When I was in my early 20’s, I realized suddenly had an embarassing realization that my sense of history was extremely poor. I had always enjoyed history as a subject, but I had never payed the slightest attention to dates. To remedy this, I devised a simple plan to slowly and systematically correct that problem.
Lazy lad that I was (and still am), I did not even want to think about spending hours at a time memorizing long lists of dates. I preferred to learn a few facts at a time when I happened to be maximally interested in a particular topic. I have to laugh at how stupid I must seem for saying this, but at the time, if you asked me, I couldn’t have told you how long ago Jesus was supposed to have lived.
Anyway, I came up with a simple plan: build a barebones skeleton or scaffold of history by learning a small number of cardinal events (on topics I already knew something about) around key points in history, then do two things:
- Use any means possible to make associations between any newly learned dates/events with “nearby” existing information, even if I have to go to lengths to ‘rationalize’ the connections.
- Continue adding new pieces to the scaffold at strategic points, to keep shrinking the gap between events.
So, for example, my first step was to create the initial scaffold. If I were doing it today, I might use Google to pick the following years and events (approximate dates are fine, for my purposes) to stand for those dates:
2000 BC - Babylonians develop mathematics based on units of 60 and 360 degrees in a circle.
1500 BC - Queen Hatshetsup rules Egypt. (Actually, she ruled just a few years after, but I don’t care about precision.)
1000 BC - King David rules Israelites (again, not exact dates, but close enough)
500 BC - Overthrow of Roman monarchy, start of Roman Republic.
0 BC - Jesus born
500 AD - Justinian emperor of Byzantine empire,
1000 AD - Leif Eriksson discovers North America.
1500 AD - Leonardo Da Vinci paints Mona Lisa
2000 AD - We worried planes might fall from the sky because of Y2K computer date issue.
Once I built my basic structure, similar to the one above (but before 2000 AD), I just followed my interests over time.
In some cases, I was looking to fill in the gaps with some more strategically placed dates. For example, I especially wanted to add more pieces to my scaffold for each decade of the 1900’s. I also wanted some rungs added for the centuries 1600, 1700 and 1800, so I casually kept a lookout for key events to represent those periods, similar to the following:
1600 William Shakespeare and friends playing at Globe theatre.
1700 War of Spanish Succession.
1800 Napoleon becomes First Consul.
1900 Max Planck devises quanta
In other cases, I would simply come across historical information that interested me. In that case, I would pay attention to the dates, then find ways to draw connections with nearby events that I had already learned. For example, when I was interested in Sir Francis Drake and the destruction of the Spanish armada (1588), I spent time thinking about whether William Shakespeare might have done a play about the events in the Globe theatre. My theory is that doing this helps lock down new information, but also reinforces previously learned facts.
Remember, I have never been too concerned with exact dates. I am more interested in building a strong intuitive sense of when events happened, relative to each other. The main thing is to keep iterating through the same steps above untill the gaps between the scaffolds get narrower and narrower.
It has been a few decades since I started this system, and I no longer remember all the details of my original framework. My methods also changed over time, but I just slowly plugged away in this manner, and gradually found I had a fairly decent sense of history, at least the history that catches my interest, and my interests have grown greatly as time went on. Most importantly to me, a good deal was achieved in the laziest possible way, just by following my interests when I was in the mood.
There was a bit more to this, because I also used it to tie in other types of knowledge, but that is the essence of it. For reasons I won’t explain, I used to call it my relational database method.
Regards,
Darn