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Comment by FranzFerdiNaN | Hacker News Reader

You cant understand why things happen if you don't know when they happen (the other way around works just fine, which is why quizzes on tv love to ask random dates). You need to know when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in relation to when other events happened to help you understand why he did what he did. If you think he conquered Gaul after becoming dictator your entire narrative changes.

It sucks, but you really do need to know a lot of whens to help you contextualize the why. I've got a BA and MA in history and my first year at university was spend memorizing so many things, which was the absolute worst. But it did really does help a lot once you start doing your own research.

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I think that this is wrong. It is easier to remember sequence of events in logical order then arbitrary dates. You really dont need to remember exact date of when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in order to understand his motivations. You need context in enough details in order to understand motivations.

> It sucks, but you really do need to know a lot of whens to help you contextualize the why.

I always managed to memorize those dates in high school and elementary school. And then I promptly forgot them after test. I blamed my bad memory, but later when I learn how human memory works, I started to blame the way they taught us. People remember stories and systems well. Our memory works on relationships between facts. Most people sux at remembering unrelated arbitrary numbers.

All that done to me was that I seen history as boring pointless class. Historical characters came across as somewhat inhuman, absurd unrealistical creatures. Their behavior made no sense. Yes, they were actual real people, but the way history was taught made them sound like badly written characters from mediocre fiction.

It was only after I started to read history that was focused more on context, motivations and reasons I both starterd to long-term rememeber times+places and also like it.

When you know the date of an event, you can locate others events that are not in a direct relationship with it. You can then situate the evolution of distant lines of events without needing to memorize too many dependency graphs.

> When you know the date of an event, you can locate others events that are not in a direct relationship with it.

No you cant. Because at that point, you know nothing about the other events you are supposed to locate and have no reason to care.

> You can then situate the evolution of distant lines of events without needing to memorize too many dependency graphs.

I am not even sure what that is supposed to mean in the context of high school history. You drew events you know about into lines or graph and still know nothing about how they relate to each other.

Memorizing if something happened at Nov. 20th or Nov. 21st is not usually that important. We don't have exact dates for ancient history and we can still understand the sequence of events.

Understanding that A happened, which led to B happening later on is what matters. Having a ballpark is good for most things. Or do you still remember the exact dates you memorized on your history classes?

If you only learn dates, of course it makes no sense. Its like memorizing mathematical formulas. They also make absolutely no sense if you never see why you would use them.

But you are a MA in history, which is not true for 99% of the population. For everyone else, knowing the order of the events, and why A led to B, is more than enough.

"Evidence" that memorizing dates don't work: no one remembers crap from their history classes.

Edit: > If you think he conquered Gaul after becoming dictator your entire narrative changes.

That's the whole point. You only need to know the order of the events. Do you know the exact date and time when he became officially a dictator?

well, hmmm... I think you can tell a good story just by painting a picture of the situation.

(and I think of computer makefiles - you don't need to know times, you just need to know what depended on what, and what things combine to cause something)

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