History in the Space-Time Continuum

you can't really make a good mental image of a 4D object, in its full detail, because that's not a thing human brains do. History across both breadth and depth is the same deal. You can never quite grasp it fully. But you can sort of see it if you project it cleverly and squint really hard.

An example: J.R.R. Tolkien, Adolf Hitler, and Anne Frank's father participated in the same World War I battle in 1916. Those facts are surprising because they join together what we usually think of as distinct narratives. Put another way: There's a Wikipedia list of Roman emperors. There's a Wikipedia list of Chinese emperors. But there's no Wikipe... See more

A detailed description of a historical event, just like a painting, a photograph, an artifact, a period film or anything that remains bounded to a single point in space and time, is a snapshot of history. It can't, by itself, provide a deep or a broad view.

compression usually removes most of either the breadth, the depth, or both, leaving us with what is essentially a point or a line. In fact, you need to squint really hard to grasp a full two-dimensional slice of history.

None of the four basic shapes of history is better than any of the others. Like in any complex field, the only way to gain a good understanding of the whole thing is to spend a lot of time studying it. But you can be smart about that, and study history in a variety of ways.

Points lack context. And that's exactly the problem with zero-dimensional history: a true point contains very little data.

Get enough of each, and you will understand the data of the world.

In the interest of building a narrative (it's no coincidence that history and story are similar words), you take out everything not relevant, and end up with only a small sliver of the entire state of the world at any given time point. Of course, that sliver may contain some breadth, if you're writing a narrative of something large like "the Americ... See more

The 2D view of history you get from a computer game isn't accurate, but I know of no better way to viscerally feel, as opposed to read or watch, the forces that underlie human affairs. Plus, games have the benefit of being, you know, fun to play. You're never going to learn any history if you don't find it fun.

Deep history is history viewed across time. That sounds a bit tautological, right? That's because, usually, deep history is what we implicitly mean when we use the word 'history' on its own.