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.

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

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... 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.

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... See more

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... See more

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.