> Here's a thought: is not the entire field of study
> known as "history" nothing more than a
> collection of anniversaries? What do history
> students learn, anyway? Large lists of events
> that happened in the past, all categorized by
> the months, days, years, and sometimes even
> moments that they started and/or ended.
>
> Certainly there are some aspects of history
> that aren't that way, but then those are some of
> the things we know the least about, such as
> ancient history, or (and why do you think they
> call it this?) pre-historic times. It's been
> almost ten years since my last history class,
> but I seem to recall that the closer we got to
> the present day in our studies, the more we
> were concerned with dates and times. The
> study of history is nothing more than the study
> of anniversaries... remembering significant
> dates and what happened on those dates.

It shouldn't be, although at school level it tends to be like that. When I look back, high school history was mostly the study of significant dates, but undergraduate and graduate level history was more like the study of processes. Significant dates among these processes were just punctuation. History is primarily about people and what they do; this is probably why school history is so incredibly boring to a lot of kids. Memorising dates of prominent events gives you a join-the-dots perspective, not a continuum.

I think history is mostly defined as the period in which people wrote down stuff about what happened. Pre-history is before anybody was writing down stuff about anyone. (Even for pre-literate societies, you might find that some other society wrote down some trading records from which we can learn about their neighbours.)

I think part of the reason dates get more focus in modern history is because, the closer you get to the present, the more background knowledge people are expected to already have about life and happenings around those dates. Also, the further in time you get from the event, the less important it is to know exactly what day things happened. History at a greater distance becomes *seen* as a continuum. You can see the whole mountain range when you're a long way off from it.

Take September 11. Last year we saw the details of the event. Today we're a bit further away, and maybe we see something of the whole shape. We still talk about September 11 as a date, even a specific time. In a hundred years, historians will be looking at it as part of something bigger -- this includes what led up to it, and what followed from it, and we still can't see either of those things fully from where we are right now. If it's still remembered in a thousand years, or two thousand, perhaps it will only be remembered as the punctuating event of the year 2001, and you'd have to do some heavy research to find out the actual month and day.

Nobody can be expected to keep every detail of everything that's ever happened to the human race. It's just trading a closer perspective for a wider one, a move which has its gains and its losses.

"The course of human events" is a phrase from ... the Declaration of Independence, right? (sorry, I never studied US history)... which I think is the right way to describe the study of history. Historians try to unearth the closer perpective, if they're living in the wider one, and vice versa.