Tim Urban, Wait But Why
I found this piece in The Washington Post over the weekend interesting and enjoyable, but odd:
The history of the world, as you’ve never seen it before
Quick, what famous historical figures were living roughly 500 years ago?
A few creative people might bring to mind the rhyme “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” and recall Columbus, Ferdinand and Isabella. Some clever souls might recall that Michelangelo finished the Sistine Chapel in 1512, and recall from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles a few other names — Leonardo, Raphael and Donatello. Or real history buffs might recall the astronomical work of Copernicus, or Henry VIII’s diva dips in the early 1500s.
But for most of us, what will come to mind is probably the hum of nothingness, or the gentle chirping of crickets. Most of what people remember from history class is pretty pathetic, a weak smattering of names and random anecdotes, like Eli Whitney and his revolutionary cotton gin, or Ponce de Leon looking for the fountain of youth in Florida.
We tend to learn about history by following a particular life or a conflict through the years – what Tim Urban, who runs the blog Wait But Why, calls “understanding history in a vertical sense.” But in a new blog, Urban offers another fascinating approach to understanding history: Taking a big “horizontal” slice to look at who was alive around the world in a certain year….
I say “odd” because… this is sort of the way I’ve always thought of history, not “a way you’ve never seen it before.” I mean, it’s not like I have this infallible database in my mind about when famous historical figures were born and died. I wouldn’t be able to construct a graph like the one above off the top of my head. In fact, I don’t really think in terms of precise dates, beyond the obvious ones such as 1066, 1492, 1776, 1800, 1861-65, 1939-45, and so forth.
But I think of people and events in context. I know roughly who was whose contemporary, because the events they were involved in were happening at about the same time.
How can you avoid knowing, for instance, that Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Horace Greeley, George Armstrong Custer and John Mosby were all alive around the same time? They were involved in the same issues during the same era. Admittedly, it’s harder to remember that Karl Marx was a contemporary, too, since he wasn’t involved in the same events and issues. And I had to check to see that The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital straddled the Civil War years. But I knew they were around that time — that is to say, roughly mid-century. I knew Crime and Punishment appeared in the 1860s, and I had this vague idea that Dostoevsky was interacting with Marxist ideas, and… to simplify, I see connections, even if they aren’t as organized as on Mr. Urban’s blog.
It seems to me odd that anyone would think about it any other way. I’m thinking some of y’all probably think of history in this “new” way as well…
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No, I don’t think of history in a horizontal perspective for the most part. For those events that have happened in my lifetime–maybe even for most of the 20th century (and in which the US was involved in some way), the horizontal approach comes pretty easy. But beyond that–world history in the 19th century and prior–it doesn’t come so easily to mind who is whose contemporary (except with some folks involved in scientific research and progress). I could have told you that Edmund Halley and Isaac Newton were contemporaries, but I could not have easily identified William Penn as their contemporary as well.
The charts Urban has created would be a great help to students for whom history is not a passion or students who are primarily visual learners. I like it.
Oh, I like it, too. I just thought it rather presumptuous to assert that this would be a shocking revelation to everyone…
And I’ll admit that if you do count out American history, I can get kind of lost in what was happening in Europe or Asia at a given moment, for instance.
But I’m generally aware of the context in which the really BIG names of history made their mark. And I’m familiar with huge developments that shaped history. For instance, I can’t remember the name of the Chinese emperor who banned travel away from China’s shores, but I’m aware that China turned inward right as Europe started reaching outward, thereby causing the West to be a greater catalyst than the East in dramatic developments over the next half a millennium…
I think I’d like this even more if the chart showed events/discoveries/movements rather than just names. I wish I had thought to teach like this…
Here’s the guy whose name I couldn’t remember:
And as I said, this was about the time when the Portuguese, under Prince Henry the Navigator, started feeling their way down the west coast of Africa, and then around and up into the Indian Ocean…
Norm is selling himself short. History teachers are storytellers. Even when they don’t plan to teach using this model, the information creeps in; they can’t help it. History, like the best novels, does not take place in a vacuum.
And the best historical novels accomplish that.
For instance, in Wolf Hall you get a strong sense about how all these contemporaries — Henry, Wolsey, Cromwell, More, Cranmer, Tyndale, Erasmus, Charles V and others — interacted, directly and indirectly. And how the movements roiling Europe affected their lives.
When my students ask me how to prepare for a test, I tell them that, while I can easily rattle off the names of all the US presidents in exact order, it’s not because I ever sat down and memorized the list–it’s because I understand why it *matters* that James Buchanan followed Franklin Pierce. Get the story right, and the trivia-quiz stuff will (a) be easily retained and (b) will no longer be trivia. Oh, and BTW, there’s another Karl Marx connection to the American Civil War–Marx actually wrote a series of commentaries on the war and its issues for Horace Greeley’s *New York Tribune.*