The Neglected Importance of Ordering

I knew very few historical dates before I started developing Cramwell’s History, even now as I play it the date questions are hardest for me (as I think they are for almost everyone). This may be, at least in part, because in our history classes in high school (as I think happens in many American high schools) rote memorization took a backseat to a qualitative understanding of certain parts of history. This was better than the alleged, ye olde way of schooling in which a stern headmistress (or, even worse, severe nun) would pound fact after fact into the malleable but ever too loose minds of uninterested pupils, for what purpose she knew not. And then drill them, forcing the intellect into the role of relational database in which the primary motivation for memorization was... …fear. This may be hyperbole. I have no idea if this ever actually happened anywhere, but faint hints of it echo through the halls of education as an implicit justification for datum-frei history.

The problem is you do lose something of an understanding of time when you don’t know the dates of things, and you lose all of an ability to reason logically about the consequences of societal actions if you don’t know the ordering of events. Dates are important. Ordering is important. Professor Cramwell’s History is a good way to learn them both along with the qualitative and event-oriented aspects of history which in the last analysis are always found to be prime. 

-Tomaz