Noting that 2014 has ushered in a slew of WWI retrospectives, Simon Reid-Henry denounces the “Great Year” school of history, calling it a “form of idolatry”:
Ask any adult what 1989 means to them and they will naturally mention the Berlin Wall falling and communism in Europe coming to its juddering halt. But they may well take the year to mean those two things alone—or, worse still, to assume that one led to the other. If we stand only with the crowd who gathered on the Bornholmer Strasse at the East-West German border in Berlin in 1989, then we miss the ways in which the winds of globalisation and not just the wind of democratic change, to borrow the Scorpions’ update of Harold Macmillan, were howling about the events of that year too.
It is true that some dates do seem to cleave history in two. (Those leaning to the left might point to 1789, 1848, 1917 and 1968 as well as 1989; conservatives may prefer 1812, 1914 and 1945.) But that is a call for periodisation, not compression. In the cramped room of a single year, the air soon becomes stale. The best historians recognise this. They fling open the windows onto the recent past and open the door to the future. Which leaves you wondering why they would confine themselves to such a small room in the first place.
The Dish 