until 1871. Before that they were collections of small states, including numerous city-states, which was what people had loyalty to instead.
  • Tribalism, on the other hand, has been around as long as humanity. It's hard to be nationalistic when everyone lives in clustered towns separated by great distances and no ease of communication, but it's easy to be fiercely loyal towards your known community and distrustful of the "other."
  • The related concept of "one RULER per nation" is also quite new—for long stretches of time, Asskicking Leads to Leadership meant that anyone with sufficient power/money could call themselves a king (indeed, dukes and sovereign princes frequently descended from kings who were "demoted"). A given "country," depending on size, could have anywhere from a handful to DOZENS of petty-kingdoms whose only common point was sharing a language. Many unified countries arose fairly early on from the fact that all the smaller kingdoms, dukedoms etc. within them were ruled by the same person, often due to conquest or intermarriage, and for the purposes of smooth transitioning of power, they stayed that way even when the king changed—but legally, they were still separate countries, often all the way till the 20th century when the amalgams or some of their constituent parts transformed into republics. And of course the United Kingdom still operates more or less on that model.
• Thanks to colonialism and the Orientalism driven propaganda by the West, many people growing up in the West as well as a lot of people in the colonized world think that Western civilization was always the most progressive, wealthiest and freest civilization. Terms like Asiatic economy and Oriental despotism were used even by such anti-colonialist figures like Karl Marx to justify and explain western superiority.
  • But historians have noted that for most of recorded human history, wealth flowed from the East to the West. Asia was far richer than Western Europe, and the West borrowed its ideas, values and knowledge from the East (mathematics from the Egyptians, religion from Judea, numeral system from India and the Arab world...). Indeed that's why colonialism was ever a thing to begin with. And it's only since the middle of the eighteenth century that the Balance of Power shifted from the East to the West.
  • Some have noted that there were several incidents in Chinese history when an Industrial Revolution could have taken place. The Industrial Revolution happening in England was itself based on and helped by the destruction and impoverishment of high-quality high-demand Indian handicrafts and textiles. Likewise, several Indian rulers did make attempts to modernize and meet the British threat, such as Tipu Sultan, but the British stamped them out.
  • Likewise, the Industrial Revolution happened in only part of Europe, in England and it was not inevitable that it would happen across the continent. Marx pointed out that Capitalism developed as a result of the revolutions of The Enlightenment, but historians point out that the Industrial Revolution really only took off in France during the reign of Napoleon III who at that point had become an English client. The conditions for industrialization in other parts of Western Europe, let alone Eastern Europe were quite delayed and indeed Egypt and British India had industrialized and modernized in the same time by then. Industrialization in North America did not lead, as the Founding Fathers had assumed, to the inevitable end of slavery, and Southern Slavery coexisted happily with capitalist and abolitionist England until The American Civil War made the English decide to cut their losses there when they realized that India and Egypt were more profitable and superior markets and sources for raw cotton.
  • The idea of diamonds from any other part of the world other than India is only as new as the 1700s. For most of history, India had a monopoly on the global diamond trade, and the diamonds of every European royal crowns came from Indian mines and were traded and sold by Indian traders to the world. That changed when diamonds were discovered first in Brazil, and only in the middle of the 19th century were diamonds discovered in Africa (to which it remains most associated with in Pop-Cultural Osmosis thanks to the De Beers Cartel and the "conflict diamond").
    • Even then, it took a long time to believe diamonds could be found in a cold country, what with India, Africa and South America being the only known sources. Then, small amounts were discovered in Arkansas; commercial mining was tried but failed, and the site is now open to public diamond digging (for a fee). Small amounts were later discovered in Russia's Ural Mountains - small enough for some to believe they were planted. It wasn't until the mid-20th century that large deposits were found in Siberia. Still later, large deposits were found in Western Australia and Canada's far north.
• Because serfdom in Eastern Europe lasted until well into the third quarter of the 19th Century, and was abolished by Tsar Alexander II of Russia in the wake of the Crimean War, long after Western European nations had modernized and advanced, many have seen Russia as a center of serfdom from time immemorial and key evidence of "Russian backwardness". In reality, since wealth flowed from the East to the West, in The Middle Ages, Eastern Europe was wealthier than Western Europe (England, France, Germany). Furthermore, serfdom at that time existed in Western Europe while in Kievan Rus' you had free movement of peasants and other forms of rights and privileges.
  • Certain nationalist Russians blame the Mongol Invasion for the arrival of "oriental backwardness" and the introduction of serfdom and the real reason why they missed out on The Renaissance (as seen in the subtext of Hard to Be a God and Andrei Rublev). In actual fact, serfdom in Eastern Europe was introduced by the highly sophisticated and advanced, and totally Catholic, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 1400s. The latter had vast farmland and was a bread basket region and to maximize exports, they passed laws tying peasants to the lands and those lands were organized into folwarks (plantations) run by Poland's warrior-caste nobility.
  • The reasons for this "Second Serfdom" (as historians have called it) is precisely because of The Renaissance in the West. Serfdom ended with the Black Death, and the rise of towns and cities and diverse merchant trade, and part of the reason was that agricultural demand increased in Poland which exported huge amounts of food to the West and grew wealthy. Many historians claim that Western Europeans grew wealthy on the impoverishment of Eastern Europe.
  • Serfdom arrived in Russia after Ivan the Terrible's conquest and unification. He was the first to pass laws restricting movement and rights of peasants. It continued under Boris Godunov and the later Romanovs that followed. The reason for this was that the Russians wanted to imitate the Polish and cater to export demands by Western Europe. And as Poland and Russia expanded in territory, so did serfdom across Eastern Europe. It was not an inevitable or eternal problem of "eastern" backwardness at all.
• Many things related to the American Civil Rights Movement are often assumed to have occurred eons ago, when they were actually quite recent, historically speaking.
  • The Civil Rights Movement itself occurred in 1954 and Civil Rights Laws would not occur until the late 60s. To put in perspective, no president elected so far has been born after the Civil Rights Act, as the last 4 were born when American still had Jim Crow Laws.
  • It has only been roughly 150 years since slavery ended (or as Louis C.K. put it, "That's two 70-year old ladies living and dying back to back."). As late as 2008, the child of slaves was alive and able to see Barack Obama get elected president.
  • Ruby Bridges, famous for being one of the first children to integrate the New Orleans school system, was only born in 1954. To put this in context, she is younger than 3 of the last 4 presidents of the United States as of 2024.
• The relative worthlessness of the Japanese yen compared to the US dollar did not emerge until World War II, when wartime inflation drove its value down; the yen was then pegged to 1/360 of the US dollar during the American occupation. The yen was created in 1871 as the direct analogue of the dollar, and was itself subdivided into 100 sen, analogues to the cent. Sen were removed from circulation in 1953.
• In the United States, the first recorded use of the middle finger to indicate contempt (i.e., "flipping the bird") dates to 1886; the gesture was probably introduced by Italian immigrants.^note In Italy, it goes back to Roman times when it was known as Digitus Impudicus.
• The Kingdom of Hawaii wasn't founded until 1795, though the island of Hawaiʻi had been called by that name for much longer. It didn't complete its conquest of the rest of the island chain until 1810. When the Kingdom was overthrown by American planters who requested to be annexed by the U.S., in 1893, it was still two years shy of a century.
• ZIP codes were introduced to the US in 1963, before which every American city had its own postal zone system. Similar systems in other countries are even newer; for instance, Canadian postal codes were introduced in 1974.
  • 1963 was also the year the US Post Office Dept. introduced the now-familiar two-letter abbreviations for US states.
• Telephone numbers have only grown longer as networks became more widespread and more sets were installed (for example: in Australia, the Greater Sydney area introduced 6-digit numbers in 1965, 7-digit numbers in 1977, and present-day 8-digit numbers in 1994. This progression was slowly followed in other towns and cities; as late as 1997, the city of Townsville, Queensland (population at the time ~110,000) still had 6-digit numbers in common usage).
• Only a handful of American colleges and universities admitted women up until the American Civil War, and even after that many private colleges were gender-segregated well into the 20th century. Harvard University only admitted its first female students in 1977, and Columbia University in 1981 (before then they had Distaff Counterpart institutions for women—Radcliffe and Barnard, respectively. Radcliffe eventually merged with Harvard, but Barnard still exists).
• The loonie, the Canadian one-dollar coin, was introduced in 1987, and the toonie (the two-dollar coin) in 1996. Before then, Canada used one-dollar and two-dollar bills, like the US.
• The Canadian GST (Goods and Services Tax), Canada's federal point-of-sale tax that adds 5% additional cost to most consumer goods, was introduced in 1991 by the Brian Mulroney government. Before then, sales taxes were paid on the manufacturer's side, not the consumer's.
• The first Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City happened in 2016, and was directly inspired by the opening of the James Bond film Spectre (which was itself essentially product placement paid for by the Mexican government). The Day of the Dead itself has only been a national observance in Mexico since the 1960s, when the government promoted it as a patriotic holiday.
• Celebrating Australia Day: The first really big public festivity was the Bicentenary in 1988, and most of that was due to the First Fleet re-enactment arriving in Sydney Harbour. New South Wales then gazetted it as an official public holiday in 1994, and the other states followed suit over the next few years, eventually achieving national unity by 1999.
• The Christianization of Lithuania didn't begin until 1387, and paganism remained dominant among Lithuanian commoners until the 17th century. It was the last region of Europe to be Christianized.
• Greco-Roman paganism lingered in the Mani peninsula on the Peloponnese — in a region which was otherwise among the earliest to be Christianized — as late as the tenth century, when St. Nikon (930-998) was dispatched there to convert them. This means that Greco-Roman paganism survived Justinian, the rise of Islam, and Charlemagne.
• Some of the larger Native American tribes including the Sioux, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Seminole, moved into the areas we think 'ancestral' to them only in the 18th or late 17th century at most. They were often helped because said areas had been depopulated of other tribes by European epidemics. Also, much of the relocation happened due to wars with other tribes. The Iroquois Confederacy launched a territorial offensive (the Beaver Wars) that displaced several tribes, while the Chippewa managed to push the Sioux west across the Mississippi.
• A lot of isolated islands in the oceans were not settled by humans until the common era.
  • Take the Austronesian expansion. While insular Southeast Asia, Micronesia, and Melanesia have been settled for millennia, Madagascar was not settled by them until 500 CE (the Malagasy language contains Sanskrit loanwords that were probably received when the Malagasy went through the-then recently-Indianized kingdoms of Java), Hawaii until 900, and Rapa Nui until 1200. The moai are often assumed to be incredibly ancient (the English dub of Godzilla vs. Megalon makes them three million years old) but were actually built between 1250 and 1500 CE. The last major landmass to be settled by humans was New Zealand, when ancestors of the Maori arrived in 1300; before then, it was populated entirely by animals.
  • Mauritius, Réunion Island, and Seychelles had no history of human habitation before the early modern period. (There might have been transient Arab traders visiting to restock supplies, but that's it.) The same applies to Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe, as well as the Portuguese islands of Azores and Madeira. (On the other hand, the nearby Spanish Canary Islands had been inhabited by the Berber Guanches for thousands of years before Spanish colonists arrived.)
  • Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha were all uninhabited when they were discovered between 1502 and 1504. Considering how remote they are (Tristan Da Cunha is the most remote permanently inhabited settlement on Earth) it's not surprising, in fact it's kind of surprising they were discovered all the way back in the early 1500s.
  • The Norse settlement of Iceland began in 874 CE. Norse records indicate that the island's first settlers were monks from Ireland, which dates the island's peopling no earlier than the Christianization of Ireland (5th century).
  • The Svalbard archipelago of Norway was uninhabited until coal mining began there in the 1890s.
  • Unlike the rest of the Americas, Indigenous Americans never settled The Falkland Islands^note  Though some ancient middens found in 2021 suggest that indigenous people from Patagonia might have at least visited them, so the Europeans really really were the first to settle there. They were first populated in 1764, not by the British or Spanish, but the French. On the other side of South America, the Galápagos Islands were also never settled by natives, and colonization only began in 1832, after Ecuador achieved independence from Spain. When Charles Darwin visited the islands in 1835, they had been settled by humans for a grand total of three years.
• The Inuit migrated into what is now Canada in the 11th century, and to Greenland in the 12th century. The region had been settled by humans for thousands of years by that point, but it was by an unrelated people that the Inuit were enemies with.
  • They also had to deal with the Vikings, who arrived in Greenland in the 10th century, but none of the modern Greenlandic Europeans are descended from them, since that colony dissolved in the 15th century. Instead, they trace their ancestry to a new colonization that began in the 18th century.
  • Linguistic evidence shows that the Apache and the Navajo peoples (who speak related languages and both branched off from the same initial migration group) also originated in Canada and only reached their modern lands in the American Southwest around the late 15th century.
• Trigger discipline—that is, the gun-safety principle of always keeping one's finger off the trigger unless firing—did not become a standard part of firearms training until the 1980s, before which gun users did, indeed, tend to keep their fingers on the trigger. This makes depictions of trigger discipline in historical settings, e.g. Saving Private Ryan, anachronistic.
• The Seven Wonders of the World were not codified in their current form until the Renaissance; while ancient sources referencing the Wonders do exist, they differ widely in both the selection of places and the number of places listed. Philo of Byzantium, who produced the earliest extant list in the 3rd century BC, includes both the Gates and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon on his list as two separate Wonders, while later writers swapped out the gates for the Lighthouse of Alexandria instead.
• The whole point of St. Patrick's Day is to go to an Irish pub and get drunk, right? Well, not until the 1970s, it wasn't, since Irish pubs were usually closed — by law, in Ireland itself — due to St. Patrick's Day being a religious holiday. In fact, the first St Patrick's Day parade took place in New York, and was imported back to Ireland. And while the parades became larger throughout the 80s and especially the 90s, St Patrick's Day didn't become Dublin's single biggest international tourist event of the year until the 2000s.
• The penny has only been the lowest-valued American coin since 1857, when the half-penny was discontinued.
• The words for China:
  • The Chinese word for China, Zhōngguó (中國, traditionally translated as "Middle Kingdom"), has only been used for that purpose since the rise of Chinese nationalism in the late 19th century, before which "Zhōngguó" referred only to the seat of power of a given dynasty, i.e., the capital and areas close to it. Indeed, one of the fixations of the early Chinese nationalists was the paradox that their country had no accepted name, with the names of the various historical dynasties (Song, Ming, Qing) being the only way to refer to it. Some thinkers, such as Sun Yat-sen, preferred the Japanese name "Shina" even into the 20th century. "Zhōngguó" only became the standard name for the state after the Republic of China adopted it in 1911.
  • Even the exonym "China" itself dates only to 1516, being first used in the journals of Portuguese explorer Duarte Barbosa, which were translated into English in 1555. The older European name was "Cathay", derived from the writings of Marco Polo. Cathay still survives as part of the name of Hong Kong's flagship airline, Cathay Pacific (its founders specifically avoided using the name "China" because Hong Kong was a British colony at the time, and they didn't want to provoke the British authorities by naming the airline after a neighboring country), as well as the official name for China in Russian and languages that borrow from it, such as Ukrainian and Bulgarian. Ironically, while the usage of Cathay predates China in English, the Qin dynasty (from which China is drived) predates the Khitans (from which Cathay is derived) by over a millennium.
• The name "Iran" is both this and Older Than They Think. Persians have called their country "Iran" for thousands of years, but the world only started calling Persia "Iran" when Reza Shah decreed it in 1935. Persia is an exonym, referring to one of the regions that make up the country, and using it to refer to Iran is akin to calling the United Kingdom "England".
• New Zealand examples:
  • The use of Aotearoa as the Māori word for the entire country didn't come into vogue until some time in the 20th century. As late as the 1890s, Māori used Aotearoa to refer solely to the North Island.
  • The two main islands, the North Island and South Island, didn't have an official name in either English or Māori until 2009. While the English names had been used for most of the time since European settlement, some 19th-century maps called the North Island "New Ulster" and the South Island either the "Middle Island" or "New Munster", with the "South Island" term being used for the much smaller Stewart Island. Te Ika-a-Māui and Te Waipounamu became the official Māori names for the two main islands at the same time the English names became official.
  • In 1998, Stewart Island was officially rechristened "Stewart Island / Rakiura", with the latter being the current Māori name. Its historic Māori name was Te Punga o Te Waka a Māui.
• The United States has used the Prime Meridian only since 1912, before which it used the Washington meridian.
• The Star of David has only been used as a symbol of Judaism since the 17th century. Even then, it was at first just used in Prague, and took until the end of the 19th century to spread to the rest of eastern Europe, and from there to the rest of the Jewish community worldwide.
• American coinage did not feature images of people until the Lincoln penny was introduced in 1909.
• Many Australians now see their country's convict roots as a source of infamous pride, but this was actually the opposite well into the latter half of the 20th Century. As the commentary on Hyde Park Barracks Museum in Sydney puts it, having convict ancestry was considered as a stigma, and it was only until heritage awareness (as a concept itself) started to sink into the Australian public since the 1970s and 80s did people started to view their convict ancestry with pride. And even then, the sense of shame still lingers in some quarters today (especially in political circles) to the point that British Lieutenant James Cook is more publicly commemorated as the "founder" of Australia.
• Satanism, as an actual religious practice, was founded by American atheist Anton LaVey in 1966 when he started the Church of Satan. Prior to this, devil-worship only dubiously existed; mostly as an accusation and/or conspiracy theory.
• Canada's national day, Canada Day (celebrated every July 1), has only been known as such since 1982, before which it was called Dominion Day. The name switch coincided with the patriation of Canada's constitution in 1982.
• The LGBT rainbow flag was invented in San Francisco in 1978; creator Gilbert Baker said he was inspired primarily by the song "She's a Rainbow" by The Rolling Stones.
• One may think of modern newspapers as thick bundles containing hundreds of pages and dozens of sections, but this was not always the case. In the 19th century, not a single newspaper, not even the largest ones such as The Times, exceeded 20 pages, and they were not clearly organized by sections either. 4 or 8 pages were considered the standard newspaper formats.
• The first known gender reveal party happened in 2008.
• The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (often erroneously called the "Nobel Prize in Economics") has existed only since 1969, being the creation of the Bank of Sweden; it has never been an official Nobel Prize.
• Many ingredients now ubiquitous in Old World (European and Asian) cuisine are derived from plants originally cultivated in the New World, and thus were not available before the Columbian Exchange (post-1492). It is difficult to imagine Italian food with the tomato, British food without the potato, Thai food without chilis, and so on, but they are relatively late additions into their cultures.
• The "divine right of kings" — the idea that God is responsible for choosing who becomes a monarch — in Europe only dates to the 16th century, and is an Early Modern conception of the justification for royal power, not a medieval one.
• The Sydney Opera House is the most recognisable building in Australia, yet it was only built in 1973.
• Arranged marriages were historically the norm pretty much everywhere, with love marriages being largely a post-industrial phenomenon, catching on first in England during the 18th and 19th centuries, and later still in other countries.
• No barrier existed between the Gaza Strip and Israel until 1994, and even then, it was initially a modest fence covering only part of the border. Israel built the current fortifications around Gaza only following the 2009 war.
• The holiday of Kwanzaa was created in 1966 by American civil rights activist Maulana Karenga; it has no basis in any African or African-American traditions.
• The Beam Me Up, Scotty! story that feminists burnt bras to protest male standards of female appearance only came into being because of a news article filed after protestors picketed the 1968 Miss America contest.
  • In turn, the garments that these activists derided were only half a century old themselves, dating back to 1913 when a New York socialite needed an alternative to corsets for a dress with a plunging neckline.
• The idea of Hanukkah being the Jewish equivalent of Christmas dates to the late nineteenth century at the earliest, and even then, only in North American Jewish communities; it remains a minor day in Israel, where Yom Kippur is the biggest holiday of the year.
• The internal organization of Orthodox Christianity has varied over the centuries, but the current structure - a set of mostly-national autonomous churches with separate synods and little or no direct state intervention in church affairs - is not even 200 years old. In the early 19th century, there were de facto only two independent Churches in Eastern Orthodoxy - Constantinople and Moscow - each corresponding more-or-less with the political reach of an empire (the Ottoman and the Russian.) The ancient Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem continued to exist on paper, but their Patriarchs resided in Constantinople and were appointed directly by the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Throughout the Ottoman Empire, nearly all Orthodox bishops were ethnic Greeks, who often did not speak the languages of their flocks. Meanwhile, up north, Moscow did not have a Patriarch, because that office had been abolished in the 1700s by Tsar Peter the Great. The Russian Church was ruled by a Holy Synod of bishops presided by a lay government official appointed by the Tsar.
• Christmas was not a federal holiday in the United States until 1870.
  • Christmas celebrations were pretty much non-existent in New England until the 1840s, owing to the region's Puritan roots.
  • The tradition of Christmas trees began in Germany in the 16th century, and was popularized in Britain during the 1840s, taking after Queen Victoria and her German husband, Prince Albert. In America, the practice did not catch on until the 1870s outside German immigrant communities.
  • A Christmas Carol (1843) more-or-less introduced "Merry Christmas" as a ritualistic phrase.
  • In the UK, post was still delivered on Christmas until 1961.
  • League football matches were played on Christmas until the 1950s in England, and the 1970s in Scotland.
  • National newspapers were published in the UK on Christmas until 1912.
• The first strike to be advertised with an inflatable rat occurred in November 1989, as a stunt of the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150 when they picketed in and around Chicago.

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