I have been reading more history lately, but events get all mushed together because I have never learned many dates. I started memorizing dates this year and it makes it easier to contextualize new information.

I started out by picking one event from each century of the common era. I tried to spread dates out as much as possible. I ignored the birth and death dates of famous people and instead tried to pick an important moment in their life instead, like Shakespeare writing Hamlet in 1600-ish.

  1. Start with a small number of dates.
  2. Pick datets that are spread out.
  3. Tie an individual, to a work/event, to a date.

So what’s the value of this? Well, it helps me contextualize history, and it increases my awareness of what people would have known about at different points in history. For example, Shakespeare might have been familiar with David and Mona Lisa, since they were done about a hundred years before Hamlet, but William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses Grant would not have known of Starry Night. Moreover, when I hear a new date, like Dante’s Inferno was written around 1321, I know that, uh oh, the Black Death peaked in 1350.

Is this reductive? Isn’t history much richer and complex than, “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue”? Sure, this isn’t a substitute for inquiry, it’s just a helpful tool.

Instead of walking around with a bunch of fuzzy historical events jostling around in a grab bag with only a gernal sense of order, having memorized dates gives me more of a tapestery with crisp events and I can sew new events into it as needed.

This is how I started off, but I encourage you to make your own list that is meaningful to you.

Year Event
79 Eruption of Vesuvius
122 Hadrian’s Wall
235 Crisis of the Third Century
330 Constantinople established
467 Fall of Rome Empire
529 Justinian Code
622 Hegira of Prophet Muhammad
732 Battle of Poitiers
800 Charlemagne becomes emporer
962 Holy Roman Empire established
1095 Pope Urban II starts 1st Crusade
1187 Saladin re-captures Jerusalem
1206 Temujin becomes Genghis Khan
1350 Peak of Black Death
1453 Mehmed II captures Constantinople
1505 David and Mona Lisa
1687 Isaac Newton publishes Principia
1789 French Revolution
1889 Van Gogh paints Starry Night
1989 Fall of Berlin Wall