“At what time was Guy Fawkes discovered underneath the Palace of Westminster? At what time was Einstein's Theory of Relativity proved? What time was on the clock when the Titanic sunk? When was President John F. Kennedy assassinated?” These four questions appear amongst the promotional blurb on the back cover of this book and are presumably designed to indicate its content and possible use. The answers, in case you were wondering, are 12.00 am, 2.17 pm, 11.40 pm and 12.30 pm, respectively. Quite why anyone would want or need to know to the exact hour or minute when these events occurred is not clear to this reviewer and the very limited prefatory matter of the book provides no elucidation. Publisher The History Press further puffs on the back cover that this is “a quirky reference book with a unique twist [that] provides the ideal gift book for all lovers for history”. Quirky certainly, but a reference book this isn't; as to whether it is an ideal gift, this might depend on the knowledge and expectations of the “history lover”.
One thing is for sure, anyone with a liking for history won't find much detail in this short little book of 158 pages. Only just over 400 topics are covered, each given entries of 75‐150 words arranged in 24 hourly chapters. Some events are timed to the minute and are so arranged within the hourly sections, but the majority cannot be pinned down to an exact position on the clock and are grouped on the hour or half hour, making the subtitle History by the Minute something of a misnomer. The topics chosen for coverage are an odd mismatch, predominantly drawn from modern British and US history, but with no explanation offered by author Ferguson regarding their selection. Leafing through the pages can be intriguing and at times enticingly absorbing, but it is hard to conceive of a reference use for this book, especially as there is no index or supporting matter. If the former had been provided it would at least have been possible to look up a specific event to see whether it was included and then establish the time of day it took place. As it is events can only be easily found if one has inkling as to the time they might have occurred. Indeed, the reviewer was only able to provide answers to the four questions posed on the back cover blurb by tediously leafing through the pages and locating each entry in the hourly sections. In addition, sources for individual entries are not given. All Ferguson provides to reassure us of the authority of his timings is an Acknowledgements section listing the BBC, The Times, the Guardian, Eyewitnesshistory.com, history.com and NASA.
There are, of course, a number of reference sources that provide information on the rather less precise issue of the day of the year on which a particular historical event occurred. Two traditional sources are Chambers Book of Days, first published in 1864 and updated in 2004 (Fergusson, 2004) (RR 2005/272) and Newnes Dictionary of Dates (Collinson, 1966). Various websites also have listings of events that occurred on a particular day, for example BBC Home's On This Day 1950‐2005 (see news.bbc.uk/onthisday), or the This Day in History section of History.com (see www.history.com/this‐day‐in‐history). There are also websites specifically devoted to listing events by the day on which they occurred, for example, On‐This‐Day.com (see www.on‐this‐day.com). By and large, however, these sites are concerned with the day not the time. As far as this reviewer is aware, there are no significant websites that arrange events by the hour or the minute. In this respect Ferguson's effort does appear “unique” as claimed. It is, of course, far from “unique” in providing the time at which events occurred. Many of the websites mentioned above, plus numerous other sources on the internet, indicate the approximate time of day of an important historical happening. In fact, the reviewer was able to ascertain the approximate time of day that three of the four events listed above occurred through simple Wikipedia searches taking seconds.
This book could easily be dismissed as a pointless undertaking, but it has a charm and fascination and once picked up is hard to put down. It should be noted that it is also available in a Kindle version but confusingly under a slightly different title – Chronologia: 24 hours of History. In its print incarnation it is reasonably priced at £9.99 between hard covers and may well come to adorn the shelves of some “lovers of history”. Serious history students will gain nothing from its haphazard coverage, however, and reference librarians will surely find no use for it given the availability of much of the information in contains in more accessible form elsewhere. Perhaps if this book had been a more comprehensive and provided an index it would have been possible to recommend it for some library situations. But, as it stands, while Ferguson and the History Press must be congratulated on their industry and originality, it is hard to recommend it for the lending shelves, let alone the reference section.
