Maybe send it back to Mexico circa 1000 and, assuming it gets a bunch of converts, it would blow the Spaniards’ minds.
I’d send back a rather thorough history of the world. Written in modern English, but on some rather resilient material. It would also include very recent and cutting edge science and math, and maybe some programming. Where would I send it? Very deep in a location that would be buried, inaccessible, and not re-discovered until very recently, but the point in time would be well after being made generally inaccessible to people who might discover the text early* (say whatever the most recently excavated location that fits these criteria). Watching everybody squirm would be incredibly fun, and I do think it would change “history” a lot in the sense of “the history from the big bang to the heat death of the universe”, in that were such a thing never discovered the world would probably go down a much different path.
- Or perhaps send it to a part of the monument/city that is contemporary, but won’t be accessed by the people who live/visit there, and will only be found by modern scientist. This ensures that dating it won’t show a great disparity between the ages, but pulling off finding a place to put it is going to prove much more difficult then. Maybe in a grave of some poor soldier that’s not likely to be graverobbed or something?
Picture History of the American Civil War to Robert E. Lee in 1864.
Sports Almanac to Biff Tannen in 1955.
Ok, serious answers. If the only goal is changing history there’s all sorts of havoc you could cause. A history of the eastern front in Russian to Joseph Stalin in 1940. A history of the Battle of Salamis in Imperial Aramaic to Xerxes I in 480 BC. An account of Cortez’s conquest of Mexico to Montezuma II in nahuatl in 1518. An account of Teutoburg Forest to Varus in vulgar Latin in 9 AD. An account of Manzikert to Romanos IV Diogenes, etc.
A history of steam power to Hero of Alexandria. Just to give him some ideas - the notion of a form rail transport had already occurred to the Greeks in the Diolkos, and Hero had the idea of steam power. Imagine the ancient world with trains.
If your aims were to be a bit more altruistic, giving Galen a very basic medical work on first aid/midwifery could save a lot of pain. His ideas about the four humours and balances, all bullshit, were tremendously influential to medieval physicians who endlessly bled patients to death, but if you altered the truth/bullshit ratio the knock-on effect could be tremendous.
A biography of Henry Mosely to…well, Henry Mosely in 1914. Killed at Gallipoli in 1915, an amazingly promising physicist who could have won a Nobel Prize. Or aiming a bit higher, a history of World War 1 to David Lloyd George in the hopes that he would do things a bit different. Who knows how many potential Einsteins were slain on Flanders fields.
You’d need to supply some sort of “A Beginners Guide to Metallurgy”, but given that, I’m sure they would manage really very well.
Because it’s a joke, and Hitler is still history’s most recognizable monster.
I really like this one. Especially if you can put the atlas in as an appendix in a book that thoroughly describes metallurgy and examples of its practical usefulness. Then, send that one back to Hero of Alexandria. Because as I understand it (and I admit I might be totally mistaken here, since I never really looked into this) they didn’t exactly have access to a lot of abundant fuel, except trees. Tell them where all the coal is, though…
Regarding a number of the historical suggestions (e.g., History of the Eastern Front to Stalin in 1940 and the others in the second paragraph of Mr. Kobayashi’s post–not picking on you, just a convenient compendium), what makes you think that their targets would take them seriously? I can see Stalin in particular dismissing whoever handed the book to him as a Western saboteur and sending both him and the book to the gulag.
It seems that scientific/technical books, directed at individuals with a sufficient base of knowledge to puzzle them out and bridge the necessary gaps, would be the most effective.
In order to have maximal effect, the book to send back should consist of relatively timeless facts. This way, when the timeline changes, the information presented won’t become wronger and wronger over time.
That said, I’m surprised no one’s yet suggested sending On the Origin of Species, translated as appropriate to some time about a thousand years ago. The ideas are relatively easy to understand, given that people have considered evolution as a way to develop life since the Greeks. It’s putting everything together that took till the nineteenth century.
ETA: Sending an atlas back seems to be courting disaster. It would be a huge advantage to whichever group had it, and I can’t really see that turning out well.
That problem occurred to me too. I think it would be fruitless to try convincing Hitler, Stalin, or anyone of that sort with a single book. They were too egocentric to let a book change their course.
Instead, what we ought to do is pick some intellectual from the early 20th century who stands out for being open-minded and influential. (I’m willing to listen to any suggested names.) We send that person The Black Book of Communism. We hope that said person reads the book. Initially he or she will be skeptical that it’s a genuine artifact from the future. However, once communism takes over in Russia, they’ll be able to see that the events described in the book are coming true and to warn the world about what to expect from communist regimes all over the world.
Eh, Given that the world’s immediate reaction to the Bolshevik revolution was to send troops from 14 nations to try and defeat Communism in the field, I’m not sure that they needed to be told it was bad.
That, however, was based not on any concern that the Bolsheviks would commit atrocities against their own people, but rather a concern that the ideology presented a serious threat to capitalism, as I understand it. (Also, I suspect a certain amount of irritation over pulling out of WWI may have been involved–while the Russians were doing a spectacularly bad job of it, they were at least tying up some German troops away from the Western front.) And the internal crimes were kept on the down-low for a good long while; look at admiring reports, such as []Behind the Urals](Amazon.com: Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel: 9780253205360: Scott, John: Books), for example. A decent minority of folks looked at the USSR during the depression years and thought they were really on to something.
The Life Magazine that contained the Zapruder film back to JFK a week before the assignation.
I’d send detailed instructions in how to build a hang-glider to Leonardo da Vinci.
Isn’t that the point of the OP?
That’s what’s stumping me, as well. I don’t want to just change history, I want to change it for what (I perceive to be) the better. Everything I can think of would merely accelerate doom.
I want to find something terribly clever, like maybe sending the Bible to some bizarre looked down-upon backwater, so that it’s completely dismissed and ignored by the rest of the world as ridiculous superstition and never gains traction in the first place. Can’t decide whether that should be some tiny African tribe of naked hunter gatherers or a woman.
(Gorram, I’m cynical this morning, aren’t I?)
Well, the basic idea behind natural selection was suggested by Empedocles back in the 5th century BC (and by several other people before Darwin). What made the whole story convincing in Darwin’s hands was not so much the idea but the wealth of natural historical detail that he was able to bring to illustrating it, and that natural historical detail was simply not available much before his time. People who have never seen animals or plants from much beyond the immediate area where they live are not going to be convinced by stories about birds on some islands they have never heard of and are never going to see, off the shores of a continent they do not know exists. It will just seem like fantasy.
There is a reason everything was not put together until the 19th century. It really could not have been done much earlier.