SOLVED. World history briefly depicted as parallel columns of concurrent events [s]

[Richard]

Back in the 1980s, I had a large format paperback book that laid out world history as a set of parallel events.

The book was, effectively, a huge table, with time running down the left margin and columns running across the top. Those headings were something like Politics, Science, Culture, Famous People, and maybe one or two others. Events were at most given a paragraph each.

I have no idea why I might have surrendered that book, but I regret it. I don't think I'm unusual in finding it easier to remember the lessons of history when more details tied each episode to others in a richer network. So while it doesn't take much effort to recall that U.S. revolutionary Paine's Common Sense was published in the same year as the U.S. declared independence, knowing that other important events took place the same year makes them easier to tie into the larger story. Edward Gibbon's first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations were also published that year. And while most folks wouldn't consider it “important”, I find it curious to recall that the building of the Presidio on a peninsula in New Spain that year marked the founding of San Francisco.

Can anyone point me to this book, or a more recent equivalent? (Actually, I'd be just as happy with a website, too. If one doesn't exist, it really should.)

[Andy]

Perhaps this http://www.amazon.com/The-Timetables-...

or this http://www.amazon.com/Asimovs-Chronol...

[Richard]

Thank you, that's what I needed. Now that I know the keyword is "timetable", I can see there are several.

Grun's The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events is very close, and in the correct format, but my sense is that it isn't quite right. It has more data, but that leaves less emphasis on what might be considered important. But this is a great starting point for my shopping research.

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

So you're okay with this being labeled solved even though this isn't your book? You can always keep searching and come back and let us know what the correct book is. Or we can shelve the Grun book as the correct one...

[Richard]

Yup, I'm okay with that. "Timetable" was the keyword that let me search for and find variations on the theme. I might stumble on the version that I had, but finding something that more-or-less does the same thing is all I really want.

Thanks.