I’ve been watching The Borgias, and realizing that it’s set in 1492 has me thinking…
When I learned about history as a kid, the text books were all set up by country, not by time period. So I learned about what was happening in X place during Y year, and there was no mention whatsoever about what important events were also taking place in locations Q, W, and V at the same time; instead I learned about the history of each country seperately. This is a rather disjointed way to learn about history. I never took a “World History” class though, so maybe I missed out on a teaching method that makes more sense.
So… are there history books that are set up to discuss history by what was happening in the world at a given time? You know, a book discussing things like the fact that as the Roman empire fell, elsewhere Saxons were invading Britian etc. If so, care to recommend one?
Sure they exist. I have one somewhere (can’t get at it now) called Historical Charts and Tables, or something like that, and another one or two devoted to history of science, specifically. They can be useful reference works sometimes, but in no way does history become less “disjointed” or “make more sense” if taught or written about this way. Quite the contrary, it would turn history into nothing more than the memorization of a boring list of dates of the dates of meaningless events.
When history is written and taught according to region and topic (politics, warfare, economics, ideas, technology, or whatever), then a meaningful narrative can emerge, and you get a sense of what caused what, why events happened as they did, even how people in a certain region and era thought about various aspects of life and the world. The sort of organizational principle (by date alone) that you are talking about would render any sort of historical understanding next to impossible. With only very rare exceptions, knowing what was going on in, say, China in 404AD contributes nothing (or virtually nothing) to your understanding of what was going on France (or Australia, or Brazil) at that time, and* vice versa*, because the events were too far separated to affect one another, and the people in these scattered parts of the world knew nothing of one another. On the other hand, knowing what happened in France in 403AD and in 405, is very likely to greatly enhance your understanding of the events there in 404. History taught and written that way can be coherent and (for people who like that sort of thing) interesting, and maybe even enlightening. The way you suggest would be a recipe for tedium and irrelevance.
So the short answer is, yes, there are books like that (sorry I cant give you a specific reference off the top of my head as all my books are currently packed away for moving), and they are useful reference works, but they do not make for very interesting reading (apart from the occasional dip), and there are very good reasons why history is not usually written or taught this way.
Norman Davies does that a lot. His histories of Europe and of the British Isles are organized along those lines because, as he likes to point out, none of the modern nations existed in any form until very recently anyway.
In high school, our European history class used the texts by Peter Gay and RK Webb. It followed history chronologically, as you describe. It would hop around from Renaissance Italy to Renaissance France to Renaissance England to Renaissance era Russia. Or from ENlightenment era England to Enlightenment era France to Enlightenment era Prussia to Enlightenment era Sweden, and so on.
Isaac Asimov’s Chronology of the World might be of interest in this regard.
It has been too long since I looked at it for me to vouch for its accuracy but my recollection is that there wasn’t any complaint other than the fact that in covering a few billion years (up through 1945) lot’s of stuff didn’t make the cut.
It has been said of Isaac Asimov that he wrote a one-volume history of the universe, and a two-volume autobiography, but yeah, anything he wrote is likely to be completely accurate relative to what was known at the time he wrote it.
James Burke has written a number of works on the history of technology in which he jumps from country to country to follow the development of a particular technology … from the abacus in China to the Jacqard looms in France to Hollingsworth’s tabulating machines in the US. Of course, he also makes leaps in time as inventions did not arise on schedule, most of the time. Enormously fun reads, start with Connections and move on! (Also an excellent BBC/PBS TV series.)