And you thought it was cod that changed the world?

If you had to pick the most historically important year out of, say, the last hundred, what might you choose? 1939, with German tanks rolling into Poland? 1945 and The Bomb? '68 and its seismic social protests?

Some writers are tired of the "obvious" years garnering all the historical prestige (and, no doubt, book sales), and are putting forward other candidates for consideration. In January, Robert Kirkpatrick published "1969: The Year Everything Changed," which asked readers to shift their gaze from 1968 to the subsequent 12-month span, which saw the moon landing, Altamont, the first Boeing 747, and Woodstock, among other developments.

And in a book due out in June, Fred Kaplan, a correspondent for Slate (and former Globe reporter), plumps for even more of an underdog year: "1959: The Year that" -- yes -- "Changed Everything." Citing the Pill, innovations in spaceflight, the microchip, and tumult in the art world, Kaplan argues that that "was the year when the shockwaves of the new ripped the seams of daily life … when categories were crossed and taboos were trampled."

But 1959, too, faces competition -- as Alan Cooperman of the Washington Post blog Short Stack points out. In "Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year," also due in June, the British historian Alistair Horne makes a case for the game-changing importance of the U.S. peace agreement in Vietnam, the beginnings of detente with the Soviet Union, the revelations of Watergate, and the second Israeli-Arab war in six years.

Horne's title, by the way, contains an intriguing ambiguity: Was '73 "crucial" for Kissinger or for the world? Kissinger himself, a man of no small ego, might find that to be a distinction without a difference.

Meanwhile, 1066 and 1453 roll in their graves.

UPDATE: How could I forget 1816, 1831, and 1912? In Ideas in 2004, John Wilson discussed a trend in which historians were playing up, in their titles, years that were "conspicuous for their lack of any evocative associations."