History has been envisaged in many long-term guises. Does it mark a process of deep-rooted continuity? Or, instead, one of gradual progress? Or one of persistent decline? Or, if avoiding the value-laden terms 'progress' and 'decline', does history consist of unending gradual change, neither systematically for better nor perennially for worse? Or, if pure continuity and gradualism seem inadequate for all these eventualities, does history instead unfold via a series of dramatic breaks? Or perhaps in a sequence of graduated stages? Or, alternatively, do events occur disconnectedly, in a miscellany of random fluctuations? The life-as-jumble viewpoint was once defined succinctly as 'one damned thing after another'. But even that verdict, it may be noted, contains a minimalist message of a sort. Or does history display none of those patterns? Or, by contrast, some elements of all, or some, of them?
... There are many possibilities--from history as narrative or story to history as myth, history as morality tale, history as national pride, history as heroic destiny, history as group therapy, history as autobiography, history as applied methodologies, history as record, history as judge, history as avenger, history as betrayer, history as a compound of lies and villainy, or history as mess and muddle.
... some sceptical theorists prefer instead to define history simply as 'what historiancs write'.
[Penelope J. Corfield, Time and the Shape of History, p.xiii, xvi]

Consider, for example, Marx's deterministic theory of historical materialism, encompassing @@@ [Hegel, Oswald Spengler,The Decline of the West (1918, 1922)]

Although other modes of representation are possible (see, e.g., White, 1990), history--and thus the heritage encoded in that history--almost invariably turn out to be, in the words of historian Arnold Toynbee (though also credited to Henry Ford), "just one damn thing after another"--a paradigmatic expression of what historiographers call the 'narrative' view of history (Mink, 1978; White, 1990). And, as a cursory browse of book titles and school syllabi will confirm, a characteristic--if not a defining characteristic--of such narratives is that they tell the story of a place (e.g. England, Byzantium), a person (e.g. Cromwell, Louis XIV), an event (e.g. the Spanish Civil War, the Great Depression), or (though often simply providing context or framework for some more specific theme) a named time span or period in time (e.g. Medicine and Healthcare in Roman Britain, Pleasures and Pastimes in Tudor England, the Renaissance, the Victorian Workhouse). (Note that 'narratives' are never either neutral or innocent; but that's another story, to which we return in the section 'Memory, Privatisation, and Power'.) A lifelong hoarder (I would prefer 'collector' or 'archivist', but I take on board what others tell me), I still have most of the history books I acquired and read as a child, many of these in turn inherited from earlier generations. Alongside The Story of the Plantagenets and The Story of Portsmouth, for example, I have the 1890 edition of Richard Lodge's A Smaller History of England. Although this latter volume does not, like the others, proclaim itself a 'story', it is a strict chronology "from the earliest times to the year 1887", a narrative nonetheless. And although I might in principle open the book at any page and flick across to any other page, the sequential text from page 1 to page 422 asserts its privilege by design to be read in exactly that order.

Enter the Museum of London, at the Barbican, and from the upper level entrance you will descend in a spiral from London's prehistory, through the Romans, Saxons, Normans, Tudors, Stuarts, Victorians, to the twentieth century at the lowest level. That passing through history is a descent, from prehistoric time down to the present, is symbolically interesting, but that's another matter; that the exhibition is organised along a time-line not only seems so natural that its arbitrariness passes unnoticed but also dilutes across the centuries thematically related displays. Had the museum galleries been organised by, say, location (the East End, the Thames, the City, the growth of the suburbs, ..) or theme (migration and citizenship, transport, domestic life, industry and commerce, leisure, ...) the history might have looked a little different, opened up new meanings, brought together artefacts otherwise lost in the time-line.

The web museum Exploring 20th Century London, a project in which the Museum of London is one of four partners, takes a different approach, its collections browsable by either timeline or place or theme (see screenshots below).

History on the Web: some examples

History World
» http://www.historyworld.net

The History Cooperative
» http://www.historycooperative.org

The History Guide
» http://www.historyguide.org

Spartacus Educational
» http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk

SchoolHistory
» http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk

English Heritage, Kids' Zone: Interactive Educational Games
A well-designed collection of interactive games (Time Traveller, Maritime Wreck, Sarum Shuffle, Find Jonngy, Life in the Abbey, Entertaining Elizabeth, A Day in the Life of a Monk)
» http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/server.php?show=nav.1580

History on the Net
» http://www.historyonthenet.com

HistoryWiz
» http://www.historywiz.org

EyeWitness to History
» http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com

All Empires
» http://www.allempires.com

European Voyages of Exploration
» http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/eurvoya/index.html

The Mariners' Museum Age of Exploration Online Curriculum Guide
» http://www.mariner.org/educationalad/ageofex/

Readings

Loewin, J. (1996). Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc. ISBN: 0684818868. [Amazon]

Software

RunningReality
» http://www.runningreality.org