To Adams’ Own Century

How do you finish a map of time while you are still living inside it? Adams had to answer that question on pp. 106–107, and he answered it with a change of color. Near the right edge the black stream of time turns red for a short stretch, carries the number 1881, and stops. Sebastian Adams, a minister and teacher in Oregon, first published his chart in 1871. In these last inches he is drawing the years of his own life, and you can feel it in how close he comes.

Start at the left, where a yellow book reads “Holy Bible, Authorized Version, King James, 1607 to 1611,” with the first newspapers beside it. Drop down to the England stream and find James I. Inside his box Adams wrote three short lines, “Bible translated. Gunpowder plot. Puritans leave,” and the last of them points straight up the page. The thin bars at the top are the colonies: “Virginia, settled by English,” in 1607, then New York, which was Dutch, and Massachusetts. Below them stand the ruins of the stone church at Jamestown.

Back on the England stream, the century turns hard. Charles I is “despotic, beheaded Jan. 30,” and three thin bands follow him, the Long Parliament, Cromwell and his son Richard, with the years 49, 53 and 58 beneath them. A little to the right Newton sits under his tree, having “discovered the power of gravity in 1666,” right above Charles II’s box: “Plague 1665. Great Fire 1666.” That is Key 6 · Same column, same moment, and it hands you two very different stories in a single year.

The top right corner is the part most readers skip, a staircase of stripes climbing toward the edge. Take it one bar at a time. Each colony runs right until it meets a green band marked Revolution, eight years, then Confederation, six, and then the tall columns of the presidents begin with I, Washington. Down on the England stream you see the same moment from the other side, where a small branch breaks away above George III with the words “Am. Col. lost 83.” Further right, column XVI is “A. Lincoln, Ill.,” under Adams’ heading for the Civil War, and column XX, Garfield’s, is left open.

Now look at the far right edge and turn the book on its side. Running up the edge is Adams’ last entry, dated to the day: “Revised Version of the New Testament published May 17th 1881,” from a revision “begun in England June 22nd 1870.” So the King James Bible stands at one end of this stretch and a newly revised Testament at the other. Everything in between, the beheaded king, the colonies, the Revolution and the Civil War, sits inside those two books. The chart that began with Genesis ends with Scripture still being read, and still being worked on, in the year the stream runs out.

Notice, too, how the room is shared. England, Europe and the United States fill most of these pages, while Asia and Africa sit lower and in smaller type (p. 108). Adams drew the world as an American of his day saw it, and the book says so without fuss. Then the timeline ends, and under the veil at the right edge Adams’ own appendix begins.