History in the Space-Time Continuum

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

Art and photography give you a snapshot of a time and place, a detailed idea of what it would have been like to be there. Narratives and timelines make history coherent and interesting by hijacking our love of stories. Maps provide a large-scale overview of an entire period, joining together distinct narratives.

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.

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.

Attempts at history in 4D are impressive. They are masterful attempts at compressing all of history in the least lossy way possible. But you immediately see the limitations. They're hard to read. They take a lot of space. They involve a lot of choices as to what information should be included.

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

Broad history is very much non-narrative, which is why, I think, it's a somewhat less common approach than deep history. Because h umans like stories. They're one of the major ways we make sense of the world.