Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Daily Question #3

Don't our traditional forms of information communication, notably "the book" and especially "the textbook" contribute to our belief in linear history?
            
The book and the textbook contribute a lot about our belief in linear history since most history books mainly teach history in this kind of fashion. Many textbooks that I have used in the past have mainly used timelines to express linear history. The timeline has a range of dates in the past that have major events at a specific date to express history in a linear fashion. Textbooks are probably the most notable source of linear history that I have seen so far in my life. Textbooks and other books use linear history so much that you often forget about the other types of history. History is now mostly seen in a line thanks to the textbooks we used for school. Even the television and the computer are starting to use timelines of events to show history in a line too. With timelines starting to become more popular in textbooks, more students are using them for history papers if they have to summarize a series of events or in projects where they have to model specific events in a time in history. More timelines are being used to model history and we often forget that history does not always happen in a line. History can happen from another smaller event or from a combination of two events. This saying represents another theory in history with the Hegelian theory. But with textbooks teaching linear history more often with timelines, this is the type of history that will be known to students as the main theory used in history. Linear history is becoming more popular in society from the influence of textbooks and it is becoming the best way to learn history over a series of dates.

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