I (Steve) recently turned the big 5-0, a lifetime long enough to measure up against historical time scales in a nontrivial way. The grand old game of baseball's American League was founded in 1901, exactly 60 years and two days prior to my own founding. We have shared almost half of its history together. I recall the United States Bicentennial in 1976, amazed that our country was really 200 years old. Now I have personally witnessed more than 20 percent of American history since the Declaration of Independence. The Jewish calendar marks this year as 5774, meaning that my life will soon cover 1 percent of the span since the world's biblical creation. Young readers may smirk, but if you are lucky someday this will happen to you.

Time is the basic organization of history, measured across many scales: the calendar year, the human life span, and the historical age. But the flow of time seems deceptively slow moving, and most of it occurred off of our watch. We need calendars, timelines, and other tools to chart the course of history, and help us understand it better. In this chapter, we will analyze historical figures across different scales of time: ranging from the days of the year to vast historical epochs.

Life-Span Analysis

All men (and women) are created equal, in that they have but one life dedicated to the pursuit of happiness and achievement. But life spans are not equal, differing greatly in length and the period in which they are lived. There are several revealing ways to look at history by life span.