It never crossed my mind to reach 100,000 visits, especially with a history blog and in such a fast way.
Since I can remember, I always loved history, music and other cultures. I can see now that my analytical mind took me naturally to graduate in journalism and international relations in University. It fascinates me to observe how great empires or influential nations are formed, out of nowhere key figures appear in politics, in the military, in the arts and literature, in philosophy and sport, in sciences, in addition to others whose lives marked their times for good or bad reasons. History has "outbreaks" of people who formed these empires and influential nations. These personalities appear in the World, in some cases being replaced by equally brilliant people who continue their influence to maintain a certain civilization or nation in its apogee, and at other times disappearing without successors, representing the decline or even the end of influential countries or civilizations. The historian or international relations analyst is neutral, sometimes annoyingly neutral, trained to criticize a real angel on earth and to discover some value in dark and hated figures of History. It is on this principle that I set up this blog.
With a highly detailed map that I built in Coreldraw, I follow the lives of these personalities, these important ships or mega-structures built by man, as long as they have already disappeared. I will not make a timeline about Lionel Messi. I wish the Argentine many years of life and football, but unfortunately, for example, Kobe Bryant is already part of my projects precisely because his life ended.
All entries in this blog are in a microsoft excel file, which already has more than 60,000 entries. On a same day, for example, in the XIXth century, several different personalities may meet in the same city, in some battle or interact with each other for another reason. In the coming months I will post on this blog a series of photos that illustrate some of these lives and how they interacted with others on a detailed map.
Each day, month and year that passes in the excel calendar, I follow the historical actions on the map while hearing soundtracks of music composed in that same year.
These soundtracks are just lists of carefully selected and searched music, since making this music available for free on the internet is not allowed due to copyright. However, in the future I may test if I can upload 30 minute/1-hour sound files with music from each of the 64 different historical periods I identified. Reader feedback will give me the answer over the next year.
The idea of this blog was also to do collaborative work, where other people could contribute, correct any mistakes, or just correct some English mistakes on my part. That help happened, but during these four years it was a bit limited. I would love to get more help in the future.
There's also the dream, that one day this blog may earn some return so that all this time I dedicate to it is more sustainable. It could be developed with the support of a programmer and become an interactive teaching tool with moving images and events taking place on a map of the world, which could be enlarged to see what is happening at a certain time or area of the globe more closely.
Finally, I would like to thank the people who helped me, the university professors who provided me with information from their books for free, the artists and photographers who authorized me to use their images, Iraq war veterans, people who participated in my "best soundtracks ever" poll , of all the students who thank me, I thank you all back.
L.M.C.
The thematic diversity and the depth of the research are remarkable. My congratulations to the author for his work of great use for those who like history. Move on.
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