Historyspeaking topic
The French Revolution's 'rational' overhauls like the new calendar and the metric system: let's talk about the ambition to redesign everything from scratch.
— The French Republican calendar and the metric system
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- Was it really a single bullet that started the First World War? Let's talk about the alliances, nationalism, and arms race behind the assassination in Sarajevo.
- The banana we eat today is not the variety people ate fifty years ago; the tastier original was nearly wiped out by a plant disease, and we now eat its understudy. If the artificial 'banana flavor' in candy actually imitates a fruit that no longer exists, does that mean our sense of taste has stayed loyal to a ghost?
- The Eiffel Tower was built as a temporary exhibition structure meant to be dismantled after twenty years; what saved it was not its aesthetic value but the military usefulness of the radio antennas mounted on top. A landmark now considered the soul of a city surviving purely because it was useful suggests that most things we call 'iconic' are really just accidents that survived.
- The diseases Europeans brought to the Americas wiped out most of the indigenous population without a single shot being fired; the conquest was largely a matter of microbes. A civilization collapsing not by the sword but through an invisible contagion shows how much the idea that 'the strong win' was really a biological accident.
- Let's talk about the conservative critique of the revolution in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.