The Crisis Chronology aims to track every major event in the governance of every country in the world. Give a minute a day and you will have a broader knowledge of the world than anyone you know. I have been keeping the record for more than twenty years, although with varying degrees of completeness. Eventually I hope to make available a complete edition of the chronology, which now runs to about 350,000 words.

The focus of the chronology is primarily political. Events in other spheres — the economy, climate, entertainment, science, the arts — are covered only when they affect the political climate or structure of a country.

The chronology is not exhaustive, since it depends on news sources available to the general public. Sources that report on a daily basis often have incorrect information that is corrected later or not corrected at all. Nonetheless, I believe the chronology provides a unique service precisely in accounting for events as they happen, with all the uncertainty that entails.

I believe that students and other interested readers can use the chronology as a place to begin research and as a guide to further reading. The chronology records the reporting, with all its imperfections and revisions. The chronology is a first stop, a place to read an overview of a situation day by day.

It also provides a granularity that is generally not available elsewhere. While history may eventually come to a general agreement about what happened in a given place at a given time, living through that series of events may have been an entirely different experience, and the chronology offers a version of that experience.

While I have political views, I make every effort to keep them out of this record. I apologize in advance for instances in which I have not done so, or in which the Western media have inadequately or incorrectly represented a situation, and I am open to changing the description in light of new information.

Entries are recorded under the name of a nation-state that is widely recognized around the world. I have made entries for supranational organizations such as the United Nations, the European Union, or the Islamic group that goes under a number of names in the West — ISIS, ISIL, DAESH, or the Islamic State — among others. I do this for ease of reference rather than as a political statement. When a section of a country breaks away and forms a new state (and that new state is generally recognized around the world), its records are entered under the new state’s name, although earlier entries remain with the state from which it split. The names of the countries are the most common usage rather than the formal, official name of the country.

Since there is a wealth of information about the United States that is widely available worldwide, I have minimized daily reporting about US activities unless they affect another country. Certain events in the US are important on their own, such as the election of the president, but many others that attract world attention are more or less transient in their wider effect. Most of the USA entries involve an instance in which the event affects another country’s government, or a war in another country.

The sources of the information are the major news outlets from around the world, heavily dependent on the newspapers of record in the United States, and increasingly, on other major news sources and news websites around the world. Inevitably, it is incomplete to a greater or lesser degree about specific countries. Because the chronology’s emphasis is on areas where there is change, some countries have only a very few records. They are, in a sense, the lucky ones. Other countries — for instance, North Korea — exercise a greater or lesser degree of control over the news that is published about internal events. The entries for such countries is necessarily limited.

In regard to orthography, I use spellings that are common in Western media and as a result, names and titles are not necessarily accurate in representing the language of origin, especially in regard to diacritical marks. In addition, media sometimes change a spelling, and I have not always updated every such change.

In regard to changes or corrections, the chronology is not a wiki. I encourage readers to post to the Responses page if they would like to discuss an event. I will take corrections and other recommendations under consideration, but I will not necessarily make changes (or make them quickly).