Can We Guess Your Favorite Period in History?

About This Quiz

They say that history is written by the winners, and that means honestly assessing how it went down is a challenge. Historians have to sift through primary sources like contemporary accounts, such as letters, carvings, paintings, plays, poems, and so on. They have to investigate secondary sources like biographies, histories, and textbooks.

 There is a scientific process for uncovering, "What really happened", and it's impossible to pin down the exact truth. History is really more of a tangle of narratives that conflict and complement one another in an unending tapestry of tales.

That said, it's clear that there are patterns and rhythms of history that create identifiable periods. The Iron Age is distinct from the Bronze Age, which is distinct from the Dark Ages, Medieval times, the Renaissance, the Industrial Age, and our present time, which has been variously called the Information Age, the Digital Age, and the Anthropocene. The latter term is in contrast to the "Holocene," which is the climate of the last 12,000 years; as human activity has now altered Earth's topography and climate to the point that we've truly impacted our home, we've entered a new human-influenced time). 

Each of these periods contained a flourishing of certain sets of ideas, from architecture to family structures to wars to theories of how governments should be set up to scientific discoveries and inventions. Which period suits you best? Tell us about yourself, and we'll find out!