The Timetables of History (1946)

The early years of human history seem to have less information than might be available, particularly spotty in Asian history and pretty much nothing about Africa south of the Sahara. Still, an interesting browse and a good place to see what was happening in a given year. ( )

The kind of master-reference that was once very luxurious and impressive--a triumph, says Arthur Schlesinger (!) on the back cover--but has been in some ways well and truly superseded by the internet. You don't need this to look up dates anymore, but there is absolutely still some fascination in the cascade of names, events, facts, across the page--a synaesthetic smorgasbord. The best way to read this, then, is to start at the start and flip pages slowly, scanning the page but not too thoroughly, magpieing. The ancient world had a lot more "history and politics" than any of the other categories--just this sort of aggregate reminder about how much of the past is lost, and how mixed up humans can be about what's important for the ages. The change to individual year numbering at the start of the middle ages, 500 CE, and the total lack of much for most of the first 500 years or so--a reminder that you can push back to a certain degree against the "Dark Ages" cliche, stress continuities with Rome and active and vital cultural practices, but it was still a shitty and muddy and squalid time with a whole lot less going on than the before it or after it--and then the further observation that this is Eurocentric in a way that would not have been possible even, oh, ten years later (my edition is from the early '90s I believe). The different ways we evaluate the arts--literature with a canon that shifts in the weirdest ways but a constant sense of itself as high art; music as a classical preserve (and in terms of what we know, the youngest of the arts) with pop singers only grudgingly and comically admitted ("1968: Aretha Franklin ("soul" music) and Jimi Hendrix (hard rock music) joust for popularity"). Visual art as just dying out, dude--great works outnumbered basically every year past 1950 by deaths of those who produced great works in an earlier age. (Why haven't we canonized our computer graphics guys, our design men, our animators?) 1650: The first coffee house opens in London; and, tea is first drunk in the British Isles. There is some fun here. ( )

I'd be lying if I said that I read this book, but it is an interesting reference to peruse from time to time. ( )

Wow. What a concept. This could have been my introduction to the idea of multidisciplinary views of history. ( )