OGHAP: The Epic Great War Timeline

While studying for my MSc in Strategic Studies at the University of Aberdeen, I wrote my in-class essay for my course in Strategic Theory on the following prompt: "Explain why and how the conduct of war was transformed between 1815 and 1914." My preparations included developing a timeline of armament, geopolitical, military, sociocultural, technical, and diplomatic (treaty) developments from Waterloo to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. When I came to the realization that I'd be writing a book about the First World War, I dug that note sheet out and used it to begin developing a timeline of dates relevant to the Great War.

Initially, I was only tracking the dates, events, and which of the aforementioned categories they fell into. As I began researching the early battles on the Western Front, I tried to categorize engagements that were subsets of the Battle of the Frontiers, the Great Retreat, the Race to the Sea. As the list began to balloon in scope, the data quickly became prohibitively unruly, so I decided to organize it - and if I was going to reorganize it, I might as well expand it, right? I re-coded the dates into a "YYYY//MM//DD" format for easier chronological sorting. I also added some additional categories: theater; campaign; whether the military events are ground, naval, or amphibious in nature; and whether the British Expeditionary Force, British Imperial Forces, or neither took place in the engagement. Where relevant, I also track the Wikipedia entry for a given event or topic - I know, boo, hiss, Wikipedia, but it can be useful if you know what you're doing.

Having initially kept the timeline in my .txt manuscript, the expansion made it too unruly for that format. Porting it over into Excel has made the it much easier to manage the data, and Excel allows me to manipulate that data so that I can clump it together for easier use. It ended up being a massive undertaking, and it's still not complete, but I consider it an investment of time that will ultimately make my effort to document the war more efficient in the long run. I can also take pride in the fact that I've amalgamated a variety of sources to create a fairly authoritative timeline of the conflict. Maybe it will have some use beyond OGHAP? Only time will tell.