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The world-famous reference that tells who did what when from
4500 B.C. to the present day—now updated for the 1990s
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By Bernard Grun, based upon Werner Stein's Kulturfahrplan
Digitized by the Internet Archive
2012
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http://archive.org/details/timetablesofhistOOgrun_0
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HORIZONTAL LINKAGE
A
THE
TIMETABLES
OF TM HISTORY
THE NEW THIRD REVISED EDITION
OF PEOPLE AND EVENTS
BERNARD GRUN
BASED ON WERNER KULTURFAHRPLAN
STEIN'S
A TOUCHSTONE BOOK
Published by Simon & Schuster
New York London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore
SIMON & SCHUSTER/TOUCHSTONE
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue ofthe Americas
New York, New York 10020
Copyright 1946 © 1963 by F. A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung
English Language Edition Copyright © 1975, 1979, 1991 by
Simon & Schuster Inc.
Foreword Copyright © 1975 by Daniel J. Boorstin
All rights reserved
including the right ofreproduction
in whole or in part in any form.
SIMON & SCHUSTER, TOUCHSTONE, and colophon are registered
trademarks ofSimon & Schuster Inc.
Manufactured in the United States ofAmerica
7 9 10 8 6 4 2
9 10 8 Pbk
0-671-74919-6
0-671-74271-X Pbk.
NOTE
PU
B LI S H E R'S
The Timetables ofHistory is a direct translation of much of the material that
appears in the original great work on which it is based, Kulturfahrplan (The
Culture Timetables), a spectacular success in Germany ever since its creator,
Werner Stein, produced it in 1946. In the intervening years between then and
now, it has been updated several times and in its various editions has sold in
the millions of copies.
Obviously an English-language version ofthis fascinating and prestigious
work was eminently desirable, but for more than twenty years the difficulties
appeared to be so great as to make a translation impracticable, both from an
editorial and an economic standpoint.
Fortunately, in the late 1960's a man emerged who was not only eager to
tackle the task but ideally equipped to accomplish it. Bernard Grun, born in
the Czech part of the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy and educated in law
and philosophy at the universities of Prague and Vienna, had by then been
settled in London for decades. An eminent musicologist, he was almost as
well-known as a historian with an encyclopedic talent and turn of mind. Com-
pletely bilingual in German and English, he could translate, delete, revise, and
add fresh material, so that a new volume would emerge that would be a
pertinent and useful one for the English-language reading public. Additionally,
to make sure that sufficient emphasis was given to American topics, the manu-
script was then turned over to an American scholar, Wallace Brockway,
whose authority and experience both in history and in compiling encyclopedic
works were very similar to Mr. Grun's.
Sadly, after several years of work on the project, both men died before
the first edition of this book could be printed and published, and this was a
source of deep regret to all of us. We are grateful to a number of people for
their help in checking, rounding off, updating, and completing what had been
left unfinished, and in this connection acknowledgments are due to Helen
Barrow, Sophie Sorkin, and Elise Sachs. Special acknowledgments go to
Laurence Urdang and his firm, who did a superbjob for the first two editions,
and to Market House Books, who saw to the complete expanding of this new,
updated edition.
—
Peter Schwed
EWO
FO
R R D
BY DANIEL BOORSTIN
J.
"Time," wrote the famous American philosopher-idler these items was most vivid to anyone living in Western
Henry David Thoreau, "is but the stream I go fishing in." Europe or America at the time must have depended on
Each of us—with the help of parents, grandparents, where that person lived, and on his education, interests,
friends, teachers, historians, and others—goes fishing in social class, and prejudices. On every page of this book,
that stream. And we usually come up with what we knew, then, we see clues to how polychromatic and how iri-
or strongly suspected, was already there. One of the pur- descent is the experience of any age.
poses of this book is to make it possible for us to go fish- A number of peculiarities in our thinking and teaching
ing and come up with some surprises. have made "chronology"—the study of the arrangement
At a glance, The Timetables of History can give us a of events in time—seem less interesting than it really is.
feel for the fluidity and many-sidedness of past experi- First is the time-cliche. This is the notion that history
ence. Here we plainly see that the historian's neat cate- mainly consists of certain "key" dates—"1066 and All
gories parse experience in ways never found among liv- That!" Dates, then, seem the rigid skeleton of history,
ing people. While, even in this volume, the authors have which historians flesh out. And early Anglo-American
found it necessary to separate events into political, cul- history would be all that happened between "1066" (The
tural, artistic, and scientific categories, when we cast our Norman Conquest) and "1776" (The American Revolu-
eye across any page we see how overlapping, interfusing, tion). "Crucial dates," we are told, are the Landmarks
inseparable, and arbitrary are all such separations. Often of History. But if we teach history as chronology the
the most interesting—and most surprising—are the mis- landmarks overshadow the landscape.
cellaneous items which the authors list in the last right- It is not surprising, then, that the unwilling student
hand column under "Daily Life." Precisely because these thinks of history as little more than lists of numbers
items are commonplace in their time, precisely because (and names) to be memorized. A more profound con-
they were so obviously in the foreground of the experi- sequence, for those of us who did our homework and
ence of non-historians, historians have been reluctant learned the lists, was to shape—or rather pervert—our
to give them the dignity of"history." notions of human experience in the long past. History
For people in the past, just as for us, experience has was not a broad stream of many eddies, but a neat and
had no academic neatness. The miscellany on every narrow road with sharp turns, unambiguous starting
page of this .book can help remind us of this neglected points, and clearly marked dead ends. Roman civilization
first principle of history. For example, 1776, the year of "ended" when Alaric and the Visigoths sacked Rome in
the United States' Declaration of Independence, was 410 a.d. Then the Dark Ages "began." Favorite exam-
also the year of publication of the first volume of Gib- ination questions asked: When did the Renaissance com-
bon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and of mence? Was it with the birth of Petrarch in 1304? or of
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations; the year of the death Shakespeare in 1564? A sophisticated student was one
of the Scottish philosopher David Hume; the year when who had become adept at marshaling and juggling dates
Fragonard made one of his best-known paintings and to mark off one or another sharply bounded expanse
when the English landscape painter John Constable was of time.
born; the year of Mozart's Serenade in D Major, K. 250 Such a date-oriented history was inevitably a story of
(the "Haffner"), of Cook's third voyage to the Pacific, sudden beginnings and instant endings. The great eras
and of military ski competitions in Norway. Or 1927, and grand movements of history seemed to arrive with
the year when Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, was also the fanfare and to depart with formal valedictory. People
year when Trotsky was expelled from the Communist who lived "in advance of their age" were "prophets."
Party, when Show Boat opened in New York, when The past was peopled with figures of transition "wander-
Sjgmund Freud published The Future of an Illusion and ing between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless
Thornton Wilder The Bridge of San Luis Rey, when to be born." It was such thinking that led an imaginative
Pavlov did his work on conditioned reflexes, Al Jolson student to describe Dante (1265-1321) as "the Italian
starred in the epoch-making "talkie" The Jazz Singer, poet who had one foot in the Middle Ages, and with the
the German economic system collapsed, and the Harlem other saluted the rising star of the Renaissance."
Globetrotters basketball team was organized. Which of While these time-cliches pervert our view of the pro-
cesses of history, another peculiarity of our date-oriented Roman Catholic Church began the practice of proclaim-
thinking perverts our view of the experience of history. ing a Holy Year (generally once every 25 years, when
Against this malady The Timetables of History may be a special privileges were given by the Church for pilgrim-
mild corrective. For we have been trained to think of age to Rome, and there was an unusual jubilee indul-
the past as a sequence, and to think of history as con- gence), the first of which was proclaimed by Pope Boni-
sequences. We learn about the American Revolution be- face VIII in 1300. Since the rise of the historical pro-
cause a great nation came out of it. Among its other fession in Western countries this slicing of the past into
consequences we may count the French revolutions of "centuries" has dominated us in ways difficult to over-
1789 ( 1830?, 1848?) and too, indirectly, the Paris Com- estimate. At first a hundred years was described as "a
mune of 1871, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the century of years." Then by the middle of the seventeenth
myriad anti-colonial revolutions of our age. We have century the word "century" itself had come to mean a
been so overwhelmed and dazzled by this sequence- period of 100 years. Ever since then the units of aca-
oriented view of the past that we have failed even to demic instruction and scholarship have been wrapped in
noticewhatwe have beenmissing—HistoryasExperience! parcels, each 100years long.
One of the obvious features of the experience that fills Scholars will surely dispute some of the dates offered
our lives every day is that we never can know what will here. While the authors of this volume have conscien-
flow out of it. But the historian is the scientist of hind- tiously aimed at precision and accuracy, they would be
sight. Since he knows (or thinks he knows) how it all the first to caution the reader. The Timetables of History
turned out, he is preoccupied with the question: What is a stimulus and an eye-opener for everyman's explora-
chain of events made it come out that way? On the other tion of the past. This book should be the starting point,
hand, we, the people, live in a world of the contempo- and not the conclusion, of some new questions for us to
rary. We see ourselves dominated by the events that ask about the past.
happen at one time—in our time. We are charmed and The reader should be reminded, too, that much of the
enticed, and threatened by the uncertainties of the future. contemporaneity of happenings all over the world re-
The historian in his library and at his leisure can focus vealed in these Timetables was itself beyond the con-
in turn on one kind of event after another—the political, sciousness of people living at the time. The events and
the economic, the intellectual. He has the opportunity achievements that are contemporary by the calendar are
to sort out origins and consequences. But the citizen is not contemporary in experience unless people know of
the simultaneous target of all sorts of events.TheseTime- them. During nearly all history, communications have
tables of History, then, can remind us of how numerous been limited, slow, and desultory. We must therefore be
and how diverse are the events which make up the ex- wary of assuming that because different events occurred
perience of living men and women. in the same year they were known to contemporaries at
Another effect of our common way of viewing the about the same time. For example, Adam Smith's
historical past is to reinforce our habits of thinking in Wealth of Nations (probably the first comprehensive
ways that make us feel at home where we already are. treatment of political economy in a Western language)
We actually use our chronology to narrow our historical had first been delivered as lectures in Glasgow, was first
vision. We do this, for example, when we make the birth published in Britain in 1776, and did not appear in an
of Jesus the turning point of historical dating. The signs American edition until 1789. It was not translated into
of a.d. and B.C. proclaim the central importance of an French or German until 1794. The writings of John
event which is actually believed to be central by only a Locke, which were first published in England in the late
small proportion of mankind. The cumbersome desig- seventeenth century, and were frequently referred to by
nation of early events by a subtractive system of B.C. the authors of the Declaration of Independence and
simply adds to the problem of finding our bearings in the Constitution, remained scarce on American shores
strange and ancient societies. Muslims, naturally enough, throughout the eighteenth century. One of the more
date their events a.h. (Annus Hegirae) from the crucial tantalizing questions for the historian is how, when, and
event in the history of theirreligion. where knowledge of an event occurring in one place
All such ways of looking at chronology inhibit our reached otherparts ofthe earth.
thinking about the whole human past. In addition, the In many cases this inability to communicate promptly,
decimal system and the celebration of centuries and so that people in one part of the earth remained ignorant
their multiples induce us to give the fluid past an un- of some of the contemporaneity revealed in these Time-
natural neatness and rigidity. Among the ancient Jews, tables, has been a crucial fact shaping the course of his-
a "jubilee" when slaves were manumitted and debts tory. And there are a number of familiar examples in
were forgiven was celebrated every fifty years. Then the the history of the United States. If James Monroe, Presi-
