In these heady times...

[HisMajestyBOB]

I don't know if the recession will be all that big in history books. No one talks about the recessions of the late 1890s, for example. If suddenly things get worse and 20%+ of people are unemployed, then yeah.

[dps]

Two comments, for starters

1. We need a definition of 'recent' for this thread to make sense

2. There is 'fast history' happening in days or weeks at the most (Fall of the Wall, First Man on Space, 9/11) and there is 'slow history' (Demographic Revolution, Civil Rights, Internet, European Union...) and things somehow in between, like the 'Great 2007 Recession'.

If we accept recent as a decade, then IMHO Obama's election and 9/11 compete for the most important thing in fast history, and the economic recession competes with China's aspirations to great power status in slow history. Perhaps (probably, indeed) some day 500 years in the future when they think about these years they will focus on global warming, nuclear weapons proliferation, the Treaty of Lisbon, the LHC, ITER or advances in genetics and cloning...

Some things will look far larger, others will matter only to historians. We just can't know which.   

I don't think that Obama's election will really be that big a deal in the long term.  It's an important indication that racism is receding in this country, but we're still a ways from having a color-blind society, and anyway that makes it more a symbol than anything else. 

[Admiral Yi]

I don't know if the recession will be all that big in history books. No one talks about the recessions of the late 1890s, for example. If suddenly things get worse and 20%+ of people are unemployed, then yeah.

I agree.  Unemployment still hasn't reach the level of the 80s and no one ever talks about that recession.