Visualizing History: The Polish System

From Poland, Jażwiński’s system moved westward. In the 1830s, for instance, it became an official pedagogical tool for teaching history across France. By the 1850s, a revised and improved version preoccupied educators in the United States and Canada. Here the chart was imagined to be a technology of almost limitless potential. As Nelson Loverin wrote, in his grandly-titled Loverin’s Chart of Time (1882), the Polish System’s “centograph” allowed the student to “[c]ultivate the memory by using the eyes, and their nerves of induction as feeders of the grand optic centres, the reservoirs of the mind”. The North American variation was popularized due to the efforts of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who opened the first English-language kindergarten, and shared a Transcendentalist philosophical outlook with her brothers-in-law Horace Mann and Nathaniel Hawthorne. It seems Peabody revised the original system in 1850 with the publication of her The Polish-American System of Chronology. To increase granularity, her chart further divides up the (previously) smallest unit into a 3x3 grid, which offered the opportunity to indicate the nature of the remembered historical event — spatializing the births and deaths of people, nations, and technologies.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/2Srqf7w