Tabletop Timeline: An Experiment

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” (Winston Churchill)

Since the beginning, the idea of studying history in chronological order, and making a timeline in the process, has been appealing to me. But the timeline part hasn’t actually gone very well. It’s hard to find a place to put it; no matter where I try to affix it to a wall, we run out of space, and the adhesive on the tape loses the battle with the sand paint and leaves the triumphant march of history sagging and flapping.

Arizona Smith, the archaeologist-narrator of the Ancient Mesopotamia dvd we watched last week, had a large, beautifully made timeline fashioned as a scroll that could be cranked. It unwound from one spool to the other. I decided to attempt a crude imitation here at home.

I purchased two dowels, two chunks of wood, and a roll of craft paper, and asked my husband if he could drill some holes in the wood chunks to secure the dowels. He used Gorilla Glue:

I didn’t want to glue the loose end of the paper roll directly to the wood because I wanted to be able to take it off the dowels, spread it on a flat surface, and draw on it. So I used a paper towel roll, with two tp rolls as extensions, to make a spool:

At Christmas, when we have some wrapping paper with a good solid cardboard tube down the middle, I’ll replace my 3-jointed spool with it. But this will get us started:

So we can take it off the spools, draw and color our progressive historical mural on it, and then put it back:

It’s not as ritzy as Arizona Smith’s, but I think it will serve the purpose for us as long as it holds up!