Oh, "if men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!" Thus Samuel Taylor Coleridge on history.
He might have had more hope had he possessed these chronologies of history from the Paleolithic Era through the Pax Americana of 1998. We can see political patterns repeated and track waves of change, times of peace and war and decades of achievement and devastation.
This book is the first to fully chronicle Asia, with more than 30 chronologies for all its countries. These are compiled in conjunction with a detailed index that allows the reader to find specific information -- the invention of the iron plow, fireworks, the fall of the Han, the rise of Showa.