Talk:John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough

Dates again

Note (a) says that all dates in the article are Gregorian unless otherwise stated. That's fine as far as it goes, But then we have his death date in OS (Julian), leaving us to assume his birth date is Gregorian. Is this how it was meant to read? If so, why are we mixing apples and oranges in his vital dates? If not, why are both his dates given in Julian when the rest of the article is in Gregorian? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 05:25, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

@User:JackofOz you are misreading the lead, OS applies to both dates in the range not just to the second one. Without cluttering the first line I am not sure how to fix it.

As the link article in the footnote(Old Style and New Style dates) explains all dates in England used the Julian calendar at the time, and to make it even more confusing the start of year in official documents such as Parliamentry papers dated the start of a year from 25th of March. Historians tend to correct the start of year to Jan 1st but leave the rest as is.

We have a similar problem in the modern age with time. For example the first Japanese attacks in the Eastern Pacific occured within hours of the attack on Perl Harbour not a day later. It was on the 9th of May 1945 in Moscow when German armed forces ceased fire, but the 8th in Washington DC.

Usually this is not a problem as we can use local time without without reference to Coordinated Universal Time. It only becomes a problem if for some reason an event needs to be coordinated over two or more time zones. This becomes really tricky if it occurses during the change over from summer time to winter time if the areas involved do not change on the same day.

So usually events in Britain can be referred to with the Julian Calendar without confusion. The problems occure when events in western continental Europe are also involved as they were using a diffent calendar. Unfortunatly for us Marlborough spent the best part of a decade splitting his time between continental Europe and England, so dates can be confusing particularly with written correspondences if people did not use dual dating.

To anyone familiar to the history of the period, this is a well known problem. The reason Wikipedia editors use two calandars in articles about this period and this war is because historians do and Wikipedia follows usage in reliable secondary sources. — PBS (talk) 21:34, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

I have just seen an RFC on how to decide on the appropriate date for a topical event affecting places in different timezones Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Royalty and Nobility/Archive 10#RFC: Which date did Charles III's reign begin, in Oceania?. Thank goodness the Queen did not die in the evening of December 31st, it could have sparked a debate on which year Charles became king! — PBS (talk) 22:03, 16 September 2022 (UTC)