The Grid

This is The Grid.

	High	Awakening	Unraveling	Crisis
	First	Second	Third	Fourth
				1492
	1506	1534	1543	1588
	1607	1629	1666	1675
	1714	1741	1752	1779
	1804	1831	1848	1861
	1869	1896	1927	1933
	1947	1968	1990	2008
	????

It's intended to make it easier to comprehend a large chunk of history by breaking it into smaller pieces.

If you can remember Four Turnings, then you can have some idea of what happens in each period e.g. total war in the Fourth, discovery and exploration in the First. If you can remember that a Saeculum is about 90-100 years, then it's easy to know it's about 90 years from events in the Revolutionary War to the American Civil War - that's how long the gap is between similar Turnings.

All of which should make it simple to remember the couple of dozen dates above. The posts associated with them should make it easier still. And that gives you a grasp of history over the last five hundred years - to the point that any historical event since Columbus will be within a decade or two of a date here. 

Many of the items in The Grid start off with links to Wikipedia - enough to have some idea of why they are significant. Not that they are the only possible significant dates in the given Turning, but they were chosen because they could be explained in those terms easily. The most recent First uses 1947 because The Hollywood Ten is a good example of a witch hunt - a common feature of a First - but could as easily be 1956 (Interstate Highway System as an example for Infrastructure) or 1961 (Kennedy Calls the Moon Shot for Exploration and Discovery).

Indeed, it might change by the time one of them is posted...