There’s more than the Inferno?
The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Burton
Call me pathetic, but I totally thought this was going to be about text messages and I was going to link to Texts From Last Night.
The Bible, Torah and Koran had a long lead on anything else IMO.
Also The Social Contract.
N.B.: “Influential” != “any good” or “worth reading.” Main Kampf was influential.
Because virtually nobody reads the Purgatorio and the Paridiso.
I slogged my way through them both, but Oy! is it a tough read!
Did you mean Edward Gibbon?
The Joy of Sex, although personally I felt the pictures were bad and the information was very boring.
I’m not sure how influential this book actually is, but it’s been in print like 5k years:
The Art of War, Sun Tzu
The Ninety-Five Theses by Martin Luther
The only reason I opened the thread was to see who would be the first to make the obvious joke. I’m (pleasantly) surprised no one has.
100 years from now, 21st century literature class textbooks will be comprised solely of LOLcats.
Exactly. Thanks.
It’s been a long day…
Mein Kampf?
Elements
Principia Mathematica
On computable numbers with an application to the Entcheidungsproblem
The Rosetta Stone?
Someday, soon, the most influential text in human history, and for the very brief remainder of same, will be The Book of the SubGenius.
The Wealth of Nations
Two Treatises of Government
Bhagavad Gita
Ramayana
1984
Oedipus Rex
The Prince
Aeneid
Faust
Walden and Civil Disobedience
Common Sense
The Jungle
Don Quixote
The Torah
Hammurabi’s code
The Christian Bible (and yes, I realize it’s 75% the *Torah *- the other 25% is incredibly influential too)
The Koran
The Magna Carta
The Constitution of the United States
Euclid’s Elements
The Vedas
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives
Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Einstein’s On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies
Gulag Archipelago
The Buddha’s First Discourse
Most of the ones I’d have picked have already been mentioned.
“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”, Albert Einstein. (Not so much for the concept of special relativity itself, but for helping popularize the idea of relativism.) (Edit: And GivenGrvty teaches me not to take so long typing this out)
The Zimmermann Telegram
The July Ultimatum (Guess the Tuchman I’ve been reading is having an effect…)
The Emancipation Proclamation
The Indian Independence Act of 1947?
The Treaty of Tordesillas
“Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction”, Luis Alvarez et al. (Influential for getting people to realize the dangers of big rocks, and perhaps doing something about it…)