Chronology is important when looking at history, because it can help show people what led up to a major event. From country’s borders, their laws, and the people that live there, chronology can help connect the dots to understand how things ended up the way they are. History involves lots of analyses and looking in depth at primary sources, but chronology allows a much simpler way to represent history for everyone especially through visual images like a timeline. Primary sources also include writings from memoirs but also stories, which is why I agree with Grafton that chronology can be more effective than history at times because history deals with stories while chronology deals with purely facts. Timelines are a great way to help organize the information we have been gathering for the Moravian Lives project. The memoirs we have been reading and transcribing tell a chronological story, and it’s even easier to understand in a simple timeline. At the same time, we can also put major events on the timeline to see what was going on in the same geographical area. The memoir of John Wiley outlined his travels all over England from when he was a child and until his death, and knowing the dates of his travels we were able to look up what was going on in England. Grafton talks about how at first a timeline may look simple but if you really take time to look at it, it can tell a complex story. For example, at the same time John Willey was in Mirfield and proclaimed the Gospel for the same time, England and France signed the Treaty of Dardanelles in 1809. Our timeline also incorporated the memoir of Anna Rosina Anderson, and we were able to see that she was also alive while John Willey.
Jacob Hubbard is a sophomore at Bucknell University, and is from San Francisco, CA.
