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Recently I was reading about English history in the 16th century on Wikipedia and found myself having to constantly check if a certain event happened before, du

Recently I was reading about English history in the 16th century on Wikipedia and found myself having to constantly check if a certain event happened before, during, or after a different event, and how this all would have added up to an actual world as experienced by people living at the time. The way that history tends to be encapsulated into specific "events" and placed in a linear timeline makes understanding this context basically impossible – unless you just read a bunch of books about the topic and then create your own interpretation of what was actually happening. It made me wish for a different way of presenting history. The best alternative I could come up with was something like a map of various rivers that intersect and cross each other at certain events. Each river being a particular trend or pattern, like "military buildup, conflict, then decommissioning," "personal incomes rose," or "belief in X rose/fell." Smaller tributaries could be included to cover smaller trends that sometimes grow larger. This would avoid the annoying habit where things are explained chronologically but then have to jump back in time later in the narrative, when the subject changes. And it would also illustrate better the idea that history isn't so much "one damn thing after another" but more like an ongoing interaction of different trends. Side note: writing this comment made me think of the Buddhist concept of dependent origination, which I don't know much about but seems like a good metaphor for this topic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratītyasamutpāda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratītyasamutpāda

europeanNyan 3y ago
I have been struggling with the same problem while trying to learn about human history because I wanted to first get a good 10000 foot view. It's really hard grasping what happened when, especially when things get really complicated after the fall of the Roman Empire. It's also interesting that there is no (or I couldn't find) readily available (free or paid) web app which would allow us to sort of slide over a timeline of history and show events which happened at that date/week/month/year. Even better if that could be filtered by event and importance. The best I could find are various timelines od history which try the parallel rivers approach, but they are mostly huge and unwieldy.
- perilunar 3y ago
  I'm working on a timeline that does some of that. It pans/zooms from milliseconds to all of time, with events appearing at certain time scales depending on their importance. Doesn't have filtering yet though. Also doesn't have a lot of data in it yet. But it works, and you can add your own content to it (private or public). https://www.timepasses.net https://www.timepasses.net
moltar 3y ago
I’ve had the same experience reading about history. My idea of it would be a Gantt chart. Because the history is still linear. But Gantt allows for dependencies and parallelism.
- comboy 3y ago
  I did have some Gantt charts in my history book back when I was at school (never knew the name), and yes it's so much more clear than recreating the same thing in your head based on dates.
hotpotamus 3y ago
Well, this isn't really at all what the article is about - I think it's more a criticism of "The End of History" type thinking. But the study of history is an interesting subject too and I've got some recommendations. Tim Urban (whose recent work I'm not especially enamored of) wrote about this a bit and came up with an interesting visual[0]. Not so much a map about events, but placing famous figures side-by-side so you see whose lives overlapped in time which is not always intuitive. It also sounds like you really need to watch or read "Connections" by James Burke. > Connections explores an "Alternative View of Change" (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation. [0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/01/horizontal-history.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/01/horizontal-history.html
Grothendank 3y ago
I recommend reading longer histories and reading them on audiobook. Those tell history in a nonlinear way, going events over and over and over from different perspectives, until you get the feeling of what it was like to live in that time. Your intuition about many rivers branching and merging is exactly what good history is written like. Once you have read some good histories, it's easy to fundamentally fall in love with all the stories and realities of the people travelling down these seemingly infinite rivers. for example, read Adrian Goldsworthy's "Pax Romana" and "How Rome Fell" for a very entertaining and up to date view of rome at its height and decline, with hundreds of little nonlinear story details. The audiobooks are on the audiobook bay. Listen to them view a Smart Audiobook reader with auto-pause for if you fall asleep, and start listening during exercise, cleaning, cooking, and commuting. If you start doing this, you'll start listening to about 2 histories a month. In a year you'll have a much deeper understanding of history and how it's written. Unfortunately, audiobook is the best format I've found for overcoming the size of history texts. It really helps me with my reading difficulties and tendency to get stuck on boring passages. The history is much more engaging when someone is reading for me. Also, many passages are going to go over your head, and it may put you to sleep literally - that's also fine! The goal is to start understanding and enjoying the small little stories that historians write. History is full of millions of them, and many of them are enjoyable!
- HPsquared 3y ago
  It's like reading the log files on a distributed system.
Tanoc 3y ago
Conspiracy boards work great for this, actually. You sort events into pools based on historical weight, and arrange them within the pools based on date and relation to eachother. The big event or concurrent events go in the center pool with all the contributing events in satellite pools around it. The events are ordered within the pools where the closer to the top of the cluster they are the further back they happened, and whether they're on the right or left dictates if they influenced or were influenced by other events in the pool. If you want further sorting, you can use different colours of string to denote specific trends or historical timelines. It also makes it fun for students to sort through because you can actually see the literal threads connecting things and how small events flowed into bigger events and culminated in massive events.
thewebcount 3y ago
I know what you mean! One of the things I loved about the TV show “Connections” was how it followed one thread to get you from some seemingly random starting point to whatever the final thing was. It would be interesting to see some of these threads plotted together. The other thing that makes this tricky is that any given event or phenomenon may not happen everywhere all at once. Just think of the popularity of a pop song, for example. It might have started in New York, and spread westward as more radio stations started playing it. Then it kind of died out in New York just around the time it was picking up steam in LA, or whatever. When you read about these things they often make it sound like one day someone played the song on the radio and then it was on every radio in the country simultaneously for the next 10 weeks before falling off the charts. But of course, that’s not how it actually happens. So it can definitely be hard to contextualize some of this stuff. And getting an accurate picture can be hard because we may not have all the details.
svilen_dobrev 3y ago
> as experienced by people living at the time there's another twist of all this. Communication back in time has been.. mostly missing - and slow if any. So people in two distant cities could be on two different planets, with similar outcome :) Seems those "linear" timelines, put in that context, look more like bitemporal things.. so its possible that city B learned that city A was in war when that war actualy ended, or later.. and reaction (if any) might be misplaced.. As of maps of "rivers".. that's similar to how people migrations - or army moves are shown. btw, there's this history-map of europe 1-year-per-second: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY9P0QSxlnI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY9P0QSxlnI and also this, i don't know are they of same author: https://thesoundingline.com/map-of-the-day-every-ruler-in-europe-since-400-bc/ https://thesoundingline.com/map-of-the-day-every-ruler-in-eu...

europeanNyan 3y ago

I have been struggling with the same problem while trying to learn about human history because I wanted to first get a good 10000 foot view. It's really hard grasping what happened when, especially when things get really complicated after the fall of the Roman Empire. It's also interesting that there is no (or I couldn't find) readily available (free or paid) web app which would allow us to sort of slide over a timeline of history and show events which happened at that date/week/month/year. Even better if that could be filtered by event and importance. The best I could find are various timelines od history which try the parallel rivers approach, but they are mostly huge and unwieldy.

perilunar 3y ago
I'm working on a timeline that does some of that. It pans/zooms from milliseconds to all of time, with events appearing at certain time scales depending on their importance. Doesn't have filtering yet though. Also doesn't have a lot of data in it yet. But it works, and you can add your own content to it (private or public). https://www.timepasses.net https://www.timepasses.net

moltar 3y ago

I’ve had the same experience reading about history. My idea of it would be a Gantt chart. Because the history is still linear. But Gantt allows for dependencies and parallelism.

comboy 3y ago
I did have some Gantt charts in my history book back when I was at school (never knew the name), and yes it's so much more clear than recreating the same thing in your head based on dates.

hotpotamus 3y ago

Well, this isn't really at all what the article is about - I think it's more a criticism of "The End of History" type thinking. But the study of history is an interesting subject too and I've got some recommendations. Tim Urban (whose recent work I'm not especially enamored of) wrote about this a bit and came up with an interesting visual[0]. Not so much a map about events, but placing famous figures side-by-side so you see whose lives overlapped in time which is not always intuitive. It also sounds like you really need to watch or read "Connections" by James Burke. > Connections explores an "Alternative View of Change" (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation. [0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/01/horizontal-history.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/01/horizontal-history.html

Grothendank 3y ago

I recommend reading longer histories and reading them on audiobook. Those tell history in a nonlinear way, going events over and over and over from different perspectives, until you get the feeling of what it was like to live in that time. Your intuition about many rivers branching and merging is exactly what good history is written like. Once you have read some good histories, it's easy to fundamentally fall in love with all the stories and realities of the people travelling down these seemingly infinite rivers. for example, read Adrian Goldsworthy's "Pax Romana" and "How Rome Fell" for a very entertaining and up to date view of rome at its height and decline, with hundreds of little nonlinear story details. The audiobooks are on the audiobook bay. Listen to them view a Smart Audiobook reader with auto-pause for if you fall asleep, and start listening during exercise, cleaning, cooking, and commuting. If you start doing this, you'll start listening to about 2 histories a month. In a year you'll have a much deeper understanding of history and how it's written. Unfortunately, audiobook is the best format I've found for overcoming the size of history texts. It really helps me with my reading difficulties and tendency to get stuck on boring passages. The history is much more engaging when someone is reading for me. Also, many passages are going to go over your head, and it may put you to sleep literally - that's also fine! The goal is to start understanding and enjoying the small little stories that historians write. History is full of millions of them, and many of them are enjoyable!

HPsquared 3y ago
It's like reading the log files on a distributed system.

Tanoc 3y ago

Conspiracy boards work great for this, actually. You sort events into pools based on historical weight, and arrange them within the pools based on date and relation to eachother. The big event or concurrent events go in the center pool with all the contributing events in satellite pools around it. The events are ordered within the pools where the closer to the top of the cluster they are the further back they happened, and whether they're on the right or left dictates if they influenced or were influenced by other events in the pool. If you want further sorting, you can use different colours of string to denote specific trends or historical timelines. It also makes it fun for students to sort through because you can actually see the literal threads connecting things and how small events flowed into bigger events and culminated in massive events.

thewebcount 3y ago

I know what you mean! One of the things I loved about the TV show “Connections” was how it followed one thread to get you from some seemingly random starting point to whatever the final thing was. It would be interesting to see some of these threads plotted together. The other thing that makes this tricky is that any given event or phenomenon may not happen everywhere all at once. Just think of the popularity of a pop song, for example. It might have started in New York, and spread westward as more radio stations started playing it. Then it kind of died out in New York just around the time it was picking up steam in LA, or whatever. When you read about these things they often make it sound like one day someone played the song on the radio and then it was on every radio in the country simultaneously for the next 10 weeks before falling off the charts. But of course, that’s not how it actually happens. So it can definitely be hard to contextualize some of this stuff. And getting an accurate picture can be hard because we may not have all the details.

svilen_dobrev 3y ago

> as experienced by people living at the time there's another twist of all this. Communication back in time has been.. mostly missing - and slow if any. So people in two distant cities could be on two different planets, with similar outcome :) Seems those "linear" timelines, put in that context, look more like bitemporal things.. so its possible that city B learned that city A was in war when that war actualy ended, or later.. and reaction (if any) might be misplaced.. As of maps of "rivers".. that's similar to how people migrations - or army moves are shown. btw, there's this history-map of europe 1-year-per-second: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY9P0QSxlnI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY9P0QSxlnI and also this, i don't know are they of same author: https://thesoundingline.com/map-of-the-day-every-ruler-in-europe-since-400-bc/ https://thesoundingline.com/map-of-the-day-every-ruler-in-eu...