Question

Do you know the reason behind the use of dates in history

Answer 1

In history, we use dates to help us find cause-and-effect relationships between human actions. In brief, later actions cannot influence earlier actions, so if we know which thing came first, we can rule out the later one as a cause of the earlier one. Be careful though--just because something occurred first, it did not influence everything that followed. For example, my grandmother died in 1967, and Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House in 1994, but there is no reason to think that my grandmother's death was the cause. On the other hand, Adolf Hitler lived through Germany's loss in World War I (1914-1918), and later led Germany into World War II (1939-1945). Historians agree that in this case, the earlier event (Hitler's experience during WWI) helped to cause the other (Hitler's leadership of Germany into WWII).