Gore/Feingold '16 (really?) writes:Find out if Tuesday was the largest gathering of humanity ever. That would be a significant piece of info.It was not. Here, like in so much else, Wikipedia provides, offering a list of the largest peaceful gatherings in history (wars often have a lot of people in one place at one time). Leading the charge is Allahabad's Hindu ceremonies in 2007, where more than 70 million pilgrims gathered over a period of 45 days. But the biggest single day they actually mention was January 15th, when more than 5 million participated in the festival of Makar Sankranti.More impressive for our purposes was April 5th, 2004, when more 30 million Hindu pilgrims from all over the world travelled to Hindu holy city of Ujjain in India for Simhastha Kumbh Mela. Then comes the 1969 funeral of C. N. Annadurai, a former Chief Minister of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which attracted an estimated crowd of 15 million people. And so it goes. The list seems rather incomplete to me: Too many of the events are from the last 10 years for comfort. And then there's the problem of definition: How do we define "one place?" If everyone comes to a fity, is that one place? Or do they all need to be on the same lawn?But the larger point is that no, Obama's inauguration was probably not the largest gathering in human history. Still pretty big, though.
