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The Timetables of American History: History and Politics, the Arts, Science and Technology, and More in America and Elsewhere
Updated to include events through the year 2000, the Millennial Edition of The Timetables of American History -- an entertaining, authoritative survey of our nation's history, presented in the popular Timetables format -- not only chronicles the events occurring in American politics, arts, science, and technology, but relates them to simultaneous developments throughout the rest of the world. From breakthroughs in the sciences to breakdowns in international relations, from the heroes who mastered the playing fields to masterpieces of art and literature, The Timetables provides a comprehensive account of the march of civilization.
The Timetables of American History is an invaluable resource for serious students and dabblers alike.
The Timetables of American History is an invaluable resource for serious students and dabblers alike.
544 pages, Paperback
First published January 4, 1981
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 26, 2026
A European, German no less, examines God's country year by year, starting in 1000 A.D. with the first Viking landings in North America and up til 2000 and that whole BUSH V. GORE mess. This book is a record of timelines, with each event placed next to each other across the years. What is happening in American science can be compared to political doings in France that year. What Urdang annotates ranges from the enlightening to the mind-numbing. His survey contains equally grave virtues and faults, and that is why I'd like to begin by praising its finer features.
Arnold Toynbee once called Europe "a peninsula of Asia", thinking of its small place in world history until modern times. Urdang conveys some of the same sentiment concerning America. The indigenous peoples of the continent made history by way of architecture, agriculture, politics, religions, and art many centuries before the Europeans showed up. The best recorded are the Hopi and Zuni of the Southwest, whose accomplishments in city-building and agriculture Urdang hails. The Latin discoverers, a word I wish Urdang put between quotation marks, Spanish and French, launched bold expeditions and claimed territory from California to Florida when the English still relied on piracy to capture booty from the East Coast of America. Urdang shows us by way of his charts the "other America" that might have been and for centuries was: Native peoples in trade with European visitors who left their cultures relatively intact. All of this is captivating, but smacks of the schoolboy history of naming every explorer, strait, and cape. The reasons why indigenous civilizations collapsed under European rule are never stated openly, nor why France and Spain got so easily pushed out of the colonial game by England.
Urdang's scope is global, though little is recorded in this book of Africa. The first stirrings of Haiku literature in Japan, contests for the Polish throne, the expanding view of the heavens thanks to Huygens, Galileo, and Kepler, all this and more make the American reader feel humility contemplating his little corner of the globe. American readers can certainly profit from knowing that during the Revolution Britain's eyes remained more firmly fixed on her prized Caribbean and Indian colonies. If at times this world survey lapses into trivia, be it the battles for the Jacobite restoration or listing the progeny of Ivan the Terrible, it's worth it to ponder just how varied and exciting history can be. No people can be kept conquered forever, and political dissidents and original thinkers in philosophy, science, and religion, though often silenced, will have their eventual triumph. America took the most important ideas and scientific breakthroughs from the Enlightenment and made them serve an immigrant population. Urdang carefully annotates both the growth of cities in the new land; we are constantly reminded of population booms in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, etc., and also the astounding diversity of these urban concentrations: African slaves, Quakers, the Dutch Knickerbockers, and the first Irish indentured servants are all here. American civilization, unlike Latin America to the south, birthed stupendously large cities and the expansion and settlement of the wilderness.
We glimpse the golden mechanical thrasher that broke open the plains, the McCormick Harvester, Edison's phonographs and light bulbs, Westinghouse's experiments with refrigeration, and more goodies. Urdang dazzles with the cataract of inventions that made American civilization and put her on top of the world. The American people demanded the land and its resources be thrown open to technology, and not just for the few. American science is truly egalitarian and utilitarian. The intellectual world is given its proper due in like fashion: The scathing sermons of Increase Mather and his son Cotton, Salem witch hunter and early American scientist, Jonathan Edward damning most people to hell, Emerson declaring America's literary independence in 'The American Scholar", Mark Twain's recording of the particular American language along the Mississippi in HUCKLEBERRY FINN, Harriet Beecher Stowe, UNCLE TOM and her minor novels, Willa Cather, the Lost Generation of novelists, and probably the greatest propaganda tool ever invented, American cinema. Jolson: "You ain't seen nothing yet!" American painting is detailed too, from Winslow Homer, Grant Wood, and Edward Hopper to Warhol and the pop masters. Here is a nation that generation after generation is learning to think for itself and shaping the global consciousness.
Alas, there is much in TIMELINES that is misinformation and downright offensive. I have already mentioned the toxic use of the word "discover" to describe European voyages in North America. Did the natives not know where they were living and make good use of the land? Even more outrageous is Urdang's subsequent foray into European-Native relations. Native Americans, from the French and Indian War to the U.S. Civil War, are always "massacring" whites in forts, towns, and disputed places on the frontier. The label is bad enough, but where are any other hallmarks of Native American civilization? Did time stand still for the indigenous? Once in a while TIMELINES mentions broken treaties between Washington and the native tribes; in fact they were all broken, but that is hardly compensation for such a loathsome incomprehension of Indian ways and fates under colonialism. I'll ascribe Urdang's gauche attitude to the Law of Hanlon's Razor and assume he is ignorant rather than malicious.
African-Americans fare little better than natives in the TIMELINES. The standout icons are here: George Washington Carver and the peanut; Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee; and BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION. But where is W.E.B. Du Bois, THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, and his polemic with Washington over "the talented tenth"? PLESSY V. FERGUSON gets a nod, but the reader also demands a timeline of how Jim Crow spread from state to state in the South and what African-Americans were forbidden to do by these noxious legal codes. Why is there no record of Black-led labor strikes? Where is Ida Wells? Martin Luther King moved a nation with his fiery homilies, yet Urdang mentions only the construction of the first Black churches in America during the colonial period and nothing afterwards. King did not operate in a historical vacuum but was the product of centuries of resistance to racism. How did the Black churches survive slavery and the Ku Klux Klan?
TIMELINES suffers from information overdrive, particularly in outstanding achievements in art and science. Does the reader really need a list of every Nobel Prize winner in every category since Alfred Nobel decided to ease his conscience for inventing dynamite by endowing the award? How can the reader judge the importance of multiple works and authors on enzymes and the transistor? How did these breakthroughs translate into daily American life? And, German patriot Urdang can't resist throwing in the name of every obscure Teutonic lab technician. In the literary and visual arts, the reader is bombarded with Pulitzer Prize winners, popular songs, long-forgotten fad dances, and all Best Picture, Actor, and Actress Oscars. This takes up more space than slum conditions and the planning of cities and highways. When TIMELINES moves into the post-World War II period, every page is a cascade and jumble of facts, statistics, and lists, producing maelstrom and vertigo in anyone who got that far. Urdang and his tables form a handy reference work for those who like their history top-down. He's composed a chronicle of great men, and seldom women, who made America by vision and decision. Fine. But what about the rest of us?
Arnold Toynbee once called Europe "a peninsula of Asia", thinking of its small place in world history until modern times. Urdang conveys some of the same sentiment concerning America. The indigenous peoples of the continent made history by way of architecture, agriculture, politics, religions, and art many centuries before the Europeans showed up. The best recorded are the Hopi and Zuni of the Southwest, whose accomplishments in city-building and agriculture Urdang hails. The Latin discoverers, a word I wish Urdang put between quotation marks, Spanish and French, launched bold expeditions and claimed territory from California to Florida when the English still relied on piracy to capture booty from the East Coast of America. Urdang shows us by way of his charts the "other America" that might have been and for centuries was: Native peoples in trade with European visitors who left their cultures relatively intact. All of this is captivating, but smacks of the schoolboy history of naming every explorer, strait, and cape. The reasons why indigenous civilizations collapsed under European rule are never stated openly, nor why France and Spain got so easily pushed out of the colonial game by England.
Urdang's scope is global, though little is recorded in this book of Africa. The first stirrings of Haiku literature in Japan, contests for the Polish throne, the expanding view of the heavens thanks to Huygens, Galileo, and Kepler, all this and more make the American reader feel humility contemplating his little corner of the globe. American readers can certainly profit from knowing that during the Revolution Britain's eyes remained more firmly fixed on her prized Caribbean and Indian colonies. If at times this world survey lapses into trivia, be it the battles for the Jacobite restoration or listing the progeny of Ivan the Terrible, it's worth it to ponder just how varied and exciting history can be. No people can be kept conquered forever, and political dissidents and original thinkers in philosophy, science, and religion, though often silenced, will have their eventual triumph. America took the most important ideas and scientific breakthroughs from the Enlightenment and made them serve an immigrant population. Urdang carefully annotates both the growth of cities in the new land; we are constantly reminded of population booms in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, etc., and also the astounding diversity of these urban concentrations: African slaves, Quakers, the Dutch Knickerbockers, and the first Irish indentured servants are all here. American civilization, unlike Latin America to the south, birthed stupendously large cities and the expansion and settlement of the wilderness.
We glimpse the golden mechanical thrasher that broke open the plains, the McCormick Harvester, Edison's phonographs and light bulbs, Westinghouse's experiments with refrigeration, and more goodies. Urdang dazzles with the cataract of inventions that made American civilization and put her on top of the world. The American people demanded the land and its resources be thrown open to technology, and not just for the few. American science is truly egalitarian and utilitarian. The intellectual world is given its proper due in like fashion: The scathing sermons of Increase Mather and his son Cotton, Salem witch hunter and early American scientist, Jonathan Edward damning most people to hell, Emerson declaring America's literary independence in 'The American Scholar", Mark Twain's recording of the particular American language along the Mississippi in HUCKLEBERRY FINN, Harriet Beecher Stowe, UNCLE TOM and her minor novels, Willa Cather, the Lost Generation of novelists, and probably the greatest propaganda tool ever invented, American cinema. Jolson: "You ain't seen nothing yet!" American painting is detailed too, from Winslow Homer, Grant Wood, and Edward Hopper to Warhol and the pop masters. Here is a nation that generation after generation is learning to think for itself and shaping the global consciousness.
Alas, there is much in TIMELINES that is misinformation and downright offensive. I have already mentioned the toxic use of the word "discover" to describe European voyages in North America. Did the natives not know where they were living and make good use of the land? Even more outrageous is Urdang's subsequent foray into European-Native relations. Native Americans, from the French and Indian War to the U.S. Civil War, are always "massacring" whites in forts, towns, and disputed places on the frontier. The label is bad enough, but where are any other hallmarks of Native American civilization? Did time stand still for the indigenous? Once in a while TIMELINES mentions broken treaties between Washington and the native tribes; in fact they were all broken, but that is hardly compensation for such a loathsome incomprehension of Indian ways and fates under colonialism. I'll ascribe Urdang's gauche attitude to the Law of Hanlon's Razor and assume he is ignorant rather than malicious.
African-Americans fare little better than natives in the TIMELINES. The standout icons are here: George Washington Carver and the peanut; Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee; and BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION. But where is W.E.B. Du Bois, THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, and his polemic with Washington over "the talented tenth"? PLESSY V. FERGUSON gets a nod, but the reader also demands a timeline of how Jim Crow spread from state to state in the South and what African-Americans were forbidden to do by these noxious legal codes. Why is there no record of Black-led labor strikes? Where is Ida Wells? Martin Luther King moved a nation with his fiery homilies, yet Urdang mentions only the construction of the first Black churches in America during the colonial period and nothing afterwards. King did not operate in a historical vacuum but was the product of centuries of resistance to racism. How did the Black churches survive slavery and the Ku Klux Klan?
TIMELINES suffers from information overdrive, particularly in outstanding achievements in art and science. Does the reader really need a list of every Nobel Prize winner in every category since Alfred Nobel decided to ease his conscience for inventing dynamite by endowing the award? How can the reader judge the importance of multiple works and authors on enzymes and the transistor? How did these breakthroughs translate into daily American life? And, German patriot Urdang can't resist throwing in the name of every obscure Teutonic lab technician. In the literary and visual arts, the reader is bombarded with Pulitzer Prize winners, popular songs, long-forgotten fad dances, and all Best Picture, Actor, and Actress Oscars. This takes up more space than slum conditions and the planning of cities and highways. When TIMELINES moves into the post-World War II period, every page is a cascade and jumble of facts, statistics, and lists, producing maelstrom and vertigo in anyone who got that far. Urdang and his tables form a handy reference work for those who like their history top-down. He's composed a chronicle of great men, and seldom women, who made America by vision and decision. Fine. But what about the rest of us?
January 8, 2013
Perfect for researching almost anything. Basically, a chronological compendium of everything significant that's ever happened in American history. I used it constantly when compiling a history of my family.
June 22, 2014
I need a copy of this book. The library would like it back sometime and I can only renew it so many times!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews