Real History

At school, history lessons consisted of a recital of dates of kings, queens, and battles, which one was supposed to remember. Remembering these dates was knowledge of history.
I found this very boring, could not see the point of it, and was therefore 'bad' at history. I was left with a prejudice against anything that could be called a 'history book'.
Interesting things have happened in the past, though; it's just we rarely got to hear of them in our school history lessons. So as to get some idea of the chronology of the events I consider interesting, I have for a year or so made a note of any dates I come across, and I put them in my little chart. As it gets bigger, from time to time I pin it up over my desk. Here's how it looks at the moment:

1390	Chaucer busy writing the Canterbury Tales; Langland’s ‘Piers Plowman’ published.
1453	Fall of Constantinople.
1476	Caxton sets up his press in Westminster.
1492	Spain takes Granada from Moors. Columbus sets sail.
1497	Shrove Tuesday. Savonarola’s bonfire of the vanities.
1525	Tyndale’s New Testament printed in Köln.
1535	6th July Thomas More beheaded in London for refusing to accept Henry VIII as head of Church (over the Pope) in England.
1536	Tyndale burnt in Holland, after bungled strangulation, for just about the opposite reasons for the killing of More.
1564	Birth of Shakespeare
1569	Mercator’s Projection.
1603	Death of Elizabeth, accession of James.
1605	Gunpowder plot. First performances of Macbeth and Lear.
1611	King James Bible.
1621	Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy.
1632/3	Galileo’s ‘Dialogue on the two world systems’ and trial.
1638	Ottoman forces reach the gates of Vienna.
1642	Outbreak of English Civil War. Death of Galileo, birth of Newton.
1667	First Edition of Paradise Lost. (Second in 1674.)
1792	In December in St Paul’s Churchyard William Blake meets Thomas Paine and warns him not to go home as the police are after him. Paine goes to Dover and crosses to France.
1797	France invades Switzerland, thereby losing the vestigial sympathy of radicals such as Coleridge.
1798	First Edition of Lyrical Ballads.
1801	Humphry Davy joins Royal Institution.
1805	October. Nelson wins at Trafalgar, ending threat of Napoleonic invasion.
1821	25th of March; nominal start of Greek war of Independence.
1822	Publication of de Quincey’s ‘Confessions of an English Opium Eater’.
1856	Birth of Freud.
1857	Madame Bovary, Les Fleurs du Mal.
1859	Publication of Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’.
1861	American Civil War starts.
1900	Publication of Freud’s Traumdeutung.
1922	Ulysses, The Waste Land, Duiniser Elegien, Sonette an Orpheus, Das Schloss. The Smyrna Disaster.
1954	French defeated at Dien Bien Phu; Geneva accords partition Vietnam.