Modern Civilization [antikvár]

A on Note the Endpapers Somc day psychologists may be able to teli us just what and how to remember. But at present we know little more than this: though a few exceptional people can absorb and tap at will large stores of systematically arranged facts-say the üst of popes from St. Peter on-most humán beings cannot remember great systems of facts for very long unless they make fairly regular use of them. Indeed, if we never did any figuring at all, most of us would forget the multiplication table. Few of us make any regular use of history. Fortunately, the modern world is admirably supplied with works of ready reference that can free our minds for more useful work than just memorizing. The engineer, for example, does not need to keep in mind all the formulas and equations he might need; he has his engineer's handbook. So anyone using history has a host of reference books available in libraries, and on his desk he may have for immediate use such a storehouse of information as the one-volume Encyclopaedia of World History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948), edited by W. L. Langer. Yet we do need something üke a historian's equivalent of the multiplication table, if only to give us a frame of reference. The trouble with most historical tables, however, is that they are much too long and contain far too many facts for the average person. It is as if our multiplication table, instead of stopping with twelve times twelve, or even ten times ten, went on to íifty times fifty. The üst of dates in the endpapers of this volume is an attempt to construct the modern historian's equivalent of the multiplication table. It is a simple üst of a few dozen dates, a rough map of historic time over the past five centuries. It does not necessarily include all the great dates since 1450, but it attempts to show somé of the key dates-the chronological turning points-in the history of the modern world. It is worth mastering bit by bit and keeping in memory.