Why do history classes focus so much on dates?

I guess it would be to put it into context with other happenings around that time.

If someone is studying why you beat up a shark with a rubber duck on Thursday 5’th of April 1996 it might be interesting to know whether your mental breakdown occured in 1995 or 1997.

Possibly for the same reason that cooking classes focus on food.

Most History is taught as a survey class, which sets up a broad view of the “landscape” of historical reference. History needs a timeline to focus the continuum of events, and their interrelationship. Unfortunately, it’s a Catch-22, if you teach it that way, it will be boring. Students find history boring, so it’s taught to get them to retain a level of broad, general knowledge.

A better way to think about history is that all history is gossip, and behind the gossip is the true story. Focusing on teaching dates is the best practice of setting up the timeline, and mapping snippets of information, or “gossip” against the timeline. In depth classes focus on the actual events.

Your “beat up a shark with a rubber duck” analogy would require dates if the discussion was, “I have a pattern of bizarre risk taking that led me to where I am.” Then the knowledge of when you beat the shark up with the rubber duck would be important in relation to when you started riding the subway in a clown suit, randomly singing operatic arias, and began missing work to ride elevators in buildings where you did not work, so you could solicit for dates.

How would you know when things happened ?
And because YOUR duck story isn’t something to write about

Because they are teaching you to pass a test, not to think.

The date is important not only to know when something happened, but also when it happened in the order of other things happening.

i.e. did Henry Ford make cars because he perfected assembly line manufacturing, or did he perfect assembly line manufacturing while making cars?

If you don’t when he did which, you don’t know why it happened the way it did.

I am in ancient civ. right now and my professor actually doesn’t include dates on our exams. I mean, she tells us what they are and I personally like having the timeline as a history major-but she says ‘dates aren’t for undergrads.”

I can understand how someone not majoring in history might be uninterested and find remembering the dates more difficult though.

Because history happened during time, and that is how we orient ourselves in time. We call these maps “calendars.”

lol I mean, how else would you do it? Granted the events and their effects on the world, but you also need to understand the time in which they occurred because it gives you a perspective of what kind of environment the world was at the time of said event. It may be a boring part, but it’s needed.

To help create a time line.

“At some point this guy called George Washington was president. At some other point there was this dude Called Gerald ford. Abraham Lincoln was another president at some other point, and there was Theodore Roosevelt, And Franklin D. Roosevelt was also president at some point.”

Okay, can you draw any usable information from that about in what order they were president, or when one was president?

Isn’t remembering the order and general dates more important than exact dates though? Also, understanding the impact an event had and how it affects life today seems way more important than remembering the exact date that the battle of Waterloo was fought.

@PandoraBoxx thanks for that lovely image of someone riding the subway in a clown suit, that was very humorous.

In my opinion, the exact dates of various events is the worst way to teach history. I suspect schools teach it that way because it is the easiest way to test for retention. If you memorize a bunch of dates, and the events they apply to, testing can show you have been exposed to “history”.

Most scholars do not realize the value of teaching history as a way to learn from the past, by relating the reasons for what has gone before, and the issues that were involved.

This is one of the many reasons I homeschool my sons and grandsons as much as I could.