How Do We Measure History?
Not only "what happened," but "when" and "how long" may be important questions in history. If you take out of history the element of time, nothing is left except a mass of information almost impossible to digest. We must try to place persons and events in their proper time relation to one another. It would never do to get King Solomon, Julius Caesar, and George Washington living at the same hour!
Don't let dates scare you. They are not nearly so hard to understand as football rules. Sometimes it is enough to know that a certain thing happened in a particular century, or "about" 3000 B.C. or 1540 A. D., for example. Some dates, however, are really guideposts on the road of history. Such dates we should get exactly right. It makes a big difference whether Columbus discovered America in 1492 or 1942 or 2419, just as it does whether your father's income is $7500 a month or $75.00 or $.0075.
But what does 1492 mean? It means 1492 years after the time when Christ was supposed to have been born. The ancient Egyptians took the period from one flood of the Nile to the next as a convenient measure; and when people began to notice exactly the relation of the earth to the sun, the length of time from one point in that relation until the same point appeared again was a convenient way of reckoning; and so we have our year. Of course, the year has to be subdivided, and so do our months and our days. Can you imagine how these divisions started? (267 words)
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