Meanwhile
Text: Shoair Mavlian
Design: Giliane Cachin
Publisher: Morel, 2026
To begin this series, I asked twenty friends and colleagues across twenty countries and six continents a deceptively simple question: What were the twelve most important events of the past three hundred years? The events mentioned most frequently became the foundation for the twelve chapters of Meanwhile.
The rules were simple: name two events from the eighteenth century, four from the nineteenth, four from the twentieth, and two from the current millennium. The 240 responses produced 141 distinct events. They ranged from expected choices such as the French Revolution and September 11 to less obvious ones, including the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, and the discovery of the ozone hole in 1985.
for each of the selected historical turning points, I searched for another story that had unfolded on the same day, something less familiar and sometimes barely remembered. Some of these parallel moments were consequential in their own right; others flickered briefly into public awareness before slipping back into obscurity. One may have held significance for only a single person. Each, however, unfolded on the same day as an event widely regarded as world-shaping.
Occasionally, history produces its own coincidences. Two of the 141 suggested events occurred on the same day. On September 19, 1893, New Zealand signed a new Electoral Act, becoming the first country to grant women the right to vote. That same day, in Chicago, Swami Vivekananda delivered a landmark address on Hinduism, introducing Vedanta and Yoga to a Western audience. The two events unfolded independently on opposite sides of the globe, yet the expansion of women’s rights and the rise of interfaith awareness now share a single moment in time. It was discoveries like these that led to Meanwhile.