Moby-Dick
1851Notable
Herman Melville's novel of Captain Ahab's hunt for a white whale sells poorly at first, then is rediscovered in the 1920s as a central work of American literature.
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Longest chain: The Big Bang → First stars ignite → Supernovae seed heavy elements → The Sun forms → Earth forms → First oceans → First life → Photosynthesis evolves → Great Oxidation Event → Complex cells (eukaryotes) → Multicellular life → First animals → Cambrian Explosion → First vertebrates → Jawed fish → Fish walk onto land → The amniotic egg → The Great Dying → Dinosaurs appear → Asteroid ends the dinosaurs → Early primates → Apes split from monkeys → Human line splits from chimpanzees → Walking upright → First stone tools → Genus Homo appears → Homo erectus → Control of fire → Habitual fire and cooking → Homo sapiens appears → Complex language → Natufian villages → Oldest known bread → Agriculture begins → Irrigation → Uruk and the first cities → Cylinder seals → Writing (cuneiform) → Akkadian Empire → Neo-Assyrian Empire → Persian Empire founded → Cyrus Cylinder → Return from exile and the Second Temple → Birth of Jesus (traditional date) → Jesus of Nazareth crucified → Paul spreads Christianity → Edict of Milan → Christianity becomes Rome's state religion → Carolingian minuscule → Gutenberg's printing press → Shakespeare → Moby-Dick
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