Historical Significance: The Silk Road

Historical Significance is picking out the most important or valued parts of history. The question is though; how do historians pick what is significant or what is insignificant? From the website, The Historical Thinking Project, it talks about how significance can only be used if it can be connected to bigger ideas or reveals something to us today. I agree with that because if I ask myself, how is something from the past supposed to be significant if it can’t correlate, or be used in the present? The answer is it can’t! Significance is very dependent on your point of view and the purpose of it because what makes it significant to others, could be insignificant to me. Now the topic for this Case Study was the Silk Road. Even though the Silk Road’s trading is a lot smaller (micro-exchanges) then I thought, I believe it is still historically significant. The trade may have been a short stop from a town, to the next, but throughout the case study, I could see the ideas spreading far and wide. Slow and steady wins the race….. ;)