The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events

Wanted to do myself a comparison table between history, religion, art, family, etc changes. Why spend so much time on that if this book is a complete verson of all this and much more. I was indeed interested to read it for the whole family. And really helpful for kids' studies.

Bought from an online recommendation and well worth it

Item arrived fast. Happy with the purchase.

Again like Cassells Atlas of World HIstory an extremely useful book pulling together historical events in a chronology with other facets included bringing in areas of interest for all. Recommended to me, recommended to you!

Good

There's been a long, steady shift from seeing history as about 'battles and dates' to exploring the cultures which informed the times. The Timetables of History goes right back to the opposite extreme -- simple chronicling with virtually no explanation. In this way it follows in the footsteps of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Quedlinburg Annals, and many of the other medieval and ancient chronicles of what happened when, linking events because they happened at the same time, even if there was no other connection.The TimeTables of History goes one better than the early chronicles, in that it lays things out across the double page spread in columns of politics, art, science, etc, making it at least easier to find something if you know the approximate date and what kind of thing it was.I can't possibly fault this book in achieving what it sets out to do. Once you take away causality and analysis, you are left implicitly with a fairly random collection of what seemed important to the compiler. Some events and people -- the Battle of Hastings, Leonardo da Vinci, Winston Churchill -- are obviously mandatory, but others are more of a personal opinion. Indeed, some of the dates of things are somewhat of a personal opinion, since few ideas or inventions sprang into life fully formed in a particular year, and The Timetables is much too concise to give more than a single mention to all but the most major inventions and discoveries.If you're writing a historical novel or a history essay, or simply referencing the events of a particular year in your blog, this is invaluable for placing things which seem to be from different periods in their proper frame of reference. For example, few people are aware that Isaac Newton, who seems to us so thoroughly modern with his theory of gravitation and his calculus, was born the year after Galileo, who seems to us so medieval, being forced to recant his heretical notion that the earth went round the sun, died. But this is the kind of connection in time that this book makes so obvious.At the same time, I wouldn't want to claim more for this book than it really is. You need to know quite a lot of history, or at least be willing to look things up in other works, to make much sense of most of this. Likewise, although the book attempts to pin down some longer-term issues by assigning a particular key date to them, it does not give much in the way of trends.Nonetheless, warmly recommended alternative reference, or simply for amusing browsing.

Whenever I research an historical period, this book is my first port of call. It gives the politics, events, religion, art, literature etc of any given period. As time goes on towards the modern, entries become more detailed. But for putting events in context, this is the best of books.