Blog 3:
Chronology is an important discipline in learning how to interpret the past. For instance, “Thapar has long emphasized that genealogy and chronicle are not primitive efforts to write what would become history in other hands, but powerful, graphically dense ways of describing and interpreting the past.” (13) Both chronology and genealogy are a way of linking together events in a particular order that produce an outcome. For example, Hayden White brings up the medieval manuscript chronology called the Annals of St. Gall. This chronology covers 25 years of events that occurred in the Frankish Kingdoms. While observing the manuscripts, you will see a list of events that seem to be nothing more than a list of negative incidents that happened to the Frankish Kingdoms, but White explains they, “vividly figure a world of scarcity and violence, a world in which “forces of disorder” occupy they the forefront of attention”. (12) Going further in depth, chronology does not simply have to be a list of events, but instead can be a demonstration of what was important in that time period.
There are some negatives to the visual tool of timelines. Unfortunately, more often than not chronology is presented in a linear fashion. This makes sense because time, itself, is seen as linear. This causes a problem in representing history or even a story like Samuel Tippett’s memoirs because history and stories are not linear. Priestly explains, “historical narrative is not linear.” (20) For example, regarding Samuel Tippett’s life we see a boy who decides to dedicate himself to god, but then not long after, he decides to revert back to his old menacing behavior. This represents events in his life that are clearly not linear so it does not make much sense to represent them in a linear fashion. The combination of methods would be extremely helpful. Both linear representation and matrix form allow the viewer to observe connections of events in different ways but together can provide a broad overarching view of a historical events and a more in-depth analysis of how the events relate to each other. Another disadvantage of a linear timeline would be the perception of importance. The timeline lists events with their dates. This would assume that all events are just as important as each other, but we know from history and stories that all events are not equally as impactful to the outcome, so based on the presentation of the linear chronology, there could be a lack of awareness for the most important events. For these very reasons timelines do not tell the complete story. They tell a story but definitely not the complete one.
Clayton Wright is an economics major at Bucknell University. He transferred to Bucknell from Bowdoin College in 2017. Before college, he grew up in Summit NJ and attended The Pingry School.
