More recent history

I'm starting to look all the way up to the 20th century level of history to make sure that I have precedent for the aids links at lower levels. That, and the early 21st century, are being linked to types of societies as the most interesting links I'm adding. For 2008, I'm starting to make forward progress instead of just catching up. At this and lower levels, interesting links are being made to the sciences. I skipped the 2nd quarter again and went to the 3rd quarter, where I'm adding events to analyze to August 2008. I had hoped to do more analysis for September 2008, but this is coming together slowly. For the fourth quarter, I'm getting closer to the state of development I have for the third. For October 2008, I have the list of events to analyze, and am starting to break his down by countries and topics. This is one of the marks I've been looking forward to reach, so I have a pretty much continuous record from August to the present. The next goal will be to fill in the gap between where I left off last June, and August. The last few passes have gone into the future, but since by the time I got to it, I was getting worn out for the
day and not making any further progress, I skipped it for once.

I had made a list of the largest files, and I use this as a rough guide to the pages that need to be split up. Very large, fat files are much more difficult to work with. The history of sociology, or history applied to sociology, was one of those, and I've been procrastinating creating a new page with just the modern history part for some time. That wasn't quite as tough as I had been expecting, so I went ahead and separated out the modern history part of peoples of the world, and wound up writing expanded summaries of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. I also separated out modern history of Western Civilization onto a separate page, and made rather more progress on connecting biographies pages to it. The Anglic peoples section I pretty much skipped over to get to the United States, which has been nagging at me for some time. This was large enough for a split, so I separated out the sociology section to a new page and did some tweaking of the format. US History is one of the largest pages in the whole base, because so much of it has been simply copied wholesale from the fat month-by-month pages. I'm afraid it's going to get bigger before it gets shorter, but I made a start on condensing it with events of November. I also took the trouble to expand a few more state pages.

Up to this point, a good deal of my work in the knowledge base has been more or less limited to the creation of links between different pages so that I could quickly jump from one to another, and it's been at times a rather mind-numbing routine. However, all this groundwork is starting to pay off, and I will be doing more analysis and writing which requires (and permits!) actual thought, rather than semi-mechanical linking and compilation, although there will still be plenty of that, too.