In my experience, it is fractal. The more you zoom in, the more you can zoom in. From the surface level, the timelines are pretty linear, start to finish, but when holding a magnifying glass up to, say, a 50 or even 25 year period, things only become more detailed.

Also, the connectivity of all events still amazes me; that World War I indeed carries roots in the Crusades and the Crusades carry roots back to Constantine, etc. It seems obvious written out like this, but when looking at these events and how they are fused together by all of the various facets of world history, it's simply amazing and at times bewildering.

I think I got that feeling when studying European history and then when I started looking into Chinese and African history it seemed like it got a whole lot longer.

When reading accounts by ancient peoples and descriptions of their lives and problems, they seem so similar to those we still face today. Because of course, they are us. With some time in-between, but still, us. History seems very short to me but this is a purely subjective question.

It is both short and long to me.

It is short in the sense that so much happens and changes in just a generation or two. It amazes me, for instance, how different the world looked to someone of my age during the Second World War. And how unaware people seem to be of that change and take the world as it is for granted. In my time I've seen the advent of the internet. I was in my early twenties then, and look at it now. We can't think of modern life without it.

However, the more I study history, the more I become aware of how much also happened way back in time, as opposed to recent history. History itself is the study of human civilization since the time of writing (as opposed to pre-history), but so much happened before that. The civilizations in the Middle East, India and China were ancient by the time writing began and there was culture, art and civilization in pre-historic Europe for instance, before writing was introduced.

We tend to look at history as a series of events that had to happen to come to today. However, much of what we think of in history as 'inevitable', really wasn't. So many important things have happened, so many things could have turned out differently, it is nothing short of amazing.

So yeah, it really is both to me, both in the sense of the huge span of history as well as how much changes in a decade or so.

It depends on how deep you really want to go imo. You can take a history course that covers 2000 years of history and of course its gonna seem like it went by in a flash since your just barely glossing over what happened in each period. Or you can look at it much more in depth and study each individual period of human history and see holy shit all this happened in just 1 period.

That's mainly because history is recorded in a way that makes it fairly easy to digest. The people who are writing it know what point they will start and end from, even mostly having an idea they want to deliver to you through that.

It would seem a lot longer if you had to observe history from just primary source accounts from Joe Schmoe writing a diary. Instead you have Herodotus laying out major things in a way to specifically make it digestable. You aren't hearing about all the minor, boring stuff that's going on in between all the monumental stuff.

I don't like to call myself a historian since a BA and a little grad work are the extent of my studies in the field, but I'd still like to answer.

In my Historiography class, I'd often differentiate between history and History -- things that happened in the past vs. our narrative of the past. Human History is very small, especially compared to human history. :-P Homo sapiens appeared at least 100,000 years ago, possibly twice that, but mankind's written record covers only a fraction of that time. I'd say that our species has a long past, but a short History.

suddenly you have arrived at the modern day in a seemingly very short time

I totally agree here. Another commenter said that History is fractal, which I think is a wonderful way of stating it. Innovation seems to happen exponentially. Even the most mundane things that we take for granted may be relatively recent developments. I mean, reading silently? Who would've thought?

I'd say humankind's History may be short, but it's more and more full.