Sometimes nothing happening IS significant, but depends on what that nothing is.

Thought about it some more and the most important event in US history is the founding. As a character in the movie I, Robot says, "Everything that follows, is the result of what you see here."

whats in I robot

I was talking about a line in the movie and not what the movie was about. The quote is highly applicable.

ok

Unless you don't count them as US history events, it has to be the atomic bomb or the moon landing. They will be well known 50,000 years from now when only scholars will know who George Washington was.

Good ole' George. Our second President.

Have you read Savior Generals by Victor Davis Hanson? His profile/chapter on Sherman is pretty compelling and perhaps serves as a foil to your contention (that and history is written by the winners a la Zinn). Or maybe the void left by Jackson allowed for a Sherman????

as a solipsist, my birth was my most significent event.

I disagree. Those are just inevitable events/discoveries of an advancing civilization.

As were fire, and the wheel, and the contact between the societies of the Eastern and Western hemispheres. Inevitable, but still worth having a Columbus Parade for.

Hi optionality:

I have not read the book you mention.

Also, while I consider Uncle Billy's accomplishments very important to US history, I think they're even more important to world history. Perhaps a topic for a different thread.

Best wishes,
Mason

I'd actually be quite surprised if the atomic bomb resonated for 50 millennia. That's making a lot of assumptions about the future of war and weaponry. Nuclear weapons made incredibly propaganda weapons but have alot of downsides, are difficult to deploy, and involve lots of risk to utilize for the attacker.

In a future where battlefields are likely populated by robots or nanotech and those battlefields might be in outer space and away from our atmosphere, I think it equally as likely nuclear weapons are a footnote in the history of warfare when considered over timescales that involve millennia. This borders on anecdotal, but many current first-world military budgets aren't really dedicated to nuclear weaponry; military tech budgets are far more focused on robotics, nanotech, space lasers, etc. than they are on nuclear weaponry and deployment systems or whatever. All the reasons for that are why I'd be shocked to see modern military might of say 500 years from now involve significant amounts of nuclear weapons. Future military power is going to involve self-replicating tiny robot nanotech or **** that can create massive explosions from space in seconds (e.g., lasers). Some future battle, probably no more than 250-500 years away, is going to involve trillions of tiny 1cm round or less nanodrones harassing people or infrastructure or whatever and some desperate clown will launch a nuke against it, maybe (if they're lucky) incinerate a few trillion of them, and then the remaining nanodrone robots will regroup and replicate themselves back into its former force post-blast within hours. And that will be the last of meaningful and useful of nuclear weapons in combat imo, and that's assuming the writing on the wall regarding nuclear weapon uselessness isn't clear already.

If there are historians 50k years from now covering us, nuclear weapons are going to be akin to spears and rocks.

I was talking more about splitting the atom, even though the bomb was not the first example of it.

Passage of Federal Reserve/Income Tax around 1913. Federal income tax led to increase in State sales and income taxes. IMHO, slowed technological development. It turned the USA into a quasi-collectivist state as opposed to a individualist republic state. It allowed ending of the gold standard and cheap debt for the elite and spendthrifts. There may be a lot of good, but it is unclear whether this is long-term or lucky. Many say it it improved life, yet I say without them the country would be a better richer more equal more technology advanced place. Instead of the federal reserve and income tax they ended fractional reserve banking and large scale accumulation of land by individuals the public would have seen the errors of these systems.