Timestamps for a whole year, or a year and month

[Erik Hetzner <egh@e6h.org>]

Hi,

I am trying to get together a configuration for taking notes for
historical research using org mode. I think org mode could be very
useful for this, with its many ways of presenting, sorting and
searching information in orgmode files.

One thing that has me a bit stuck, though, is timestamps that might
represent a year. For instance, it would be nice to write:

  By <1849> the California Gold Rush had ...

I’ve tried:

  By <1849-00-00> the California Gold Rush had ...

and this at least registers as a time stamp, but it doesn’t seem to
work (at least running M-x org-timeline on the file doesn’t seem to
find the entry).

I’ve tried ranges too:

  By <1849-01-01>--<1849-12-31> the California Gold Rush had ...

And this kind of works, but it’s pretty awkward. I’m also not sure I
want to see that entry for every date in 1849.

Is there any way to represent this in orgmode? I guess what I am
looking for is something that would show up on the first of the year
in a timeline, but would represent the fact that the year is being
treated as whole unit, and not a specific date.

Any ideas are welcome! Thanks.

best, Erik Hetzner

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