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horizontal history | 2016-01-27

permafrown

27 Jan 2016 — 1 min read

our friend, tim urban, from waitbutwhy, is, unknowlingly, taking over trivia wednesday today.

maybe that makes me a sellout or lazy but i think the article he wrote with the diagrams he built are such a fabulous model of historical trivia that they are too good to skip over.

see above for an example of what i’m talking about

see how the age of discovery (columbus, pizarro, magellan, etc.) lines up with the italian renaissance (da vinci, michelangelo, raphael, machiavelli) and that there was also this thing happeningwith luther/calvin/knox/tyndale/erasmus that you might have heard of? also, guru nanak was busy over in pakistan.

this is a tiny section of the much larger diagram found within the article here or here

you’ll find the article is very long but feel free to skip down until you start seeing pictures and, then, just jump from picture to picture to get the flow of how he got to the final iteration linked above.

i find it fascinating to see what lined up with what and who lined up with whom.

an example i think is cool:

george washington (cherry trees are a lie) and thomas jefferson (anyone need an important manuscript drafted up?) match up with marie antoinette (mmmm… cake) and robespierre (quick game of guillotine, anyone?) who share time with mozart (eine kleine what-what!??), haydn (father of the symphony), and beethoven (who is elise anyway?). at the same time, adam smith was being the father of economics, benjamin franklin was being awesome, lavoisier was making major leaps in chemistry and biology, linnaeus was designing binomial nomenclature, euler was geeking out on infinitesimal calculus and many other things, james cook was mapping the entrance to the st. lawrence river, and napoleon was causing all sorts of trouble.

that’s just amazing…

so far on horizontal history

BONUS: this baby is hilarious

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deadlines | 2018-01-10

ways to die | 2018-01-10

colours | 2017-10-04

poison garden | 2017-05-31