Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2019
The term “history” frequently brings to mind the notion of dates — dates of events, dates of lives, dates of the creation of notable cultural objects. Lists of dates concerning presumably related objects yield chronicles. The term “chronological,” according to my computer's thesaurus, includes the notions of sequential, progressive, and successive among the synonyms. Thus a chronicle is fundamentally a list of datable entities arranged in some kind of progressive or successive sequence. While chronicling is an essential exercise in historical research, the concept of “history” extends beyond mere chronology. In a nutshell, histories seek not only to document what changes and when, but to explain processes of why things change.
This is a revised version of the paper presented at the 33rd World Conference of the ICTM in Canberra, Australia, 5-11 January 1995.