Customer Reviews

The People's Chronology: A Year-By-Year Record of Human Events from Prehistory to the Present (A Henry Holt Reference Book)

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There are several good chronological overviews out there, but this one (overdue, after 11 years, for a newly revised edition) is the best I know of and the one I reach for most often. No matter what historical period your greatest interest falls in, you can browse through it year by year. You can look up your own birth year and those of friends and relatives and find out what was happening then, or refresh your memory of past times. You can follow the repercussions of a given incident from beginning to end while noting how the world continued to spin all the while. Of course it's heavily weighted toward more recent events (the 19th and 20th Centuries occupy 68% of the volume), but the detail is superb. You'll find *everything* in this book--kings and presidents and prime ministers, wars and assassinations, financial landmarks, inventions, new developments in science and research, the founding of universities, newspapers, paintings, sculpture, theater, ballet, music, industry, population, and that's just the year 1801! If you have any prospect of ever needing to know "what happened when," you need to own this book.

Every time I pick up this book I am sucked in, following one historical trail through the years and being distracted by another path, and then another. It is set up so brilliantly, each year broken down by category--politics, music, food, religion, etc--and covering both Western and some Eastern history, that it puts all of history into accessible context and perspective. After looking up a detail in 1099 about English royal politics, it is easy to trace the repurcussions year by year, and to quickly glance at the music, the French situation, the new foods, the new theater, the global exploration, the current Chinese dynasty, and myriad other details all the way up to the present. Or just follow Mozart's career, or the Industrial Revolution, or agricultural innovations. Sure, it is not intensely detailed on each event, but it makes a great jumping off point towards other reference material. It is also the most appreciated gift I have ever given. Let's just hope the publisher decides to reprint!

As soon as you receive this book take a few minutes to
reinforce the binding because (a) it's big and thick for a
paperback, and (b) you'll find that it will spend very
little time closed once it's opened. This book is an
absloute necessity for those of us who are fascinated by
not only the major landmarks of history, but the everyday
flavor of past times. This book presents an eternal well of
interesting notes and accounts that are organized
ingeniously by subject, within years, across time. The
cross-referencing that accompanies most entries makes the
book nearly impossible to put down. The thoroughness
provides a much needed perspective on almost any of today's
pressing issues.
The international scope only serves to make it that
much more interesting for those with a thirst to know
something about everything. Truly, you will learn something
new everyday - for a long time.

What a great idea: take nearly every year of human history and discuss the events as they unfold into a chain of causality. The effect on the reader is unparalleled.

However, there are historical innacuraccies throughout the work. The reader is best advised to get a "twenty-thousand-foot-level" view of the era that interests them from which to pursue more exhaustive texts.

This reference book has been on my desk for years. I find it most useful to get a perspective on a historic or historic fiction that I am reading. For example, if I am reading about Henry VIII, I will look up the relevant years and read about the other events taking place during this time. These include inventions, agricultural information, progress in treatment and prevention of disease, economic concepts, philosophy, religion, natural disasters, culinary patterns, technologies, and the arts. Small icons in the left margin next to each entry help guide the reader so that it is possible to read all the entrys related to agriculture and skip the rest, if agriculture is your topical interest area.

Thus, for any historic book you are reading, you can get a quick view of the times in which the events take place. Because the book is witty and well written, it tends to hold you captive while you read one item after another.

I find the best use of the book is to give me perspective on a time in history, with clues and suggestions on other routes of study and reading that will give me a more complete picture. This book stimulates study, so it is a great gift to give to a graduating high school senior to take to college.

This book is at once entertaining and enlightening.

The nature of its format invites immediate browsing rather than cover to cover reading, yet it would be a mistake to consider it merely historical trivia.

While there are certainly errors and ommissions in the book,I have never come across any other work that gives a better sense of progress while simultaneously emphasizing the common threads of human history and behavior.

This book is useful as an adjunct to deeper, more academic works in that it gives a lens on "what the world is like" by describing many facets happening simultaneously without a narrow judgement of what is important.

This is extremely valuable to understand the real world.

What you may find, as I have, is that an entry or a series of entries will lead you to seek out serious treatments of history to deepen your understanding of a topic. When you do you will reflect on the value of this book, and you will recognize that both approaches have resulted in a deeper understanding of events.

I recommend it highly, and wish that it were updated regularly.

Really interesting to see how so many of the social problems we have today have been the same throughout the years.

However, while I don't expect everyone to be of my faith or any faith, as a Christian I was surprised that the author treated the birth of Jesus Christ with one paragraph and even it reflected the author's scepticism. I also couldn't help notice a vein of anti-Catholicism running through the entries. I thought society had passed beyond prejudices like that.

I'm not saying this is wrong or wrong, just very surprising to me.