Timetables of History for Students of Methodism intends to help its readers more readily and fully understand the significance of important events and developments in the history of Methodism by putting those events and developments into their context and showing their relationship to one another as well as to other happenings in human history. The volume places major events of every year across the period from 1700 to 2005 into eight parallel columns:

A. World History & Politics

B. American History & Politics

C. Science, Medicine & Technology

D. Daily Life, Popular Culture & Entertainment

E. Education, Literature & the Fine Arts

F. Religion, Theology, Philosophy & Psychology

G American & United Methodism

H. British & World Methodism

This tabular arrangement of information enables students to gain a sweeping overview of the past three centuries, allowing them to discern something of what was happening simultaneously in all these different areas of human life and activity at any given point. It helps them "contextualize" significant events, movements, and developments in the history of Methodism, both in North America and in the rest of the world, by placing them into relationship with other historical, political, cultural, intellectual, artistic, and literary currents.

Through the use of this volume, students with a particular interest in the historical development of Methodism can readily see that development taking place in the context of other major trends and developments in human culture and social life. Those who are interested, for example, in the struggle of Methodist women to achieve lay representation and clergy rights can easily perceive how that struggle is related to the larger series of developments involving women's rights and women's suffrage, both in the United States and elsewhere. Major milestones concerning the abolition of slavery and the development of the civil rights movement help to illumine the relationships between racial and ethnic groups within Methodism. The spread of Methodism around the world through the activities and influence of missionaries from Britain and America can be seen to result in the emergence of autonomous Methodist churches in many countries, just as European and American colonialism ultimately led to the formation of numerous independent nation-states.

Sometimes it is both interesting and instructive simply to observe the conjunction of seemingly unrelated events occurring in a given year. For example, The United Methodist Church came into being in 1968. The delegates to the Uniting Conference that year in Dallas lived through a year that also witnessed and experienced all of the following:

• The signature of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by the US, the USSR, and the UK

• The crushing of the "Prague Spring" democratic movement in Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops

• The capture by North Korea of the USS Pueblo, an American intelligence-gathering vessel

• The surprise of the Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese army

• The rise to power in Iraq of an obscure general named Saddam Hussein

• The report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (often called the Kerner Commission) saying that "our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal"

• The assassinations of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy

• The founding of the American Indian Movement

• The journey of the Apollo 8 astronauts around the moon and safely back to earth

• The premiere of the rock musical Hair on Broadway

• The posthumous release of "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" by Otis Redding, his last and biggest hit record

• The imposition of restrictions on the mail-order sale of rifles and shotguns by the 1968 Gun Control Act

• The surprise announcement by President Johnson that he will not seek reelection, due in large measure to increasing protests over the Vietnam War

• The advent of the television news magazine 60 Minutes on CBS

• The introduction by McDonald's of the double-decker Big Mac hamburger

• The issuance by Pope Paul VI of the encyclical Humanae Vitae (On the Regulation of Birth), which reasserted traditional Roman Catholic opposition to birth control

• The US Supreme Court decision invalidating an Arkansas state law that had prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools

• The publication of Mary Daly's The Church and the Second Sex, Jürgen Habermas's Knowledge and Human Interests, Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, and John Updike's Couples

• The release of the movies 2001: A Space Odyssey, Romeo & Juliet, Yellow Submarine, The Lion in Winter, and Rosemary's Baby

• The violent confrontations between protesters and police at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago

• The discovery of oil on the North Slope of Alaska

• The ruling of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that sex-segregated help-wanted ads in newspapers are illegal

• The signature by President Johnson of the landmark 1968 Civil Rights Act (also known as the Housing Rights Act), which outlawed discrimination in the sale, rental, or financing of housing

• The first public demonstration of a networked computer system at the Stanford Research Institute, marking the public debut of the computer mouse, hypertext, and video teleconferencing

• The election of Richard Nixon to the presidency of the United States

As any historian knows well, the simple conjunction of events does not demonstrate causality, and none of those events, perhaps, had any direct bearing or any specific influence on the establishment of The United Methodist Church. However, that list of events does serve to give the reader some sense of the complicated nature and character of the world into which The United Methodist Church was born. That list of events does help to describe the historical, political, scientific, technological, and cultural context within which The United Methodist Church came into existence and provides some important clues about the texture of the lives and experiences of the people who brought it into being and to whom it endeavored to be in ministry.

This volume takes its inspiration in large part from Bernard Grun's classic Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events, now in its fourth edition, which is in turn based on Werner Stein's Kulturfahrplan, first published in 1946. This important reference work provides a guide to well over 2,000 years of history, enabling its readers to gain some sense of the complexity of human experience and endeavor during those years. As valuable as this massive volume is, it provides relatively little attention to religion in general, even less attention to Christianity in particular, and has no specific concern with or focus on Methodism in any of its incarnations. The same is true of other more recent volumes similar to or inspired by Grun's work, such as Laurence Urdang's The Timetables of American History or John B. Teeple's Timelines of World History.

Timetables of History for Students of Methodism is much...