Understand historical significance as a judgement: the criteria used to make it, why it changes over time and between groups, and how memory and commemoration express it.
Each is in the History glossary, with every other term in the subject.
The wave of protests and uprisings across the Arab world that began in Tunisia in December 2010 and spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain and elsewhere in 2011.
A famine in the Bengal province of British India in 1943 in which an estimated two to three million people died, worsened by wartime policies on food supply and distribution.
The 1956 federal court case, upheld by the US Supreme Court in November 1956, that ruled segregation on Montgomery's buses unconstitutional.
The shared understanding of the past held by a group or society, expressed in stories, commemorations, monuments, holidays and education.
The transfer of plants, animals, people, ideas and diseases between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia that followed Columbus's voyages of the 1490s; the term comes from the historian Alfred Crosby (1972).
A holiday on or around 12 October marking Columbus's landing in the Americas in 1492; proclaimed a national holiday in the United States in 1937.
A public act of remembering a person or event, through monuments, ceremonies, holidays, names, museums or anniversaries.
The name given in Spain and parts of Latin America to 12 October, celebrated as a day of Spanish language and culture in the Americas; Spain's national day.
The German law of 23 March 1933 that allowed Hitler's government to make laws without the Reichstag, the legal basis of the Nazi dictatorship.
A way of writing history that treats Europe as the centre and the standard, overlooking or undervaluing the achievements and perspectives of other parts of the world.
The Soviet and Russian name for the war between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and its allies, 1941–1945.
A judgement about why something in the past matters: how far it changed things, affected people, lasted or reveals something important. It is made by someone, for a purpose, using criteria.
The 150 million francs France demanded from Haiti in 1825 in return for recognising its independence, to compensate former colonists; reduced to 90 million francs in 1838.
A holiday on the second Monday of October, first adopted by Berkeley, California, in 1992, that honours the Indigenous peoples of the Americas instead of, or alongside, Columbus.
A period of cooler climate, especially in the North Atlantic and Europe, from about 1300 (or later, by some definitions) to the mid-nineteenth century.
Kenya's Heroes' Day, 20 October, the anniversary of the 1952 arrests, renamed from Kenyatta Day under the 2010 constitution.
The movement that took oaths of unity from about 1950 and fought an armed revolt against British rule in Kenya from 1952 to 1960; its fighters called themselves the Kenya Land and Freedom Army.
The refusal of Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, to ride the city's segregated buses from December 1955 to December 1956, after the arrest of Rosa Parks.
Printing with separate pieces of type, one for each character or letter, that are arranged to form a page and reused for other pages; first made by Bi Sheng in China in the 1040s.
The purge of 30 June to 2 July 1934 in which the SS killed Ernst Röhm and other SA leaders, together with other opponents of Hitler.
A machine that presses inked type onto paper; the screw press adapted by Gutenberg in Mainz around 1450, used with cast metal type, spread across Europe after 1460.
History presented to the general public outside schools and universities, in museums, heritage sites, memorials, films and the media.
The emergency decree of 28 February 1933 that suspended civil liberties in Germany after the Reichstag fire.
A student protest movement that began at the University of Cape Town in 2015 and won the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes; it spread to other universities as a campaign against colonial legacies.
An English trading company chartered in 1660 (rechartered in 1672) that held a monopoly of English trade with West Africa and transported many thousands of enslaved Africans to the Americas.
Gandhi's march of March–April 1930 from Sabarmati to Dandi on the coast of Gujarat to make salt in defiance of the British salt tax, beginning a mass civil disobedience campaign.
The Nazi Party's elite force, led by Heinrich Himmler, which carried out the Night of the Long Knives and later ran the police, the concentration camps and the extermination camps.
The Nazi Party's paramilitary force of street fighters, led by Ernst Röhm until his murder in 1934.
The Indigenous Arawak-speaking people of the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas at the time of Columbus's arrival in 1492.
The forced transport of about 12.5 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries; about 10.7 million survived the crossing.
The four Tunisian civil-society organisations (the UGTT trade union federation, the UTICA employers' federation, the Tunisian Human Rights League and the Order of Lawyers) that brokered a political settlement in 2013–2014 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015.
The holiday on 9 May that marks the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in 1945; the most important national holiday in Russia.
Printing in which the text and pictures of a whole page are carved into one wooden block, which is inked and pressed onto paper; used in China from at least the seventh century.
A world's fair held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyage and American progress.
Historical significance is the value that people give to something in the past: why an event, person, idea or development matters and deserves to be studied and remembered. Every history book, museum and national holiday rests on judgements of significance, because no account can include everything. Learning to make, explain and question these judgements is what turns a list of facts into an argument about the past.
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Scope. Significance is one of the four historical concepts that run through every part of the course, alongside cause and consequence, continuity and change, and perspectives. The study of the concept covers what significance is, the criteria historians use to judge it, why judgements change over time and differ between groups, and how memory and commemoration express them, illustrated from all four thematic studies and the voyage of Columbus in 1492. The course itself rests on a judgement of significance: its choice of studies deliberately includes diverse regions and histories that have sometimes been marginalised.
A battle, a law or a leader does not carry a fixed amount of significance that historians simply measure. Significance is assigned. The historians of education Peter Seixas and Tom Morton, in The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts (2013), describe it as something that depends on the historian's question and on the place of the event in a larger story. The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 in England, for example, is significant in a history of English labour and protest, much less so in a history of English foreign policy.
The diagram of the four questions behind any judgement of significance shows why historians so often disagree about it. An event can be highly significant for one group and minor for another (for whom?), significant for its consequences while revealing little (in what way?), significant at the time but forgotten later, or the reverse (when?), and central to one inquiry but marginal to another (for what?). A precise judgement answers all four.
Three ideas are often confused with significance.
Fame. Some events are well known because they are dramatic, well filmed or often taught, not because they changed much. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 is famous; its significance lies mainly in what it shows about class and in the safety rules that followed, not in large-scale historical change.
Size. The number of people involved matters, but a small event can be very significant. On 17 December 2010 Mohamed Bouazizi, a street trader in Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia, set himself on fire after officials confiscated his goods. One man's protest became significant because of the uprisings it set off across the Arab world, known as the Arab Spring.
Causal importance. A cause that contributed a great deal to an outcome is significant for that outcome. Consequences are the most widely used criterion of significance, but not the only one. An event can be significant because it reveals something (a riot that shows how people lived, a trial that exposes a regime's methods) even if it changed little.
A judgement of significance is therefore an argument, and like any argument it needs criteria and evidence. A strong judgement is also qualified: it says in what ways and how far something was significant, and acknowledges the ways in which it was not.
Because significance is a judgement, historians and history teachers have proposed criteria to make it systematic. Using criteria forces a judgement to give reasons, and it allows two judgements to be compared on the same terms. Three sets are widely used.
In The Idea of an Historical Education (1980), the British educationist Geoffrey Partington proposed five criteria for deciding which parts of the past most deserve study.
Importance: how important the event was to people living at the time.
Profundity: how deeply people's lives were affected.
Quantity: how many people's lives were affected.
Durability: how long the effects lasted.
Relevance: how far the event helps understanding of the present.
Partington's criteria stress impact: depth, breadth and length of effect. They work well for wars, revolutions, famines and inventions, less well for events that changed little but tell historians a great deal.
The history teacher and educationist Christine Counsell, writing in the journal Teaching History in 2004, offered five criteria that are easy to remember because each begins with R. An event or person may be significant because it was:
Remarkable: remarked on by people at the time or since.
Remembered: important in the collective memory of a group, for example in national myths, commemorations or songs.
Resonant: people make analogies with it or use it to make sense of later events.
Resulting in change: it had consequences for the future.
Revealing: it sheds light on some other aspect of the past, such as the values, conditions or tensions of a society.
Seixas and Morton reduce the criteria to two. An event, person or development is significant if it resulted in change (deep and lasting consequences for many people over a long period) or if it is revealing (it illuminates enduring or emerging issues in history or the present). They add that significance varies with the perspective and purpose of the person judging it, and changes over time.
Framework | Criteria | Strength | Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
Partington (1980) | Importance, profundity, quantity, durability, relevance | Measures impact precisely: how deep, how many, how long | Undervalues small events that tell historians a great deal; "relevance" depends on the present |
Counsell (2004) | Remarkable, remembered, resonant, resulting in change, revealing | Includes memory and reputation, so it explains why some events are celebrated | Remembered and remarkable events are not always the most consequential |
Seixas and Morton (2013) | Resulting in change; revealing | Simple and flexible; stresses that significance is constructed | Leaves the weighing of different kinds of change to the historian |
The table of examples applies the criteria to one event from each thematic study. In each case the criteria give different answers, which is why a judgement needs to weigh them.
Thematic study | Event | Resulting in change (profundity, quantity, durability) | Revealing | Remembered and resonant |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Conflict | Battle of Stalingrad, August 1942 – February 1943 | Destroyed the German Sixth Army; about 91,000 Germans surrendered; the German advance in the east never recovered | The scale of Soviet mobilisation and the brutality of the war in the east | Central to Soviet and Russian memory; the city, renamed Volgograd in 1961, holds the vast Mamayev Kurgan memorial |
Innovation and transformation | Gutenberg's printing press, Mainz, c. 1450–1455 | Printed books spread across Europe within fifty years; printing helped spread the Reformation from 1517 | European demand for texts from universities, the Church and merchants | Often named among the most important inventions of the millennium, though movable type existed earlier in East Asia |
Authoritarian rule | Night of the Long Knives, 30 June – 2 July 1934 | Removed the SA leadership; won the army's support; the army swore an oath to Hitler personally in August 1934 | The regime's readiness to murder opponents and the legal system's acceptance of it (a law of 3 July 1934 declared the killings legal) | A byword for a ruthless purge of former allies |
Popular movements | Montgomery bus boycott, December 1955 – December 1956 | Desegregated Montgomery's buses after the Supreme Court upheld Browder v. Gayle (1956); made Martin Luther King Jr. a national leader | The organisation and determination of Black communities and churches in the segregated South | Rosa Parks's arrest is one of the best-known moments of the civil rights movement |
The examples show that criteria can pull in different directions. The Montgomery bus boycott changed the law on one city's buses, a limited result, but it was highly revealing and is among the most remembered events of the civil rights movement, and its methods and leaders shaped the next decade. A judgement that it was "very significant" is weak; one that it was more significant for the methods and leadership it created than for its direct legal result is an argument that can be tested.
YouTubeJudgements of significance are never final. The diagram of why judgements change sorts the reasons into three groups: the passing of time, changes among historians, and changes in the societies that remember.
People living through an event cannot know what it will lead to, so its significance often becomes clear only later. In January 2011, days after President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia, few observers could know whether the Tunisian uprising would be a local revolt or the beginning of a wave of revolutions. Bouazizi's protest became significant because of what followed it; seen from 1 December 2010, a desperate act by one trader in a provincial town would have seemed a local tragedy.
Later events can also lower an earlier event's significance or change its meaning. The Nobel Peace Prize of 2015 judged the significance of Tunisia's transition in the light of what had happened by then.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2015 is to be awarded to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011.
Norwegian Nobel Committee, announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2015, 9 October 2015. The prize was a judgement of significance by an international body that wished to hold up Tunisia as the one success of the Arab uprisings and to encourage dialogue elsewhere. After President Kais Saied suspended parliament in July 2021 and ruled by decree, many observers judged the "pluralistic democracy" the committee praised to have been fragile or reversed; as of 2026 the significance of 2011 for Tunisia is still being argued over. The citation is valuable as evidence of how the revolution was judged in 2015, not as a final verdict.
New evidence can transform significance. The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), the only successful revolt of enslaved people that founded a state, was for a long time treated in European and North American histories as a minor or exotic episode. The anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued in Silencing the Past (1995) that this neglect came from Western assumptions about who could make history. Since the 1990s historians have placed it at the centre of the "age of revolutions", alongside the American and French revolutions, as the revolution that applied the idea of universal rights to enslaved people. New questions (about slavery, race and the Atlantic world) changed its significance more than new facts did.
Each generation finds significance in the parts of the past that speak to its own problems. Interest in past pandemics, from the Black Death to the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919, rose sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020. Concern with climate change has given new significance to the Little Ice Age of the seventeenth century and to the environmental effects of the Industrial Revolution. Partington's criterion of relevance names this effect directly, which is both its strength (history that helps explain the present) and its risk (judging the past only by what matters now).
The same event can have opposite significance for different groups, because it affected them in different ways and because they use it in different stories about who they are. Judgements of significance are therefore closely linked to the concept of perspectives: asking "significant to whom?" often explains why judgements differ.
The end of the Second World War in Europe in May 1945 is remembered in Western Europe as liberation from Nazi occupation. In the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), which the Soviet Union had annexed in 1940, it is widely remembered as the beginning of a second occupation that lasted until 1991, with mass deportations to Siberia and other remote parts of the Soviet Union in 1941 and again in 1944–1953. In Russia, Victory Day on 9 May is the most important national holiday and a central part of national identity. When the Estonian government moved a Soviet war memorial, the "Bronze Soldier", from the centre of Tallinn in April 2007, the clash between these judgements led to riots and a diplomatic crisis with Russia.
Group | Significance of May 1945 | Main criteria in play |
|---|---|---|
Western Europeans (France, the Netherlands, Norway …) | Liberation from occupation and the end of Nazi terror | Resulting in change; remembered in national holidays such as 8 May in France |
Soviet Union and Russia | Victory in the Great Patriotic War at the cost of about 27 million Soviet lives; proof of the state's strength | Profundity and quantity of loss; remembered and resonant, used by the state to build national identity |
Baltic states and many Poles | Replacement of one occupation by another; loss of independence until 1989–1991 | Resulting in change (Soviet rule, deportations); remembered as a national trauma |
Jewish survivors of the Holocaust | The end of genocide, but a liberation that came too late for about six million Jews killed | Profundity; revealing; remembered through survivors' testimony |
The table of judgements of May 1945 shows that disagreement about significance is often not about the facts at all. All four groups would agree on what happened in May 1945; they differ on what it meant, because each group judges it by its effect on its own people.
The same applies to individuals. Historians may disagree about the significance of a leader because they use different criteria or judge it for different groups. Winston Churchill came first in a BBC poll of the "greatest Britons" in 2002, mainly for his leadership of Britain in 1940, when it fought on alone against Nazi Germany. In India, his significance is more often judged by his opposition to Indian independence and by his government's response to the Bengal famine of 1943, in which, on most estimates, between about two and three million people died. Both judgements rest on real evidence; they differ in whose experience they measure.
Historians are not the only people who judge significance. States, communities, museums and campaigners make public judgements every time they build a monument, name a street, declare a holiday, design a school curriculum or issue an apology. These judgements form a society's collective memory, and they can be studied as historical sources in their own right.
A commemoration is evidence about the people who created it as well as about the event it remembers. A statue put up in 1900 is evidence of what its builders in 1900 thought deserved honour; the decision to remove it in 2020 is evidence of what had changed. Historians therefore treat commemorations as sources about significance, asking who made them, when, for whom and why.
After Kenya became independent in 1963, its first government under Jomo Kenyatta played down the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s. The movement remained banned until 2003, and 20 October, the date of Kenyatta's arrest in 1952, was celebrated as Kenyatta Day. As the generation of the independence struggle aged and the political climate changed, the significance of Mau Mau was re-judged. A statue of the Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi was unveiled in central Nairobi in 2007, and the constitution of 2010 renamed 20 October as Mashujaa Day ("Heroes' Day"), honouring all who fought for independence. The fuller story of Kenyan independence is a focused study of its own; here it shows how a nation's judgement of significance can shift within a lifetime.
Former colonial powers have also had to re-judge their colonial past. After Kenyan veterans of British detention camps sued the British government, the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, told the House of Commons on 6 June 2013 that the government recognised that Kenyans had been tortured and ill-treated by the colonial administration and sincerely regretted it. The statement accompanied a legal settlement of £19.9 million for 5,228 claimants and support for a memorial in Nairobi to the victims of torture, but it did not accept legal liability. It shows how far the official British judgement of the significance of the Emergency had moved by 2013, and where it stopped; the statement itself is analysed as a source in the focused study of Kenyan independence.
Debates about apologies and reparations (payments to make amends for a past wrong) are debates about significance: they ask whether a past injustice still has consequences that require action in the present. In 1825 France forced newly independent Haiti to pay an indemnity of 150 million francs, later reduced to 90 million, to compensate former slave-owners for their lost "property" in exchange for recognition. Haiti borrowed to pay it and finished paying the loans only in the twentieth century. Haitian governments and historians have argued that the debt was a lasting cause of Haiti's poverty; in April 2025, on the two-hundredth anniversary, President Emmanuel Macron announced a joint Franco-Haitian commission of historians to study it. Judging the significance of the indemnity has become a question with present-day political and financial consequences.
In 2015 students at the University of Cape Town campaigned under the slogan "Rhodes Must Fall" for the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist and mining magnate; the university removed it in April 2015. In June 2020, during protests after the killing of George Floyd in the United States, protesters in Bristol, England, pulled down a statue of Edward Colston, a seventeenth-century merchant who had been an official of the Royal African Company, which shipped tens of thousands of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. The statue was later displayed, lying down and covered in paint, in a Bristol museum.
Supporters of removal argued that public statues honour their subjects, so keeping them is a present-day judgement that slave-traders and imperialists deserve honour. Opponents argued that removal erases history. Many historians replied that a statue is not the history itself but an interpretation of it from the time it was built: Colston's statue was put up in 1895, more than 170 years after his death, by Bristol's Victorian elite, which shows what they chose to celebrate.
YouTubeEvery history, from a school textbook to a national museum, includes some parts of the past and leaves out others. That selection is the most basic judgement of significance. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, histories written in Europe and North America told world history as the story of Europe's rise, with other regions appearing mainly when Europeans arrived. Curricula built on that selection taught generations of students that significant history happened mostly in the West.
Choosing to study diverse regions and the experiences of women, colonised peoples, Indigenous peoples and other marginalised groups is itself a judgement of significance: it claims that these histories matter as much as those of states and elites. Like any such judgement, it can be explained and argued over.
Gutenberg's printing press, which printed the Gutenberg Bible in Mainz around 1455, is often called one of the most significant inventions in history. Yet movable type was invented first in China. The scholar Shen Kuo, in his Dream Pool Essays (1088), described how a craftsman named Bi Sheng had made movable type from baked clay in the 1040s. In Korea, books were printed with movable metal type in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the oldest surviving example is the Jikji of 1377.
Two arguments explain why European histories long treated Gutenberg as the inventor. The first is Eurocentric selection: historians writing in Europe knew European sources and judged significance by effects on Europe. The second is an argument about consequences. Chinese and Korean printers continued to use woodblocks for most books, because a script with thousands of characters made movable type less practical; in Europe, an alphabet of a few dozen letters made movable type cheap, and printing spread rapidly in a market of competing cities and states. On this view Gutenberg's press was not the first but was the most significant for its results. A balanced judgement separates the two claims: who invented movable type (East Asia) and where it produced the largest and fastest change (Europe after 1450).
Even within European history, historians disagree about how significant printing was. The table of interpretations sets out the two best-known positions.
Historian | Argument | Evidence stressed |
|---|---|---|
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) | Printing brought a revolution in communication that fixed and standardised texts, preserved knowledge and made possible the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution | The rapid growth in the number of books; standardised editions; the spread of Luther's pamphlets after 1517 |
Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (1998) | Printed books were not automatically reliable or fixed; piracy and errors were common, and trust in print had to be built socially over centuries | Pirated editions, disputes between printers and authors, especially in seventeenth-century London |
Eisenstein judges printing by the criterion of resulting in change and finds it transformative; Johns does not deny its importance but argues that the change was slower, more uneven and more dependent on people and institutions than on the technology itself. The debate shows that agreement on what happened (printing spread) still leaves room for disagreement on significance (how much it changed, how fast, and why).
On 12 October 1492 Christopher Columbus, a Genoese navigator sailing for the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, landed on an island in the Bahamas that its Taíno inhabitants called Guanahani and he named San Salvador. Few events have been judged so differently. It has been presented as a discovery, a meeting of two worlds, the beginning of American history, and the beginning of conquest, enslavement and the destruction of Indigenous societies. The timeline of the voyage and its anniversaries shows how these judgements succeeded one another.
Columbus did not know the significance later given to his voyage. He believed he had reached islands off the coast of Asia (the "Indies"), and he held this belief until his death in 1506. The name "America" first appeared on a world map by Martin Waldseemüller in 1507, after Amerigo Vespucci, whose published letters argued that the lands were a new continent. To the Spanish crown in 1492–1493 the voyage was significant as a possible route to Asian wealth and as a chance to spread Christianity, a rivalry with Portugal and a source of gold.
Columbus's own account of the first landing survives only in a summary of his lost journal made in the sixteenth century by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who later became a fierce critic of Spanish treatment of Indigenous peoples. In the entry for the day of the landing, Columbus describes the Taíno.
Weapons they have none, nor are acquainted with them, for I showed them swords which they grasped by the blades, and cut themselves through ignorance. … It appears to me, that the people are ingenious, and would be good servants and I am of opinion that they would very readily become Christians, as they appear to have no religion.
Christopher Columbus, journal of the first voyage, entry for 12 October 1492, as abstracted by Bartolomé de las Casas (English translation, slightly adapted, from Olson and Bourne, The Northmen, Columbus, and Cabot, 985–1503, 1906). Columbus was writing for the monarchs who had paid for the voyage, so he stressed what would please them: a people who could be converted and made to serve, and who could not resist. Read today, the passage is revealing, in Counsell's sense, of the assumptions that shaped conquest from its first day; to readers in 1492 it would have read as promising news.
By the criterion of change, 1492 is among the most significant dates in world history. The historian Alfred Crosby, in The Columbian Exchange (1972), named the Columbian exchange: the transfer of plants, animals, people and diseases between the hemispheres that followed. Maize, potatoes and cassava from the Americas became staple foods in Europe, Africa and Asia; horses, cattle, wheat and sugar cane were taken to the Americas. Diseases such as smallpox and measles, to which the peoples of the Americas had no immunity, killed a large part of the Indigenous population within a century. The demand for labour on plantations and in mines led to the transatlantic slave trade, which carried more than 12 million Africans across the ocean.
The chart of population estimates shows how a change in historians' evidence changed the significance of 1492. In the 1930s and 1950s, scholars such as Alfred Kroeber and Ángel Rosenblat estimated the pre-contact population of the Americas at under 15 million. From the 1960s, studies of epidemics and of local tribute and census records led Henry Dobyns and others to much higher figures. On the higher estimates the decline after 1492 was one of the greatest demographic catastrophes in human history. The figures remain contested because the evidence is indirect, but the debate itself moved the significance of the voyage from discovery towards catastrophe.
In the young United States, Columbus became a national hero, a symbol of a new world free of old Europe. The first celebration of the tercentenary was held in New York in 1792. Washington Irving's popular biography of 1828 presented Columbus as a visionary who defied the ignorance of his age, and John Vanderlyn's painting of the landing was placed in the Rotunda of the Capitol in 1847.
The four-hundredth anniversary in 1892 was celebrated on a national scale. Congress asked the president to proclaim a holiday, and Benjamin Harrison did so in July 1892.
On that day let the people, so far as possible, cease from toil and devote themselves to such exercises as may best express honor to the discoverer and their appreciation of the great achievements of the four completed centuries of American life. Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment.
Benjamin Harrison, President of the United States, Proclamation 335, "400th Anniversary of the Discovery of America by Columbus", 21 July 1892. The proclamation judges Columbus by the criteria of change and resonance: he began "four completed centuries of American life" and stands for "progress and enlightenment". It asked for the celebrations to centre on schools, which spread this judgement to a generation of children; the Pledge of Allegiance was written for those school celebrations. The context also mattered. Italian Americans, a large and often despised immigrant group, adopted Columbus as a symbol of their place in the nation, and the proclamation came a year after eleven Italian Americans were lynched in New Orleans in 1891. Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 then celebrated four centuries of progress with exhibits of American industry.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed 12 October a national holiday, Columbus Day, in 1937, after campaigning by the Catholic fraternal organisation the Knights of Columbus; since 1971 it has been observed on the second Monday in October. In Spain and much of Latin America, 12 October was celebrated as the Día de la Raza or Día de la Hispanidad, honouring the Spanish language and culture that the voyage brought to the Americas; it remains Spain's national day.
By the five-hundredth anniversary in 1992 the judgement had divided. Governments in Spain and the Americas held celebrations, including the world's fair in Seville, and some official programmes spoke of an "encounter" rather than a "discovery". Indigenous organisations across the Americas held counter-events marking five hundred years of resistance, and protests disrupted Columbus Day parades in the United States. In 1992 the city of Berkeley in California replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. Historians such as Kirkpatrick Sale, in The Conquest of Paradise (1990), presented Columbus as the start of European destruction of the Americas' peoples and environment.
Later changes continued the shift. Venezuela renamed 12 October the Day of Indigenous Resistance in 2002, and Argentina the Day of Respect for Cultural Diversity in 2010; a statue of Columbus behind the presidential palace in Buenos Aires was removed in 2013. In 2020 statues of Columbus were removed or pulled down in several US cities, and Mexico City took down its Columbus statue on the Paseo de la Reforma. In 2021 Joe Biden became the first US president to proclaim Indigenous Peoples' Day.
Since time immemorial, American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians have built vibrant and diverse cultures — safeguarding land, language, spirit, knowledge, and tradition across the generations. On Indigenous Peoples' Day, our Nation celebrates the invaluable contributions and resilience of Indigenous peoples, recognizes their inherent sovereignty, and commits to honoring the Federal Government's trust and treaty obligations to Tribal Nations.
Joseph R. Biden, President of the United States, "A Proclamation on Indigenous Peoples' Day, 2021", 8 October 2021. Compared with Harrison's proclamation of 1892, the subject of significance has moved from the "discoverer" to the people who were already there. Biden still proclaimed Columbus Day as well, so the two judgements now exist side by side in official US memory, and later presidents have weighted them differently.
Group or period | Judgement of 1492 | Criteria emphasised |
|---|---|---|
Spanish crown, 1490s | A route to wealth and a chance to spread Christianity | Importance at the time |
United States, 1792–1892 | The founding moment of American progress and liberty | Remembered; resonant; resulting in change (seen as progress) |
Italian Americans, from the 1890s | A symbol of Italian contribution to America and of belonging | Remembered; identity |
Spain and Hispanic America, 20th century | The birth of a shared Hispanic language and culture | Remembered; durability |
Indigenous peoples, especially from 1992 | The beginning of invasion, dispossession and population collapse | Profundity; quantity; resulting in change (seen as catastrophe) |
Environmental and global historians (Crosby, 1972) | The start of the Columbian exchange that reshaped diets, ecologies and populations worldwide | Resulting in change; durability; quantity |
The table of judgements of 1492 shows that almost everyone agrees that the voyage was significant; they disagree about what kind of significance it had and for whom. The facts of the voyage have changed little since the nineteenth century. What changed was who was doing the judging, which criteria they used, and whose experience they counted.
A judgement of significance is an argument, so it can be built step by step. The chain of five steps sets out a method that works for an event, a person, an idea or a development.
The first step prevents the most common confusion: claiming that something was "significant" without saying for whom or for what. The second and third turn the claim into an argument with criteria and evidence. The fourth tests it against other perspectives and other periods. The last produces a judgement that says how far, and in what ways, something was significant, and which criteria it scores less well on.
The table of significance questions gives one example from each thematic study of how judgements can differ and why.
Thematic study | Example | Why judgements of its significance differ |
|---|---|---|
Conflict | The Battle of Stalingrad (1942–1943) as a turning point | Historians weigh it against the Battle of Moscow (December 1941) and Kursk (July 1943); Soviet and Russian memory gives it a central place; Western accounts long gave more attention to the war in the west |
Innovation and transformation | Gutenberg's press (c. 1450) | Eurocentric selection versus earlier East Asian movable type; Eisenstein's revolution versus Johns's slower change |
Authoritarian rule | The Night of the Long Knives (1934) | A turning point in consolidation, or the last step of a process begun in 1933; significant for what it revealed about law in the Nazi state |
Popular movements | Gandhi's Salt March (March–April 1930) | It changed little at once (the salt tax remained), but it was remarkable and resonant worldwide, mobilised millions and led to about 60,000 arrests and to talks between Gandhi and the viceroy |
Each of these also involves the other historical concepts. Judging significance uses consequences (cause and consequence), asks whether something was a turning point (continuity and change), and asks for whom it mattered (perspectives).
Concept questions on significance approach it from several angles: how significance can be judged in different ways, how it changes over time, why historians disagree about an individual's significance, and why some events are remembered more than others. Each needs a judgement that is qualified and supported.
I can explain why historical significance is a judgement rather than a property of an event.
I can distinguish significance from fame, size and causal importance.
I can state and apply Partington's criteria, Counsell's 5 Rs and Seixas and Morton's two criteria, and explain the strengths and limits of each.
I can explain how judgements of significance change as consequences unfold, as sources and questions change and as societies change.
I can explain how significance depends on perspective, using an example such as May 1945.
I can explain how monuments, holidays, apologies and reparations express judgements of significance and can be used as sources.
I can explain how selection and Eurocentrism shape which histories are treated as significant, using the example of printing.
I can trace how the significance of Columbus's voyage of 1492 has been judged at different times and by different groups.
I can use the five-step method to reach a qualified judgement of significance about an example from my thematic study.
I can write a concept answer that analyses significance in two or three facets with precise evidence from one example.