On History & Timeline 1700-1900, 3: History as a continuum
Or: Why Timeline 1700-1900 is organized decade by decade.
In the first post in this series, we looked at why history matters; in the second, why the best way to study it is as a series of ideas rather than a random sequence of events. In today’s post, I discuss why the Timeline 1700-1900 is organized by decades.
Eras vs. continuum
Even if we study ideas rather than a multitude of separate events (see the previous post), dealing with 7,000 years of written history in a single block is impossible. Hence scholars traditionally break history into periods: Babylonian, Greek, Baroque, Rococo, and so on.
But it’s crucial to bear in mind that none of those periods is self-contained. Some old-fashioned ideas always persist. Some radically new ones are always being created, tested out, accepted or rejected. In the early 1780s, for example, Fuseli created a work that’s a precursor of the Romantic movement, David created one of the iconic early examples of Neoclassical painting, and Clodion sculpted a monument in the Rococo style. This is how human history progresses: bit by bit, in different fields.
History is a continuum. That’s why I chose to organize Timeline 1700-1900 by decades rather than traditional historical periods. Within each decade, we look for connections forward and backward. How did philosophical ideas change? What happens to political events and economic trends as those ideas change? Do the subjects and style of literature and visual arts also change as these new ideas become more widely accepted? The Major Events and Trends section at the beginning of each decade in the Timeline looks at such changes.
Spoiler: ideas (philosophical, economic, scientific, or esthetic) don’t immediately change the culture. But if the ideas are radical enough and widely accepted enough, change will happen.
Geographical focus of Timeline 1700-1900
For the sake of transparency: I was born and I live in the United States. Two categories in each decade are devoted to the area that is, or became, the United States. A timeline written by a South Korean, a South African, or a Finn would include substantive differences. Same reality, different focal point.
I’ll say more on the choice of entries for the Timeline in a future post on methodology. But in tomorrow’s post, I’ll tell you what makes Timeline 1700-1900 unique.