I've been reading The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings. In the front of the book are lists of historical figures and what they did, various cities and countries that will be visited in the book, and maps to tie all these people and places together.
Before I started reading the actual book, I started looking through all these resources.
I used to think of history as these neat boxes: British history is people in England only very rarely interacting with other groups; European history, same thing - France does its thing, Germany does its thing; Asia is way over there doing their own thing; and America... well, usually what you learned about the Americas didn't start until the Spanish and English went out poking around.
But I've come to realize more and more since leaving school - thanks in part to books like this, and to watching things like "Who really discovered America" on the History channel - that rather than history being neat little boxes, it is a basket of messy balls of yarn, all tangled up in each other. You can see the different colors, but trying to figure out where one ends and another begins requires a lot of patient unraveling.
Taking just the period of approximately 800-1100 AD, and what I've learned just from those introductory resources and the first 1/3 or so that I've read is that the "Vikings*" had a much larger influence on European history than I realized.
*And what I also didn't realize is that the raiders we know as Vikings were not just Norse, but also Danish. And they weren't a neat allied nationality - they were just as likely to fight and plunder from each other as they were from the other kingdoms they were invading.
Everyone knows Vikings went raiding. Everyone pictures the Vikings pulling up in their long ships, jumping out to smash-and-grab, and then heading home. But apparently a lot of them stayed. There were raiding parties, but there were also full scale invasions. Several Irish cities, including Dublin, were founded by Vikings. York was a major Viking trading center. Normandy was created when a Frankish king gave some land to the Northern invaders and said, "Look - please stay out of Paris and you can have this land. I obviously can't protect the coast; you broke it, you bought it."
I knew that early medieval Russia had been influenced by the Vikings. I didn't know that Kiev was founded by one, or that just a couple generations later his descendants (St. Olga and St. Vladimir) would turn Kievan Rus into a Christian state which is a huge and influential turning point in Eastern European and world history.
The Vikings found and settled Iceland, and had colonies in Greenland and areas that we would now call Canada and New England. They also raided as far south as the Mediterranean. Looking at all that on a map that is a huge, huge swath of the world to have influenced. And we don't learn about it. What I was taught of European history generally went: Ancient Greece and Rome, Fall of Rome, France and England in the "dark" ages, Italian Renaissance, German and English Reformation, Spanish Armada, Spain and England settle the New World, 'Merca, French Revolution, Queen Victoria, World War I and World War II. Neatly labelled little boxes.
I remember learning that there was a very stark red line in British history at 1066; the Normans invaded and English history began. Seriously. So many resources almost make it seem like nothing happened in England before 1066; so many lists of English events and monarchs don't begin until after that. Yes, I realize that prior to 1066 England was made up of a handful of smaller kingdoms, but Alfred the Great was apparently...well, great...and deserves some recognition. I also realize that a lot of people consider 1066 to be the start of English/British history because the invading Normans created a unified kingdom, as well as because that was the last time the island was successfully invaded.
Remember the French giving the Vikings Normandy? This happened about 150 years before the Norman invasion of 1066. Great, great-grandsons of "Vikings" invaded land that 150 years prior had been fought over by Anglo-Saxons and other "Vikings," who eventually settled and intermarried in the area. Vikings invading Vikings.
Between the Norman invasion and the strong Viking influence in Ireland, I thought about the number of English and Irish who would be descended from Vikings. English and Irish ancestry are two of the largest backgrounds in America. So realy, when you go back far enough, that probably makes a lot of Americans the descendants of Vikings when you get right down to it.
Hmm... Now I have a really strong urge to go pillage Ikea.