A time machine
with footnotes.

Choose a moment in history. Explore different places. Discover how people lived and why their worlds were different.

The globe opens twelve broad cultural timelines with 442 dated events. Switch to Places to compare 100 present-day location tracks with 1,303 dated catalog anchors. Choose a year, open a culture or compare two places, and follow the source links. These records come from the desktop project, whose historical source audit is ongoing. Coverage varies; archive entries are not uniformly researched stories about ordinary life.

What a date means

A chosen year is a point from which to explore the record. A cultural timeline opens a nearby dated event and shows that event’s actual date; it does not claim evidence for every intervening year. Sources rarely describe every household in a single year. Dates, geographic names and social positions are kept as specific as the evidence allows. A modern coastline is a locator, not a historical border. The web atlas ends its research horizon at 2025; it does not invent later history.

How evidence is shown

Records link to their source institutions and make gaps visible. A nearby anchor is only a navigation reference, never proof of an unresearched year. Culture pins are geographic starting points for broad timelines, not boundaries or claims of historical presence at the selected year. Events without item-level sources are labelled as research leads, and sacred or oral traditions are identified as interpretive records.

A featured case study

Two capitals around 750 CE is a close comparison of Chang’an and Heijō-kyō. It is one story within the wider archive. Its sources include:

• The Met · Tang Dynasty (618–907)
• The Met · Japan, 500–1000 CE
• UNESCO · Historic Monuments of Ancient Nara
• Nara research institute · Wooden tablets report I
• Nara research institute · Excavation report VIII

Help correct the record

Historical corrections should identify a place, period, current claim, proposed change and supporting evidence. Use the public repository’s issue template. Submissions are reviewed before changes appear.

The globe surface uses NASA Blue Marble, credited to NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, with data courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC) and NASA’s Earth Observatory. It is used under NASA’s media usage guidelines. Public-domain Natural Earth 1:110m land polygons provide the fallback. This modern imagery locates the story; it does not reconstruct the selected historical date or draw historical frontiers. No generated historical illustration is included in this edition.