ABSTRACT
Simple Linear History is a mental concept that is a reflection of textbook timelines which show the past as a single trajectory with major people and events on it, listed in chronological order. An undergraduate student who read an early draft of this book explained that her greatest struggle in middle school history classes was trying to understand that there were different sets of events happening simultaneously in multiple places on the globe. Novelists like Mark Twain, Laurence Sterne, and Kurt Vonnegut all employed unconventional non-linear timelines to express new ways of looking at narrative time. They demonstrated that timelines that diverge from a traditional left-to-right linear model offer people the ability to think creatively about our subject and encode additional information. But the student timeline presented here represents a median result in the class.
