Ooh, no, you’d better go much earlier. Rome lost ALL of its early history to some fire, or some sort of catastrophe, and they ended up inventing a whole bunch of stuff that are now the lengends of early Rome. It’s pretty much crap. I’d suggest 500 BC as a good starting point.
Actually you may as well do both. Good early history and Imperial history. Heck I’ll go too. Sounds like fun.
So many choices;
I’m sure there many more that will come to me onve I’ve hit Submit
I want to hear Beethoven play the piano.
Hey everybody! Oswald shot JFK!! Get over it!
Sometimes the correct answer is the easiest.
Any point in Ancient Egyptian history;
The day when Jesus (supposedly) was resurrected;
Library at Alexandria for me too;
The beginning of the universe;
Cavemans face when he discovered fire;
Contact with extra-terrestrials
to name a few.
A lot of these have already been said, obviously:
The Sermon on the Mount
The first performance of Hamlet
The Gettysburg Address
The battles of Hastings, Waterloo, Gettysburg, the Bulge, Normandy, Britain.
Library at Alexandia, definitely
The Congress of Vienna, and the U.S. independence, Constitutional, and slavery debates.
Helen of Troy and Cleopatra in their respective primes.
The Cuban Missile Crisis
The moment when Joseph Smith uncovered the Golden Plates, would really let me decide once and for all if the Religion that I was brought up is true. Of course the whole Prayer in the Grove event would decide things just as well.
I know, they require the assumption that said event actually happened, but then so do the crucifixion and resurrection replies. (For the resurrection part at least)
Now if we are going for purely secular events I’d have to say I’d like to be there when the Declaration of Independence was read by the King of England (or at least when he was told it’s contents if he didn’t read it himself).
Now if it was interfere and not event then I’d got get the framers of the Bill of Rights to clear up the 2nd Amendment.
Woodstock 1969.
The infamous Clinton/Lewinsky blowjob.
I would want to go back several million years and, from a safe vantage point – say, sitting on the moon – watch that gigantic meteorite plow into the Yucatan.
Most of mine are cultural:
One of the first performances of Twelfth Night
Both of Chicago’s World’s Fairs
Performances by Jenny Lind and Houdini
A typical market day in a large Medieval English town
The Great Chicago Fire
The premiere of Oklahoma!
Mozart performing one of his own piano concertos
The first public showing of “Gertie the Dinosaur” to see the audience reaction
Paris in the 1890’s
My personal favorite would be to see the dinosaurs taken out. But I’d like to watch 'em for a few years first, though.
But I’d also like to tag along with some of you fundamentalists to see some of the biblical events you selected, and then watch the look on your faces when you realize that it’s all a bunch of bullshit.
Years and years ago, when I was a young lad, I found a small square of green paper on the pavement; on it, in neat handwriting, were the words “Roxell Roxell Bowshot”.
If I had a time viewer, I’d be heading back there to find out why somebody wrote that.
If I was able to interact with the past, I’d have a whole list of things to do.