History

Approach

In order to begin learning about history, it helps to start off by outlining what exactly I hope to achieve here. As a function of that I can more easily drive in that direction and keep improving my learning.

- Objective

Develop a simplified working understanding of the history of human civilisation at a macro level. The key operational phrases for me are:

- Simplified

I do not intend to maintain the most precise documentation of dates or any other relevant facts. What matters to me is to be able to put any new information about past or present events into a meaningful context. I believe this can be done with a directional understanding of history, without burdening myself with the task of remembering exact facts.

- Human Civilisation

The phases which are of interest to me are those of human history. Only when it is relevant to human life would I be interested in stages of history prior to humanity, or to historic events which aren't directly a matter of human interaction.

- Macro level

Even the working understanding that I aim to develop here is a preliminary one. I do not hope to be able to discuss and understand the conversation of experts. But I hope to be able to broaden my understanding of a large range of peoples, places and events. For this context at a macro level should begin to shed a fair bit of light.

My overall goal here is thus to come up with my own study of history (exclusively by borrowing from the studies of scholars in the field) in a 2D plane. The dimensions of importance would be:

- Geographic

Reducing our 3D world simply to a linear list of regions (from cities to continents).

- Time

Often at the macro level of millenia but sometimes down to much more fine units of measure.

In this context there are 2 approaches which seem like reasonable approaches to begin with. Each of these Quora links gives a hint as to what sort of approaches might work as a starting point.
- Quora post 1
- Quora post 2

My takeaway from them was:

- scattered history

Develop a general interest. Start off by watching and reading anything cool and interesting. As long as it's capturing my interest, I should be able to easily absorb a lot, and dive deeper. By moving through a few such interesting spaces, I can aim to build up a few pillars in my learning. And from there I can get donw to filling in the blanks.

- organised history

The starting point would be a basic timeline of world history. Once I know and understand what the major events and happenings of each century is (and at each part of the world), I can begin diving deeper. I would start filling in my blanks in knowledge for the most interesting centuries and learn to connect the dots along the way.