Methode
14 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- "What if not?" is a measuring tool, not a game.
To say how important a cause was, you have to ask what would have happened without it. In 1964 economist Robert Fogel …
- A fingerprint lies less often than a letter.
Sources split into two kinds. Relics arise incidentally: tools, rubbish, invoices, fingerprints. Narratives are told …
- Do great men make history, or does history make great men?
In 1840, Thomas Carlyle declared that world history was 'the biography of great men'. Herbert Spencer countered in …
- How a roof beam reveals the year it was felled.
Trees add one ring per year, wide in good years, narrow in dry ones. The pattern works like a barcode for a region. …
- How archaeologists tell a bone's age.
Living things constantly take in the radioactive carbon isotope C-14. At death the supply stops, and C-14 decays with a …
- How linguists reconstruct a language nobody wrote down.
The comparative method: collect words of the same meaning from related languages, such as Latin 'pater', Greek 'patḗr' …
- How our year count began, and why there's no year 0.
In 525, the monk Dionysius Exiguus in Rome wanted to calculate Easter tables and counted years from his estimate of …
- How seven questions turn one idea into ten.
SCAMPER is Bob Eberle’s 1971 checklist for generating ideas. Take an existing product and ask: Substitute – replace …
- Longue durée: reading history at three speeds.
In 1949, the French historian Fernand Braudel distinguished three layers of time: events like battles and elections …
- Presentism: judging the past by today's yardstick.
Presentism means judging people of the past as if they had your knowledge and your values. A doctor in 1750 who …
- Source criticism: four questions before you believe a source.
Historians test every source with fixed questions: Who wrote it? When, and how close to the event? For whom, and with …
- The trap of reading history as a road leading to us.
In 1931, the historian Herbert Butterfield criticised 'Whig history': narratives in which everything earlier is merely …
- Why every collapse looks 'inevitable' in hindsight.
Hindsight bias makes you treat an outcome you know as having been predictable. The fall of Rome, the Reformation, the …
- Why the past seems to consist entirely of stone palaces.
What you know of an era is what survived: stone churches rather than wooden huts, letters of the literate rather than …