#EuropeanBios

Once upon a time, I read a biography of every American president. Halfway through, I started doing Twitter threads about the biographies, which got longer and more elaborate, and people enjoyed reading them. I discovered that reading biographies was obviously a fun way to learn about specific people, but there was an unexpected benefit: a continuous series (like the presidents) meant you got the same events told from different perspectives, and a broader view of history in general for that period.

So I embarked at the beginning of 2020 on a more ambitious project: given the hashtag #EuropeanBios on Twitter, the idea was to write up a mini biography of a continuous chain of historical European figures, starting in 500BCE and ending in roughly the present day. It took two and a half years. These are the resulting Twitter threads, downloaded, compiled, occasionally corrected and frequently annotated. I hope you enjoy reading them.

Advice for the reader

You can read all the bios in chronological order of course, but the earliest ones are kind of patchy because we don't know much about people that long ago, even the most famous ones. I suggest picking somebody you think you already know about, and if you enjoy it then go back and pick up some others. There are 83 bios so I don't recommend trying to get them all at once!

Because these threads were written as tweets I have presented them as tweets, even including likes and retweet counts when available. The joy of these threads is that they are bite-size and quotable and translating them to long-form prose would have lost that.

The bios