(no subject)

[tanaise]

Work was one of the purest forms of evil yesterday (it's my catch phrase today.  Just you wait.).  The 20 and 40 meg Powerpoint files that I made now get broken back down into chapter files. This is easy, just time consuming--each chapter has about 60 image slides and 20 map slides.  The interesting part of it was that this history book was constructed in blocks of time, not blocks of space, as I was taught.  We learned europe from say, 500 BCE to 1500 CE, and then Asia, and then Africa.  Which was all well and good, but it means my mind's timelines for each area are isolated.  This book does things like, up to 500 BCE over the whole world, and then 500 BCE to 500 CE, so the timelines are linked--of course the africans had chinese pottery in their tombs, as the silk road was established by that time--stuff like that.  It's also a slightly disturbing process at the same time.  For example, this picture scared me the first time I saw it, and still does, really. 

And I'd forgotten what an ugly war WW1 was.  I don't think any of them are pretty, mind you, and maybe it's just that I've read more things set in that time than anything else, but gah.  Nash, Menin Road, is another image that I came across.  This used to be a forest, that's what the tall black things were--trees.  I just remember all the nastiest descriptions in the books I've read--everyone was still learning how to kill most effectively, and either over did it or didn't quite do a good enough job.  I don't know if WW2 was better or worse, perhaps it's like the difference between the first child and all subsequent ones--they no longer felt it was necessary to record the details and minutia. 

Comments

[toratigris.livejournal.com]

I wish my history books had been written in that way. Like you, my sense of history exists in regionally isolated bits. I always wanted a time line that would allow me to integrate them, because I'm terrible with dates, so doing mental comparison is out. I'd have to go through each section taking notes, and make a chart for myself, which I've never done.