Reading Assignment: Cartographies of Time
In the chapter Time in Print, it is initially revealed how large of a role that chronology once played, allowing us to better understand how time has been represented and what it has shown us about different periods of time. Today, chronologies are often thought of as “mere sequences” giving them little significance in our history, which the authors go into showing why this should not be true.
The authors emphasize the idea that “the passage of time is orderly and linear.” However, chronologies are not just mere sequences and should therefore have a more complex layer. The authors point out one of Joseph Priestly’s issues with the idea of linear time, which is that the historical narrative is not linear. I find this idea of the historical narrative not being linear interesting because it then raises the question of how linear time is and whether or not it should be presented in this way.