Mnemonics in history?

What are some ways of recalling or contextualizing dense material? I have trouble with dates, especially the whole thing with written centuries (for instance, writing 'fifteenth century' instead of the 1400's).

Don't forget that "the 1400s" correctly refers to the first decade of the fifteenth century, not the whole century.

People increasingly use it to mean the whole century, which I think is an Americanism that (like so many others) is spreading, but that is not right. After all, "the 1900s" has always meant the Edwardian era, not the entire twentieth century.
 
I wonder why that image of academic history still persists in the popular imagination? If I tell people I study history, they say "Oh, that must be hard, remembering all those dates", and I just have to agree without admitting that I know like three, maybe four dates*. I suppose it reflects the way that history is taught at a secondary level, with a big political/military emphasis?

*For the curious, these dates are: 1066 (Battle of Hastings), 1492 (discovery of America), and 1977 (first appearance of Judge Dredd.)
What is this obsession that Columbus "discovered America" in 1492? The Vikings were here (in Canada) 500 years before that, and the paleo-North Americans many thousands of years prior to the Vikings.

Columbus didn't discover anything except that his geography was wrong, and landed on an island, not the continent itself.
 
What is this obsession that Columbus "discovered America" in 1492? The Vikings were here (in Canada) 500 years before that, and the paleo-North Americans many thousands of years prior to the Vikings.

Columbus didn't discover anything except that his geography was wrong, and landed on an island, not the continent itself.

The reason historians cite Columbus's voyages as discoveries is because they are recorded in primary source literature. Unfortunately for us, we do not have written accounts from the natives whom his murdering genocidal entourage interacted with.
 
Also, obviously, Columbus' voyages led to far more significant historical outcomes than the Vikings' did.

Besides, the fact that other people had discovered the Americas before Columbus did doesn't mean he didn't discover them. It's perfectly possible to discover something that other people have discovered before you. It just means that Columbus wasn't the first to discover the Americas. But obviously his discovery of the Americas was more significant than anyone else's in modern times and led to a new era of world history.

Columbus never did discover that his geography was wrong, though. He believed he'd discovered a new route to Asia until the end of his life.
 
Also, obviously, Columbus' voyages led to far more significant historical outcomes than the Vikings' did.

Besides, the fact that other people had discovered the Americas before Columbus did doesn't mean he didn't discover them. It's perfectly possible to discover something that other people have discovered before you. It just means that Columbus wasn't the first to discover the Americas. But obviously his discovery of the Americas was more significant than anyone else's in modern times and led to a new era of world history.

Columbus never did discover that his geography was wrong, though. He believed he'd discovered a new route to Asia until the end of his life.
Historical outcomes or not, I just get really tired of this "no Europeans knew anything about North America until Columbus" nonsense, because we know that's not true.

And it just seems nonsensical that he can claim to have discovered something that many other people already knew about because they were already there.

It's like the Star Trek: The Next Generation intro that says in part: "To boldly go where no one has gone before." Except that they often meet people or other kinds of lifeforms that are already there.
 
Don't forget that "the 1400s" correctly refers to the first decade of the fifteenth century, not the whole century.

I have never heard of this. Why wouldn't it refer to the whole century?

Historical outcomes or not, I just get really tired of this "no Europeans knew anything about North America until Columbus" nonsense, because we know that's not true.

And it just seems nonsensical that he can claim to have discovered something that many other people already knew about because they were already there.

It's like the Star Trek: The Next Generation intro that says in part: "To boldly go where no one has gone before." Except that they often meet people or other kinds of lifeforms that are already there.

Isn't it where no man has gone before?
 
I have never heard of this. Why wouldn't it refer to the whole century?

Because it just doesn't!

The decades of the twentieth century are the 1900s, the 1910s, the 1920s, etc. That's just what they're called, and always have been. Now, as far as I can make out, it is increasingly common in America to extend the name of the first decade to cover the whole century, so "the 1900s" means the whole twentieth century. As with so many other Americanisms, this is spreading and has become common use elsewhere. However, it's incorrect.

And yes, I know this is inviting a great big argument about prescriptive vs. descriptive attitudes towards language, which I'm going to forestall in an imperious fashion. I'll just point out that extending "the 1900s" to mean the whole century would leave us with no name for that decade (note how no-one seems to know what to call the first decade of the twenty-first century; it should be called the "2000s" or "twenty-hundreds").

Besides all this, it's easy to remember that a date such as 1450 is in the fifteenth century, not the first, because it's in the same way that a six-month-old baby is in her first year of life, not her zeroth. Once she reaches her first birthday she's completed her first year of life and enters her second, and so on. Centuries are just the same.
 
As with so many other Americanisms, this is spreading and has become common use elsewhere. However, it's incorrect.

I would say common usage can make it correct. Gay means homosexual now, but it used to mean happy. Which is correct? Which is incorrect? Rubbers used to mean winter galoshes, but now they mean condoms. Which is correct? Should a teacher get in trouble for reminding her class to put on their rubbers before going outside to play?
 
I would say common usage can make it correct. Gay means homosexual now, but it used to mean happy. Which is correct? Which is incorrect? Rubbers used to mean winter galoshes, but now they mean condoms. Which is correct? Should a teacher get in trouble for reminding her class to put on their rubbers before going outside to play?
Gay still does mean happy. Rubbers also meant erasers, to one of my Grade 1 teachers. Of course the teacher shouldn't get in trouble, but she'd be understood better if she used the word "boots."

This is starting to remind me of the time I wrote a brief viewer's guide to I, Claudius for people not familiar with the Julio-Claudian dynasty. One friend who read it told me it didn't make sense, because she insisted that the entire life of Jesus happened between 1 BC and 1 AD. :crazyeye:
 
I suspect a lot of it has to do with the way history is taught in middle school and high school. To make it easier, they focus on "objective facts" such as dates, which can be distilled through multiple choice exams. Ironically, this desire to make it simpler and easier is what turns many people off in the first place.

In my high school world history class, there is some of that, but my teacher has our class do something called a DBQ for every unit.

Essentially we'll get seven to ten documents on the topic, a broad question about history and we have to pull information from those documents and from what we learned in class to answer the question.

I remember for the Cold War we had to write a DBQ on whether the Cold War was initiated by the US, by the Soviet Union, or was it the fault of both powers.

This is a much better standard for judging how much "history" a person has learned, as history is looking at the facts and coming to conclusions. And I am not just saying that because I often scored above a ninety on those:D.
 
That's the argument about prescriptive vs. descriptive understandings of language which I really don't want to get into.

Well, I think any discussion that says "1400s only refers to the first decade and referring to the entire century that way is wrong" is necessarily staking out a stance on the prescriptive vs. descriptive debate. You may be saying that it's introducing confusion and should be avoided, but it's quite common to refer to the 15th century as the 1400s and, from a descriptive perspective, it is now accepted as correct.

In my high school world history class, there is some of that, but my teacher has our class do something called a DBQ for every unit.

Yeah, I had that in AP US History. I'll point out that this was 11th Grade and it's an advanced class (supposedly college level).
 
Nobody says "fifteenth century" anyway. All the cool kids write "C15th".

:cool:
 
Well, I think any discussion that says "1400s only refers to the first decade and referring to the entire century that way is wrong" is necessarily staking out a stance on the prescriptive vs. descriptive debate. You may be saying that it's introducing confusion and should be avoided, but it's quite common to refer to the 15th century as the 1400s and, from a descriptive perspective, it is now accepted as correct.



Yeah, I had that in AP US History. I'll point out that this was 11th Grade and it's an advanced class (supposedly college level).

You only got this in AP? I thought this was something introduced in the tenth grade? Perhaps education standards have changed, or that Massachusetts education system operates differently than elsewhere.
 
Or I may honestly not remember very well High School. It was 8-9 years ago since graduation.
 
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