If one imagined an alternative US Civil War, where the war ended in stalemate, the Union and CSA coexisting for decades, before an miraculously resurgent Mexican Empire swept through and engulfed the territories of both, before allowing the original 13 states to continue to exist as a subservient, but nominally independent state that still had nominal local democratic republicanism, and the inhabitants on those states will called themselves "Americans".
When would you say "the United States of America fell" in that scenario?
Arguments about the "when did the Roman Empire fall in the west" are actually arguments about what are the most important aspects to Rome to us, here today in the modern world (particularly in the western world).
The Goths in a (very technical) way "unified" the empire after they took Italy since they got rid of the western emperor and declared that they are now vassals of the one in Constantinople.
In a couple of generations Romans were on the verge of retaking the entire Mediterranean, without the issues with the climate and especially the plague they might have done just fine and we'd be talking about the "crisis of the 5th century" instead of the fall.
As the onset of a US fall.
Personally, I didn't understand the Biden principle of helping Ukraine "not lose", but not helping it win. How was that ever going to produce a desirable result? And now, the US reputation for stalwart support of friends, and friends willingness to support the US, are both fading faster.
Well, I can't predict the future. At least I very much hope I can't.
Most of what we learn has been from dramatization. There is, maybe, slightly less now, offset by more technical text, but that's a really recent change in human history. And even then, how many people's ideas of history are entirely formed from television shows and movies, or even stories told to each other?
We talk about what makes stories compelling. Compelling stories have a beginning, a climax, and an end. History thus also has a beginning, climax, and end.
So we think of the Roman Empire as a thing in history that had a beginning, and a rise, and then a fall.
Yet Rome still exists.
I see this a lot in discussions about businesses. Somebody will do something dumb, and then immediately two camps form: those that throw darts at the exact date that the business will cease to exist, and those that mock the first camp's predictions of timely demise.
So we get these really repetitive, entirely pointless debates after the fact about whether the business is "dead" or not, so everybody can try to figure out which camp was right.
But, in the general case, it never works that way. For every WebVan, there are a hundred Reddits: persistently spectral businesses, online and still making money, occasionally bolstered by some CEO whose job it is to convince everyone that the business is still as full of verve as ever it was, and yet, when people think of it, they think of it nostalgically, if they do at all.
Slashdot is still online and posting stories every day.
Rome never fell; its story changed. It stopped being the main character of historical storytelling for a certain period, but of course that leaves us wondering what happened to that character, and when exactly did that character die?
Occasionally it did happen that way though. e.g. the Soviet Union was seemingly fine (or not much worse that before) and suddenly it and its empire was in a couple of years.
Their style of communism/socialism went down with them and is pretty much dead.
Arguably the absolute worst aspects of it are preserved under the state that exists there today. There's certainly a solid through-line through Putin himself.
> absolute worst aspects of it are preserved
While it's obviously horrible, lets not downplay what the USSR was.
Even as late as the 80s when they were pretty much exterminating entire towns and villages in Afghanistan. Of course there are tactical and strategical reasons why they can't do something close in scale to that in Ukraine.
After more than a thousand years that's true.
But Rome remained the "universal [Christian] Empire" well into the middle ages. In a way didn't really matter if its capital was in Constantinople or Aachen or Rome. Or if its ruler spoke Latin, Greek or even German.
Its ~35 years since the the collapse of the USSR, its cultural identity has pretty much disappeared.
A city exists in the same place, yes, but you'd be insane to fail to note the centuries of economic decline and the nearly complete disappearance of the bureaucratic state.
A bit over 840 years before the first Muscovy Tsar of Russia.
The Ottoman sultan just took it for himself because he conquered the territory and the people living there.
It was a big highlight of my adult life to learn that each country pronounces latin their own way cause they map their spelling over it.
E.g. Italians read the "c" in Caesar as the ch in 'chair", Hungarians as ts in tsar, Americans (anglophones ?) as s in sea.
But yeah the German pronunciation of kaiser is probably closer to classic latin.
For the republic, the crossing of the Rubicon is when it failed. But really even the first triumvirate was technically a “failure” of a republic (centralizing power in 3).
I would agree with that, though I wouldn't say it was Caesar crossing that did it. It was Sulla crossing the Rubicon that broke that particular seal. And of course, the foundations were laid even before that.
The Franks had them even longer.