History is just one damn thing after another | Hacker News Reader

History is just one damn thing after another

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129 pointsprakhar89726 comments

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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!

It's like reading the log files on a distributed system.

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.

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.

> 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

and also this, i don't know are they of same author:

https://thesoundingline.com/map-of-the-day-every-ruler-in-eu...

Title should be How This All Happened (2021)

And since that is still very vague, here's the first line: "This is a short story about what happened to the U.S. economy since the end of World War II."

Remarkably well written.

The context of tribalism, especially how seeing others live better hits different when they're not in your tribe as well as how 9/11 and the two wars impacted the economy, similar to WW2 would have been nice to see in this story.

It's interesting how people can share similar views about society and the economy without having discussed them beforehand. Everything mentioned in this article fits perfectly into my worldview. It was still very interesting to read because it reaches the same conclusions from a different starting point. I guess this is what makes these narratives so powerful. They don't communicate new ideas, they merely confirm and label existing ideas which, until that point, had been building up in people's minds independently over many years.

You can meet someone completely different from you, from a completely different social group and industry with different life experiences; yet they have the exact same sense about what's happening, regardless of how complex and obscure the underlying machinations are.

> They don't communicate new ideas, they merely confirm and label existing ideas which, until that point, had been building up in people's minds independently over many years.

I see it doing something different: organizing a collection of events into a causal narrative that helps to explain our present situation. Additionally, by focusing on the meaningfully important events and their causes, it points to some number of solutions for how we can improve our present situation.

I don’t think everyone shares this model, even though I think it’s quite accurate. If people did, you wouldn’t have exasperated land owning boomers online telling Gen Z and millenials what they’re doing wrong. Avocado toast has nothing on high debt to earnings and low wage growth for a majority of people over generations. But older folks still think everyone lives essentially the same because all their friends do, so what’s the problem? I think that was one point of the article—that people have a hard time letting go of the prevalent narratives of their generation as outdated as they may be.

Well everyone standing in the rain can agree that it's raining. The article's talking about societal impacts that affect 90+% of the population negatively in roughly the same manner, albeit at different magnitudes.

The emphasis on expectations being the problem bothers me. I've heard this argument many times before and the claims that average people feel entitled to the same mega wealth as someone who owns a 4000 square foot home. Actually, I think it's more correct to say that average people believe that the 4000 square foot home owner is not entitled to such an obscene waste of resources.

The value of fairness is not arbitrary, as the author seems to imply (intentionally or not). He keeps saying things like, "you don't have to believe that this was right or wrong, but just that it happened that way." I don't think we're ever going to get out of this mess by ignoring the question of what's right and wrong.

I must've missed the part where the author emphasizes expectations as being the problem. What I thought was being described was a divergence of expectations from outcomes, as a matter of fact rather than as a matter of moral judgment. The author takes pains to state that these things occured, independent of what we think about "why" or what we think about "should."

I'm in my sixties, and British. When I was a kid, my parents told me the USA wasn't divided into classes, like Britain; everyone was middle class. It wasn't true; there was a small aristocracy of very rich bankers and industrialists, and there was a large class of disadvantaged people; the 50s and 60s in the USA were marked by a poor working class comprising largely black people.

The author's thesis might be correct; but not everyone floated on the post-WWII boom.

Perhaps a map of the world with a timeline slider at the bottom. The map would need clickable bubbles which are larger or smaller relative to the significance of the event.

Zoom out for a smaller number of more significant global events. Zoom in and, like Google maps does with cities, show an increasing number of less significant events local to the zoomed in area.

For example, zoomed out in 1692, we see a slave revolt in Barbados, a large bubble for Europe's ongoing Nine-Years' War, and the Salem Witch Trials.

Zoom in on Salem and see little bubbles appearing with specific witch trials.

Now, to truly bring home your idea, add weighted dotted lines between events. The strength of the relationship between events would influence the weight and opacity of the dotted lines between events.

I like it, but significance is still context dependent. It all looks quite different depending whether you are researching military conflicts, technology progress, evolution of a species, fashion, religion, trade etc. And these dimensions interact with each other too.

I think adding your idea would work best in VR space.

I remember some early 20th historian trying to bring an early network/system approach to history. Rather than points on a line, it was about arrows/forces. I ... could never remember that persons name nor how he named his approach.

But you don't know for sure what things

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36458211

This would be a really cool and informative additon to wikipedia.

They dont seem too concernerd about innovating anymore though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com