Enough epigraphs? Suggested Preface
The biggest problem the world faces today is the plethora of history ignoramuses in all countries, to whom history is a giant blank, a swamp of mush, an ocean of murky jello. The school system has failed them in a big way, but why? It all traces to the longtime use of paper to store historical information. Inevitably universities accumulate huge libraries of history materials, then turn around and restrict access to the elite, who produce history works referencing them in their footnotes and bibliographies, knowing the general public will never be able to access them, saying "trust me". Right.
Then voila, along came the Internet, the World Wide Web, and Google, a tremendous sea change. Now everybody with Internet access can access virtually all historical materials easily and cheaply, and enjoy the power of electronic searches. Now that the sea has changed, who's gonna lead the masses to the water and teach them how to drink? Drum roll, please.
Tired of being nekulturny, but Tempus fugit? The world is shrinking and spinning out of control, and you'd like to learn world history, not American, European or Asian, but The-World-As-One history so you can take your place in the world, but don't want to face the swamp of materials that are either too broad and shallow or too narrow and deep, and all totally too confusing, like Wikipedia, leading you around in circles and getting you nowhere, causing you to drown in a sea of information containing little real knowledge? Is there any hope of achieving a sharp, sweeping, comprehensive knowledge of the past, and if so, what is the effort required? The hardest part of studying history is knowing what to study, and where to look it up, and now that I've got the Internet and Google, if only there were a top-level master map, plus a guided tour written by an experienced guide? Another drum roll please.
The Great Track of Time (GTT) is the fast track to the finish line of a robust, comprehensive awareness of world history from Creation to Armageddon-Minus-Now without having to go to all the bother of looking everything up, because everything's already looked up for you, and all you have to do is get on the track and ride.
The GTT is a new way to study history called a Historyscope, a total immersion timeline based on the power of the Internet, providing a veritable road atlas of time, tagging and describing every "map point" (object of interest) as it fires off in chronological order in enough detail to grok it, along with the flow, blowing away lightweight history timelines that list historical events but shed no understanding and miss needed map points, while dispensing with the need for narrowly-focused history books covering just one or a handful of map points with too much detail, written by writers with no broad awareness of the rest of the map. The idea is that a Historyscope is a good enough map so that if you decide to go deeper by Googling down or consulting more detailed books, the map doesn't turn into another map as hidden map points emerge, but rather just gets more boring.
The style? Think of it as an endless roll of "world news today" newspapers, only written backwards in time by an all-knowing reporter, who can tell you what event has big effects down the road, and when and how, and doesn't miss anything that might matter later, like the day that Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft, I'm sure it wasn't on the front page of the London Times. Or think of it as a map through a swamp, keeping you from getting lost or falling into quicksand, prepared by a pathfinder who's been through it many times before, TLW Boone was a man, was a bi-i-i-g man, and he fought for your history to keep your historyscoping free. The GTT makes old-fashioned history books seem obsolete, because they were all written by old-fashioned historians who themselves didn't have the GTT. Or think of it as a Memory Palace, where everything that ever happened is shown to you on a royal guided tour by one cool know-it-all pansophist with a barba blanca.
How many map points are we talking about? The entire GTT is around 300K map points, which sounds like a lot, but TLW manages to give you a brilliant guided tour of all of them with an average of 20 words per map point, about 6 million words total, think of it as a new college education in a box, 1.5 million words a year (4,110 words a day) for 4 years, or 1 million words a year for 6 years. A lot of people read a million words a year of romance novels, so what do you have to lose? It's the best novel ever written, containing every plot thread you can ever want, only the net result of the plot is the story of where you and everyone else came from, the Grand Novel of the Human Family.
But I'd rather spend a year studying the Battle of Gettysburg? That's your choice, but try TLW's grand tour first, all the map points from Creation to Now, and after you go out the exit you can come back in the entrance and go deeper at any map points you like, equipped with the complete map in your head, which will keep you from ever being lost in history again as the super-specialists talk your head off.
The GTT is an exciting quantum leap, made possible by the Internet and Google (or some other search engine if you prefer), and TLW teaches you how to use them as your personal historyscope, your portal to a lifetime of history study in our Google-powered world, a high-density drink of pure historical water. More like Red Bull, it's concentrated and hi-energy, immersing you in each historical milieu to give you an awareness of the unfolding of time, like pulling the skeletons out of the graveyards and putting the flesh back on them and making them talk. Stand on TLW's shoulders as we all stand on the Internet's shoulders, and admire the view and shake a few hands.
But if you can't wait you don't have to start at Creation and work your way through, but can open up at the start of any year or decade and immerse yourself, because it has an ongoing long view, bringing out parallels, trends and historical theories along the way, giving you a mature awareness of the march of time and the future consequences of events. Think of it as a Tootsie Roll that you can chop up into bite-size pieces, by the year, decade, or century, all equally rich and chewy, each bite thoroughly historyscoped and integrated into the GTT. Like the waters of life, it's able to be diluted to any amount and still give life.
The GTT is the education you should have received in college, or should be getting now, maybe one day the one you'll be giving, the new green education, one day you're going to school, now we're here doing interviews? A revolution in history teaching, taking it out of academia straight to the general public, since everybody can Google to double-check or go deeper without having to set foot on a campus. It should be taught starting in K-12, covering it once lightly before going to college to go over it again deeper. Hopefully the GTT will rock the whole school system to its socks so it stops producing endless lines of history ignoramuses and starts producing Historyscopers who are ready to take their place in the world.
Allow me to let you in on a little secret: exponential growth. Half of all history happened in the 20th century, so it takes three million of the six million words. The 19th century takes about half of what's left, and the 18th century half of that, etc., back to the Dark Ages, when things level out at a snail's pace, after which the Roman Empire pumps the action back up. See ya in ancient Rome.
The entire history of the world? So why isn't the current book price fifteen thousand dollars? Obviously, you can't relive every human experience since Day One, the essence of style is condensation, so the trick to a great GTT you can hold in your hand is boiling it down, cooking it until the flavors mingle together and there's a satisfying aftertaste, leaving you with a good awareness of history. It depends on starting out with good ingredients, in this case accurate facts, and good literary style, good cooking, and good culinary equipment, in my case Goog Goog Google and my secret software. As to its size, sorry, a lot of stuff has happened before you came in, but you're the heir to the kingdom, you are the world, you are the children, it's yours now. It's just too dang big, and I want to keep up with my romance novels? Yes, although the GTT is one-stop shopping, it's not necessarily one size fits all, and many Mini-Historyscopes have been made available for specialized study.
Three hundred thousand dollars for college, you ever studied blackjack, pull up a chair? College costs too much, and even if your GTT is far cheaper and I can use it solo with Google, why waste my time on historyscoping when I can learn to get a job developing hi-tech doohickeys? Because you're human, and just taking up space and processing chemicals might not be enough when you reach the magic moment of facing your mortality. Maybe you just might want to inherit our rich history with open eyes, not just get hooked to an assembly line belt that dumps you into a morgue with a mind that was always a child.
The GTT is above mere politics, with no axe to grind. Unlike the current educational system, the GTT has no PC agenda, no philosophical, political, or religious view to promote, because the Historyscoper is above all that, interested in the way it really was, not should be. Historyscoping is a discipline with its own standard of Da Truth. It was developed by TLW the Original Historyscoper outside the establishment because TLW is your classic lone wolf genius. Sorry, stuffed shirts, we LWGs still have our place, snicker. It's something no bureaucratic organizations could have produced if they tried, it's above bureaucracy, it's a Rockin' Sockin' Historyscope, totally cool and unlame, no PC agenda in sight, born of good deeds I might add. It's got juice, it's almost supernatural in places, a living viewport into history, a crystal ball, everything that happened for each year from the Eye in the Sky, an eerie channeling, like it just happened yesterday. The Historyscoper is owned by no organization, other than the human race, is that your race too? A Historyscoper spends his/her life looking out the back of the bus and communing with dead spirits, who keep crying "Remember me! I once lived! Remember me! I lived too!", while promising them "All right, I will, just let me get your story straight!", and once we get into it, sorry, we just can't stop, can't let up. TLW's been historyscoping 24/7/365 until his hair turned white, literally, and just doesn't care, hold the hair coloring, it was all worth it and he'd do it again if he had another life. TLW's GTT is like a Hershey's bar, pure enjoyment for the mind, without the calories and fat.
But I'm just a fool trying to be cool? It's fine for you, but I don't have your background? Guess what, good news. The GTT starts with the assumption that you basically know nothing about history, and teaches you everything, how to crawl, walk, run, ride a bike, everything. It's something you grow into and then can't grow out of, your ultimate history start page, not just a textbook or an encyclopedia but a here-in-the-dark user's guide to every textbook and encyclopedia, a new kind of history book, the master guide to where everything in history came from and in what order, not another xyz-pedia, as if all the encyclopedias were imploded, inverted and reverse-engineered into a seamless narrative after being historyscoped by an all-seeing all-knowing brain (okay, a pretty good but not infallible brain, nobody's perfect). A common public information superhighway to become a member of the Sgt. Historypeeper I-read-the-news-everyday oh-boy iPod Google GTT Historyscope Age. The first book to read when you want to study history, and the last, and the one to consult in between. The book to use to measure your progress, and to gauge how much you have left to learn. The phat book, the I just had to look, having read the book, I'd love to turn you on book. The I ain't the worse that you've seen, can't you see what I mean, go ahead and jump book.
But why why why? And who who who? Simple. This here little book I dashed off during a peyote vision is a one-of-a-kind opus maximus (magnum opus) (chef-d'oeuvre?) of a been-there-done-that super-generalist lifetime student who has the benefit of living at the butt crack of dawn and having the latest stuff available. It started as a project for TLW's private use, a secret veapon, way back in the day before there was an Internet or even personal computers, and a hobby after there was, but after the primal shock of 9/11 he began ramping it up full-time in the hope of trying to figure out how the world got into such a mess, and how it can get out of it, after which it grew into Always On My Mind, until it became too good to keep to himself, especially after his back went out and he realized he wasn't going to live forever, even if it was his Precious, because the public needs it now. TLW feels sorry for people who don't have it. Join the movement or be left behind, a dinosaur, a caveman, always a child, pat pat.
Broad Before Deep, Historyscoper dot com's motto, along with Prod Before Peep. Think of TLW as your Personal Historyscoper (Historyscooper, like Pooper Scooper?), your Iron Chef, the Boy Who Never Left School, Extreme Mind Makeover, Home Edition without the annoying bullhorn, He's Fashionable, One Man Come In the Name of Learn, One of the Most Iconic Voices of Our Time, History Samurai Doing Battle With Forces of Darkness and Confusion, the Pharmacist of History with a powerful restoring ingredient, laboratory-proven, scientifically developed, cures clueless athlete's foot with half the treatments, a Polymath, we call him the Egg, an Endless Infomercial of History, isn't it time you discovered the power of Winslow Clean, the Edward R. Winslow of Yesterdays Past, he's been there, seen it, never backed down, whether it's news from your century or around the millennium, he's your trusty guide, St. Thomas Enlightenus in Living Coloradus, an ascetic monk donning the itchy-scratchy goat hair shirt and unobfuscating the obfuscated, untangling the tangled, straightening the crooked, and shining a light in the muck, all for your benefit if if if you you you dare to try to make a memory and steal a piece of time to ride his Great Track of Time to Prehistoric Junction, toot toot.
Really, it's about Why Am I Here and All That Jazz, like, do you want to live like a candle in the wind, here riding the float today, you know what tomorrow, like a worker insect with no soul, who makes a buzz and leaves a husk, or, like TLW, would really very much like to know where he, you, we all came from, and how things got the way they are, and what it's all about, and is there any plan to history or is the world just a giant madhouse, and would appreciate any clue, woo woo woo? Illiteracy sucks? There is no royal road to learning? What you don't know can't hurt you? We're making history right now? How can you go forward unless you know your past? In order to learn the past one must forgive it? It's all just a little bit of history repeating, I've seen it before, and I'll see it again? Is the answer in his eyes, in his smile, or in the words you hear him say? Life is one long day in school? When I think of all the crap I learned in high school it's a wonder I can think at all? My degree has provided so much security in my life? Opportunity is what it's all about? Money can't buy you love? Come hungry, leave happy.
So tighten up y'all. I pity the fool who tries to learn history by mucking around in the murky swamp instead of enjoying the cool view from the sky. Don't be left behind. Keep up with the Joneses. There's two ways to study history, the dumb way and the TLW way. My way is the highway. TLW's patented new approach is to not just list or arrange, or to dump tons of pompous literary crap on you (famous last words?), but to knowledge-engineer, cooking and concentrating the history down into page after page of pure ambrosia, then going back the other way, adding deliberate redundancies, backward and forward references, and statistical and context-setting info, so that everything is always in front of you and blends perfectly, finally salting in a tasty seasoning of trivia and clever comments to keep it fun, all in a unique mnemonic language that builds rich connections in your mind, making historical facts not only easy to remember but hard to forget, like Velcro strips with all those tiny hooks, a built-in Da Vinci Code, call it the TLW Code, making you feel like you really lived back then, and was reading all the newspaper headlines with your tea and scones, and browsing the Time and Newsweek magazines and watching the nightly world news brodcasts, but at mental jet speed, and with the benefit of hindsight, because you're living now and they were living then. Think of TLW's mnemonic system as a History Operating System, and TLW as the Bill Gates of Historyscoping. Once you learn history from TLW, you won't want or need to relearn it from anybody else. And that's not all. Before letting it out of the shop there was the final editing process, like making a box of chocolates, with layer after layer of creams and nut clusters and jelly centers, you do know what you're going to get, no you don't, bon apetit.
What about all them world history encyclopedias I can get at the used book store? Think of it as a paper diet, 95 pounds lighter, slim forever. Before the GTT, all these encyclopedias were put together by committees, and suffered from the too many cooks spoil the broth syndrome, a hodgepodge of kimono sleeve mini-histories cut-pasted together by a motley group of myopic blindfolded elephant-patting super-specialists with varying language skills, filled with specialized articles off the main track that only historians can understand, like a stew that's half-cooked, unpalatable, indigestible. TLW's GTT, on the other hand, is the product of a single mind with a super-high-power microwave oven, trying to understand, to grasp, to go broad, broader, broadest, and deep enough to satisfy without going too deep to bore and confuse (leaving you to do that for yourself on your own later, chuckle, you'll be baack). Iron Chef TLW always looks fabulous as he serves you a well-cooked Vegas-here-I-come-class dish in the banquet of banquets, the entire world's history from the all-seeing-eye top-level-integrating editor-in-chef.
Your brain is so empty it's lame, and filling it up might hurt? Hey, you can start by cruising the pictures, giving you a little insight into what life was like, inviting you into the text and bringing it down to you, like, it's history, it really happened and it's where you came from. And, unlike other global world history compendiums, there is only one author, one voice, the coolest voice, moi, a certified you know what who could be the new Herodotus, check back with me later after the tour bus leaves. Yes, TLW was born with a blank slate too, would that cure you of epistemophobia?
Does it have to be recast as fiction to get you interested? Think of this work as an exciting megawork of fiction that just happens to be based on fact, like a ton of Dan Browns on steroids. Or was that an exciting megawork of fact that just happens to be based on fiction? How about an exciting metawork of faction that just happens to be based on friction? I've got news for you: history is way more interesting than fiction. All them parallel plot lines like a good novel, but more twists and turns than any fiction writer could come up with, and surprise, you're at the end of one of them, along with everybody you know.
This is who I really am, knowledgeable me, the Universe is right, I'm looking forward to the days ahead, I hope tomorrow you'll find better things, A all night, B all day? What about historical accuracy? How important is that to you, chuckle? Hey, I was there, I really lived through the last six thousand years, I read the newspaper headlines every morning with my tea and scones, and watched the world news broadcasts every evening on multiple televisions like LBJ. It all seems like just yesterday. Has it been that long? My, how time flies. What's the matter, were you young whippersnappers with peach fuzz on your cheeks just born yesterday? Let me tell you all about it.
Back in the dawn of time, the Universe was born, a big black hole or something. The rest gets complicated, it's a long story, I'll have to skip a lot. Why not learn history by watching movies? I'm William Wallace, and I'm here today to help you Scots fight for your free-ee-ee-dom, is anybody with me, Erin Go Bragh? But if you arrest me between productions when I'm not in character, I own the town and will crush you, and all wars were caused by the Jews? Why does everybody play war? Doesn't anybody play peace?
Sorry, but I only got five minutes, show me the video? Sorry, but history is all about words, golden words that unlock the events of the past at jet speed and engineering accuracy. Not that movies are worthless, just second best, too slow, phony and manipulative, more fiction than fact, and once seen, what dates and facts did you write down while passing the popcorn? Now try watching a zillion hours of them movies and check back with me when you paid the bill.
It's work, no matter how fun you tried to make it? You can always die a child, too, turn back to the professional wrestling, suckah. If you just want to get your wick wet, try looking up the year of your birth, then the year of your death, and see if it don't give you a buzz and leave you feeling hungry. I'm trying to get you addicted? Once you get a free sample you will want more, and more and more, and pretty soon don't just want it but need it? Naw, drugs are bad for you, this is nutritious, more like health food. Try TLW's GTT, made with cracker-thin crust and two types of toppings, hand-baked, that's Poppa TLW's. It's like Spray N Wash, it has new resolve power, it's an amazing product, trust TLW N Wash for stains.
But wait, isn't history lame? I bet Paris and Jessica wouldn't? Yes, lame. As lame as a fifty-year-old kid walking around in diapers. I can't take time out from my animal existence because my hormones have to come first and Clay Aiken is in town? My child tries very hard, and my friends have old shoes too. If this work doesn't make you think history is tremendously cool, you're brain-dead and might as well go back to the world of squirrels, kids included, while we do the bon voyage. One day you're going to have to get real and face the fact that the clock keeps ticking.
Take a road, any road? I prefer waiting to attend Oxford? Here's the fastest road, period, end of report, don't ask any longer what you want to do when you grow up, here's a new Bible to thump throughout life, six lucky numbers separate you from millions, don't forget to play. Duh, don't wait till you enter Oxford to start studying the GTT.
A new Bible? It's not recognized as authoritative by blah blah blah? Yes, it's not perfect (what is?), and misstatements will be found in it, like cooking mistakes, fiction and fact are very hard to separate? Like any information, you should judge it by its sources. No, TLW didn't try contacting Jehovah using a Ouija Board. The oracle TLW used is the same good ole Google you got, using it to do a massive global radar scan of history that took zillions of Googles to compile, ouch, don't ask, it's a word radar and every word had to be processed one at a time the old-fashioned way, by reading it. Yes, the Internet is a huge swamp of information with little knowledge in sight, but like panning for gold, TLW went through tons of crap to find the chunks and nuggets, then built the nuggets into gold bricks, and finally laid the gold bricks into a Golden Brick Road Through Time. It's only as accurate as all the human minds concentrated in the Internet can make it, grin, and if Big J sends a new Bible down from Plugo you can use it, else TLW's GTT is the Main Terrestrial Starting Place to Wake-Up City, the High Springboard to the History Ocean, the Way to Go to Find Clues to Where You Came From, When the World Will End, How Happiness Runs Like a Little Boat on the Sea, or smaller facts, like who invented the Internet and whose shoulders they stood on. The entire master story of the human experience back all six point six six thousand years to 6.66 decimal point accuracy. Beautiful, like a brand new home, for your mind.
A Bible, a little library, yes. But get off your knees you duck pluckers, it's not meant to be a Holy Bible, i.e., the final, inspired or perfect last word on history, but a secular (worldly) Bible, a working tool and guide that is unfinished and evolving, in your face raw and begging to become preggers with a short skirt and a long jacket, a lifetime love affair, besame, besame mucho, hello Dolly, this is TLW, Dolly, it's so nice to have you back where you belong, hold me darling, you're still growing, you're still scoping, you're still going strong, have a little faith in me fellahs, say you'll always be mine. It should never be relied on as a final authority, but as a Map of What Happened and When to help gain that ever-cool overall awareness of history, which always should be verified in its details with specialized works or by Googling before betting on it. A map is never a substitute for being there, but it helps when you can't, and even when you can.
This is the man who started the farm? Think before you speak, always speak the truth, and write it down afterwards? Where's the bibliography and footnotes? There aren't any. The GTT is written not for specialists but generalists, in other words, everybody, as few want to study history in grad school, and even they remain babes in the woods like everybody else outside their narrow area of specialization, and will find the GTT just as useful to pump them up, and even inside their areas they will develop a new appreciation as they see how it fits in the big picture. Besides, why even try to learn a narrow region of history when you can't see where it fits and in what? What's the point? Isn't your goal to learn where you came from, and how the world got to be how it is, and if not shouldn't it be? You're part of the world, and the world is one, learn your history and take your place in it. Tired of paying too much for glasses, get out the karioke mike and sing along.
And so GTT is based on zillions of primary and secondary sources, but there are no B&F, and very few sources are cited in situ, as TLW is such a master thief and plagiarizes so many zillions of works that the entire library would have to be listed, actually so many that it isn't plagiarism anymore, it's creativity, since it's a new synthesis from a pool of historical facts, which are all public domain, Monster works for me. A Historyscoper is not a historian, but knits together the works of historians into a Historyscope, the generalist as consumer of the output of the specialists, this is not an either-or this is a both-and.
What's in it for me? Let's say you bite. Let's jump to the ending, the logical conclusion, you, the new enlightened you. Truly dedicated educated adults can read it through from beginning to end in four years to gain a comprehensive, accurate and detailed we-both-get-carried-away I-want-a-girl-with-a-mind-like-a-diamond aerial view of history, then use it as a guide and vade mecum throughout life, knowing where to relearn it the easiest and remember what the cool golden words with the mnemonic hooks in them were. School-age readers can use it to amplify, make sense of, and conserve their studies, and show their teachers up when they're pikers and take over the class for a week when they get bored, they are gaining on us, they are gaining on us.
Plus it's not just boring lists of events, it's a literary work that really rocks, and makes stuff that went down centuries ago seem like it just happened yesterday. And it's not just the facts, it's the compilation, arrangement, and and and and the Word the Word was with TLW and the Word was TLW, and the Word was made Flesh by TLW? Besides, keep it simple stupid, we're now in the Google Take Your Office With You Age, and to say again say again, when the GTT has made you aware that something's on the Great Track of Time, all you have to do is Google it and go as deep into it as you want, like when you're zooming in with a map. Just don't lose your place so you can resume your journey. Long live living long and loving every millennia of it.
What about bias? Who are you and what will a background check bring up? Is "be" the first word you learn in any language, or "me"? The GTT is admittedly biased toward Western history, I'll give you that much, because TLW is from that neck of the woods, and suffers from I-got-it-bad-so-bad-it-ain't-good Western info-overload, but he didn't forget about Chinese history, so although he is an outsider looking in, I'm currently tone deaf but trying. TLW made every effort to be unbiased when it comes to non-Western history, which means he's got built-in bias in the first place, but it's not an incurable defect, since I'm-just-wild-about-Harem Eastern-oriented editions can be published switching the Eastern, er, Central Earth events to the top, and the Western Barbarian Province events to the bottom, and more can be always added as needed on a slow boat to China without having to redo what's already been done. The question for non-Westerners is, can you deal with the Western part in the first place and stay true to yourselves? It's better to try and fail than to have failed to try, even if you end up in the same place?
But let me ask you a question, raccoon to raccoon, why did you mess it up with all those off-the-wall comments, italicized to set them apart? Because I get paid for it? Because I couldn't resist and think I can get away with anything as long as I fake a good American accent like Gregory House, M.D.? Because I've got fifteen brothers and they've all got history kids? Think of TLW's personal comment track as the laugh track in a sitcom. The comments are a Fourier convolution of TLW's personal state function with the material, call it channeling dead spirits to let them have their say. It would be lame to take offense at any views the comments seem to take, because they actually take all sides at different times, are not necessarily TLW's personal views (TLW is legion?), and are a look into some peoples' heads who have strong opinions, since they presumably have them for a reason. They show where the heat in history is, even if they're cold dead and in mouse company now, to help shed light on what all the fuss was about. They're all phrased as what, questions? because they're just suggested mind grippers to teach an old brush new tricks and keep your little minds from the hobgoblin of foolish consistency and make sure the history isn't vacuumed into the forget-bin. You're free to ignore them, just don't tell me you resisted the urge to peek. Yes, some of the comments are themselves nonsense, but that's their way-cool feature, they're brilliant nonsense. The aim is to make each and every event in history seem as real and personal as the time you popped your cherry. Too bad, many of them rely on puns or pop culture in American English, and aren't easily translatable, but versions in other languages will be prepared by noted poets in case America Too Shall Pass.
"How can I be expected to retain all this information?" asketh thou, er, thee, er, ye, er, you, followed by "I'm suffering from history amnesia?" The trick is in how you're taught.
Think of the piano. Some people are born understanding the piano almost instinctively. They just get it, and can play. Mozart was playing at age 3 and composing at age 6, and could play anything backwards standing on his head. Salieri might have gone through school until he got a doctorate in musicology, but he could never really play or compose. Modern piano teachers charge for lesson after lesson, yet never tell you they're giving you the 10-year classical musical course, and don't want you to just play or they'd lose your business. How much did you pay and still can't play "My Way" at the office party? But if somebody who knows how to play shows you the Scott Houston Play Piano in a Flash Technique, you can be concentrating on polishing your technique to a sensuous pro level in those three years, if their ads are true. When it comes to the Historyscoper, TLW is the Mozart, and you're the student, and you learn via the Internet as fast as you can take it. What you become is totally up to you.
It's like a mattress. You start by constructing a frame, then laying down coil after coil, spreading them out evenly in a matrix so that they can support weight, then you apply the weight, and it will hold, and now you build a mattress and you're in for a great night's sleep. But if you just start pouring weight into an empty frame it will only make a hole in the floor. That's why reading most history textbooks, which are really paint-by-numbers creations of sections plagiarized from reference books, based on some officially approved outline that is itself a coverup, are such a waste, like pouring sand down a rat hole - nothing sticks. Never fear, TLW's Play History in a Flash Technique teaches you how to play, how to make sense out of the keys, how to demand that the loser's tunes get in the playbook, how to build a broad foundation on which you can hang facts without losing them, so that everything sticks and you will no longer worry about dying a child in a crib. We can put a child on the Moon but can't learn our heritage? The number one function of your brain, after basic survival and reproduction, is to become what? Wiser, nyuk nyuk nyuk.
So you decided to put away the history doper for the Historyscoper. The question now is, no matter how much you know about the past, how does that give you a clue about what will happen in the future? It doesn't. But when the future comes, how has not knowing the past doomed you to repeat it? Won't you be glad to be in the position of being the one to ask what historical parallels apply? To quote George Burns, I'm glad to be anywhere. And that's where you and I both came in? (cellos and violins)
T.L. Winslow (TLW), Colo., U.S.A. June 23-24, 2012 (give or take).
The GTT is a shocking new type of knowledge product to newbies who are themselves a product of the pre-GTT education system, and a word to the wise is in order.
The GTT is a mental map of world history, consisting of 300K map points with a master description of each by TLW. It is meant to be read in its entirety, decade by decade, like a novel, in order to build the map up in your mind, to build a new you, the Historyscoper you. It can be used as a reference, yes, but you have encyclopedias for that. This is a Historyscope, a crystal ball of each of the 600 decades of human history back 6,000 years, total immersion, everything coming at ya in the face, I'm telling you mister, she's a sob sob sister, my oh my how the baby could cry.
Like any map, first you have to see the points, then learn what they represent, and slowly come to see the dynamic relationship among the points, the structure and flow. Some points are minor, such as the birth or death of an important person. Others are rich and capable of years of further study, such as the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg. Until you have the map in your head, you are advised to not spend too much time delving into individual map points, since it can turn into a trap, causing you to miss the boat and keep you from becoming a Historyscoper.
But you graduated from Oxford and Yale and know everything already? Sorry. No matter where you came from, whether you went to Podunk Community College or Harvard, your brain may have absorbed a lot of basic principles, but sorry, it's basically empty of historical knowledge. When you start your study of the GTT you will no doubt hit a learning curve wall, because it's made of pure concentrated knowledge, like pure thick golden honey, and you're not used to drinking it, don't have the mental enzymes or digestion system.
Trust me though, after the shock of your initial taste you will start developing them, and begin not just tasting, not just drinking, but gulping the honey, feeding your lame empty brain, which will soon prove insatiable, wanting ever more, and more, and more, and more, because brain honey absorbs into your brain clean, without making waste, and slowly makes your brain stronger and more demanding of new knowledge as it begins thinking about what it knows and coming up with questions, there is a jigsaw puzzle here, it all fits.
When just getting started, go ahead and just skip around and sample your way through the centuries, a taste here, a taste there, to get your system used to it. Before going further, read TLW's essay on How to Study the GTT, and learn his cool mnemonic system, which is used throughout the GTT to make memorizing facts and dates not only easy, but hard to undo, and becomes your mental don't-say-Windows operating system. Then read TLW's Little Lectures, which are designed to lay a groundwork of key names and dates in your mind. That done, go back to the start and skim, trying to work your way to the present without skipping a year to develop a sense of the flow. Then go back to the start again and read more in each year, and attempt to connect it with the surrounding milieu, and form a working picture. Then when you are ready to get serious, go back again, reading everything, for your first Full Pull (complete pass), savoring the experience of encountering old friends and savory memories while filling out the jigsaw puzzle in your mind. Try to resist the urge to Google down on individual items unless it's absolutely important to you, else your first Full Pull might never happen.
A good rule is not to do too much Googling unless you're trying to prepare an oral lecture that you would like to recite to yourself or others to ham it up. All through this historyscoping, once and awhile you will no doubt pause and look back at yourself, how much you've learned, and marvel at how you could go around all those years with such an empty brain. And you will begin getting regularly shocked at others with empty brains, especially when they consider themselves educated, but don't diss them, just get them into the GTT like you. Never forget, we have a very rich history, and no matter how long and hard you study, there's ever more, and more, and even more for you to learn, and you never know too much to not need another review of the principles, and it's beautiful to know there's always more coming. And years after your first deja vu you will experience another deja vu as you realize that even when you thought your head was pretty well filled, it was still on empty anyway, so who needs to forgive you, nobody.
Let me give you the surprise ending of the story: until you've read every word in the GTT several times in several different directions, and done a lot of Googling to go deeper, and become so familiar with it that you are able to hop back and forth at will and understand the dynamics and flow, until it's all under your mastery, you still really know nothing, you're a piker, you're full of crap. And even after you get the map in your head, you will have to face the fact that it's a top-level map only, and that to Google down into every point on the map would take thousands of lifetimes. Still, you're on top of the situation now, in charge, with a great sense of the surrounding terrain, something that wasn't possible until the GTT came along, welcome to the Historyscoper Club.
Maybe you are thinking that your brain is too average, that you aren't smart enough, aren't made to know the GTT. Hey, TLW wrote it, so it's a proven fact that a single brain can contain it, and you aren't being asked to write it, just read it, and stand on TLW's shoulders, so try it and you will find you like it. Going around with a serious knowledge of history beats the band, is cool and useful, and makes you a force. They key is to understand that it's up to you to do the actual honey gulping, there's no shortcut or way to cheat, honey is your mental money, and like Smith Barney, you have to do it the old fashioned way, by learning it.
Maybe other history writers will fear that TLW has ruined their market, but never fear, ultimately it will get far bigger, with the difference that readers will demand that they have the GTT in their minds too before wasting their time. One day hopefully we will all enjoy the power of the GTT to give every literate person on Earth a common top-level world history map that allows a world community to function and keep the world going on its way wide-eyed and knowledgeable rather than blind and empty-headed, spreading rather than limiting freedom. A world full of Historyscopers will be a safer world.