Friday, May 08, 2009

Sweeping through history

AGain. The look through social structure and change, and through institutions, culture, and so forth didn't take very much time at all, considering how little progress I had actually made in history. So, I started over with history in general.
After going through the nations and cities I had connected to history, I am now current. That is, all of the nations and cities that actually have pages, are now at least mentioned on the main history page, and distributed to various peoples as far as I have considered appropriate. Most of the lower-level aids to history are also developed. Rather than going through these any further, what is demanded now is to go through the divisions of history to bring them up to date.

I went through prehistory, updating connections to nations, and appropriately distributed to nations, including updates of the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa, and stopped with the Americas. I did similarly with Early prehistory, middle prehistory, and late prehistory, and with Antiquity.

There, I stopped. Dead stuck. I couldn't bring myself to slog through the millennia, doing a little bit of updating. I could, however, go on to classical and medieval history, modern history, and the future, adding and distributing connections to more nations and cities. So, what went wrong, and now what?

Partly, I think, I have a sense that other things need to be done, and many of these have to be connected with nations and peoples. For one, not all of the nations are present in the five major subdivisions of history, and none of them are quite caught up. For one, the nations aren't fully distributed to their various peoples: for instance, on the list of nations, there are several that belong with Western Civilization, that aren't there yet, and so with each of the other three groups.
Another is that these major peoples aren't fully connected with each other. Another is that Social structure and change doesn't have sufficient examples of nations to work with, and neither do Institutions or Culture. Another is that things like the agricultural revolution, hunting and gathering peoples, and the like are itching for me to work on them more. Another is that it feels like about time to do another update of the site, and I need to do a review of the largest files and see whether any of them need to have new pages split off in order make them more manageable.
So with all these other things competing for attention, I'm going to set the 5th millennium BC aside for now, work on a few other things, and come back to it when it begins to seem necessary and important.

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