In 1769, 18th-century British polymath Joseph Priestley published A New Chart of History and its prose explanation as a supplement to his Lectures on History and General Policy.[1] Together with his Chart of Biography (1765), which he dedicated to his friend Benjamin Franklin, Priestley believed these charts would allow students to "trace out distinctly the dependence of events to distribute them into such periods and divisions as shall lay the whole claim of past transactions in a just and orderly manner."[2]
The Chart of History lists events in 106 separate locations; it illustrates Priestley's belief that the entire world's history was significant, a relatively new development in the 18th century, which had begun with Voltaire and William Robertson. The world's history is divided up into the following geographical categories: Scandinavia, Poland, Russia, Great Britain, Spain, France, Italy, Turkey in Europe, Turkey in Asia, Germany, Persia, India, China, Africa and America. Priestley aimed to show the history of empires and the passing of power; the subtitle of the Description that accompanied the chart was "A View of the Principal Revolutions of Empire that have taken place in the World" and he wrote that:
The capital use [of the Charts was as] a most excellent mechanical help to the knowledge of history, impressing the imagination indelibly with a just image of the rise, progress, extent, duration, and contemporary state of all the considerable empires that have ever existed in the world.[3]
As Arthur Sheps in his article about the Charts explains, "the horizontal line conveys an idea of the duration of fame, influence, power and domination. A vertical reading conveys an impression of the contemporaneity of ideas, events and people. The number or density of entries . . . tells us about the vitality of any age."[4] Voids in the chart indicated intellectual Dark Ages, for example.[5]
Both Charts were popular for decades—the A New Chart of History went through fifteen editions by 1816.[6] The trustees of Warrington were so impressed with Priestley's lectures and charts that they arranged for the University of Edinburgh to grant him a Doctor of Law degree in 1764.[7]
The fame of Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) rests today chiefly on his career as an experimental scientist and as a polemicist in defence of Protestant dissent and Rational Religion. He thought of himself, however, primarily as a minister of religion and as an educator. In these occupations, and indeed in all of his endeavours, the teaching and study of history played a critical role. Works about history such as the Charts of Biography and History (1765 and 1769), and the Syllabus of Lectures on History and General Policy (1765) were among his earliest publications. His first scientific publications, The History and Present State of Electricity (1767) and The History and Present State of Discoveries relating to Vision, Light and Colours (1772), were as an educator and historian of science. Throughout his life he was to use the history of the early Christian church polemically in defence of his theological views. His last published writings, the volumes which make up A General History of the Christian Church from the Fall of the Western Empire until the Present Time (1802-03), were also historical.
