History in the Space-Time Continuum

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.

The second dimension is breadth, or horizontality, or space. It describes the state of the world at any given time point. (This includes the usual three spatial dimensions, but it's much more comprehensive than that. We're in fact collapsing the full multidimensional complexity of the world into a single dimension. Moving along this dimension might... See more

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.

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

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.

History, which contains literally everything that has happened to human civilization, is the data of the social sciences.

As The Scholar's Stage puts it: The problem with history is that it is too big. It is impossible to get a fine grained picture of every people and era on the planet. There is just too much of it.

TWO DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY:

The fir... See more

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.

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

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.

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.