CHRONOLOGY OF MARCHING

4 m.y.a. ca. Human upright standing.

117,000 BC ca. Upright footprints left in South Africa.

10,000 BC ca. Humans travel by path to temperate zone climates.

8,000 BC ca. Earliest known illustration of marching in formation in Spanish Levant.

4,500 BC ca. Earliest known choreographed marching in China.

3,500 BC ca. Earliest known religious processions.

3,500 BC ca. Earliest known description of choreographed military marching in China.

3,000 BC ca. First densely packed infantry formation evidenced in Assyria.

2,000 BC ca. Egyptian soldiers depicted in rank and file phalanx.

1,000 BC ca. Earliest evidences of the maze or labyrinth, believed to have been originally employed as a defensive military measure.

67 ca. "It would not be far from the truth to call [Roman] drills bloodless battles and their battles bloody drills" (Flavius Josephus).

128 "Military exercises have, I may say, their own rules, and if anything is added to or taken away from these rules, the exercise becomes either of little value or too difficult" (Emperor Caesar Trajanus HADRIAN Augustus).

250 ca. Geoglyphs of Nazca, South America established by foot.

400 ca. "For we see that the Roman people owed the conquest of the world to no other cause than military training.... At the very beginning of their training, recruits should be taught the military step" (Flavius Vegetius Renatus).

500 ca. The game "chess," based on the movements of armies, is invented in North-West India.

1290 Earliest known use of the word "march," designating a boundary, border or area of territory whose ownership is in dispute.

1570 "Queen Elizabeth’s Academy" is established to instruct citizens in "sundry kinds of marchings," among other academic subjects (Sir Humphrey Gilbert).

1806 Lewis and Clark complete their three-year, 3,555-mile expeditionary march.

1819 Civilian marching prohibited in England.

1861 Drills used in the Civil War are taken from a wide array of drill manuals either from Europe or adaptations thereof, resulting in a "virtual melting-pot of marching formations and drill tactics. The Civil War may perhaps be seen as a struggle between two opposing doctrines of tactics. On the one side there were the tactics of the drill manuals - translations from the French...lifted somewhat out of context and...often badly applied on the battlefield. On the other hand...a ‘kindergarten’ set [of tactics was] designed specifically for use by shambling armed mobs.... This was the idea of fieldworks or fortifications, which, however...spiced with lip-service to mobility and manoeuvre, represented essentially a static concept of tactics" (Griffith).

1862 Congress provides for the instruction of marching in land grant colleges.

1882 Booth’s Salvation Army parades, sometimes drawing as many as 50,000 marchers...and marched in systems of ranks with flags, marching bands and uniforms" (Myerly).

1904 "The Army of a Dream" sets forth a model of national unity in 20th century British society which advocates the teaching of military drill in school at an early age (Kippling).

1905 "I am prepared to advocate ordinary physical drill as part of the general curriculum of education; I am not prepared to advocate to the same extent anything which seems to train the military side of human nature" (Balfour, Scotland Secretary of State).

1910 "The drilling of masses of men together makes a community of thought and feeling; makes a crowd into a regiment, makes a rabble into a nation...develops a new faculty of humanism" (Blatchford).

1918 A "serious effort" is made within the National Education Association to introduce military drill into elementary schools" (Van Dalen).

1918 In consequence of American pacifist movements and a growing number of sports advocates in physical education, war veterans begin to recognize that the tradition of marching as physical education "the very act of carrying a gun...is ruinous to good posture. ...Talent, genius and natural gifts are ignored" (Hilderbrant).

1923 Hitler’s Nazi reform party marches on Munich, winning him the hopes and hearts of a depressed Germany.

1936 Mao-Zedong’s forces complete their two-year, 6,000-mile "Long March."

1943 The U.S. War Department "does not recommend that military drill take the place of physical education in the schools and colleges during this war period," due to sports-favored demands for fitness and technological developments in modern war.

1943 "The inexorable fact of history so far is that when a nation stops marching another nation marches in" (Allen).

1946 "After the war, mass physical exercise and uniformed youth movements became less popular through their associations with Nazism" (Kirk).

1954 American music educators recognize the marching band has "the ingredients necessary for the development of a genuine new art form" (Cantrick).

1963 Martin Luther King, Jr. leads more than 250,000 on a "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom."

1971 Drum Corps International is formed.

1973 Drum and bugle corps contests become the third largest outdoor crowd drawing events in the United States, following baseball and football.

1976 The Drum Corps International World Championships are televised with a Nielson rating of approximately 8 million viewers.

1986 "Hands Across America" creates the largest formation in history with 6 million participants.

1995 Fitness Walking grows to 16 million participants (13 million more than in 1993), ranking it first among the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, according to frequency (SGMA).

1995 The U.S. Supreme Court rules parade marching is a form of expression, stating that "the speaker has the right to taylor the speech" (Souter).

1995 Mike Miller, Western Division President of The Music Educators National Conference, suggests the way to implement 1994 National Standards for Music Education for the marching band is to "get rid of it."