The majority of people have a linear understanding of history; historical events that have played out over time. We may know an impressive number of details about two particular events while not realizing that they actually happened nearly or about the same time. Effectively, most people would never be able to grasp that most historical events were actually taking place simultaneously.
Unfortunately, history classes are structured in a way that we don’t realize most of history happened much more recently than one would think. For example, Cleopatra lived closer to the first moon landing than she did to the building of the Great Pyramids and Mississippi only ratified slavery in 2013.
One of the most renowned universities in the world, England's Oxford University has existed (in some form) since 1096. In 1231, the masters were officially recognized as a "universitas." The Atzec Empire, which is commonly thought of as the oldest empire in the world, wasn't established until 1430—nearly 200 years after Oxford officially became a university.
The Eastern Roman Empire (aka the
Byzantine Empire) fell in 1453. Forty years later, in 1492, Christopher Columbus landed in America. Meaning that plenty of
people who thought of themselves as Romans (one of the oldest civilizations in
the world) had heard of the discovery of a new continent which probably blew their world apart...their social imagination.
The first major wagon train of nearly 1,000 pioneers left Elm Grove, Mo., and set out to follow the Oregon Trail in search of a new future on May 22, 1843. Five days later, on May 27, 1843, Alexander Bain filed his patent for the fax machine. It's crazy to think that newly arrived pioneers could have sent a fax to their east coast family to let them know they'd arrived safely.
On April 14, 1865, when Samuel J. Seymour was 5 years old, his parents took him to a production of "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theatre in Washington D.C. the same night Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. In 1956, Seymour recounted the experience on the CBS game show "I've Got a Secret."
In 2001, Steve Jobs changed the world when he launched the first version of the iPod. With room to hold 1,000–2,000 songs and a battery life of 10 hours, the first-generation iPod now sits in history museums. Five years later, when the sixth-generation iPod was launched, slavery was abolished in Mauritania, the last country on earth where it was still legal. And while technically the practice is criminalized here, Mauritania is still widely regarded as slavery's last stronghold.
https://stacker.com/history/50-historical-facts-will-warp-your-sense-time
Commentary: The point being of the above is to stress that man, in his social imagination, likes linear order; however, in the bigger picture, its anything but. Why is that? Perhaps, its the social imagination's way of dealing with the experience of time and space. We prefer to think that things happen in a given order as in one after another and thus, the previous event is less of an event as the next one occurs... Less in the sense of being important in comparison to the next one and all future events.
Man tends to think in the present with the past behind him and the future always ready to be grabbed with enthusiasm ...always for the better. But, that's not usually the case. Many civilizations have come and gone and many have had their high times when nothing else mattered more than the present.
Everything else pales, everyone else who ever came before could never be as smart, creative or skillful. Maybe that is why politicians, experts/scientists bury ancient wisdom, relics or ideas and even relationships from the past because their own wisdom, objects and ideas would seem trivial...or pale in comparison today.
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