41–50 of 195 posts
I'm not talking about minute details.
For instance, lookup wikipedia for "Grand Duchy of Lithuania" and note the active years of that state in all its different phases. Then compare with what this map shows.
How cool would it be if the timeline could switch to a log scale and show prehistory too, with morphing continent shapes?
There's a great big coffee table version of this [1]. As always though, I wish there were a way to show not just which "nation" ostensibly controlled an area, but what _people_ were actually there: what languages, cultures and gods actually held sway in each of these areas and times. [1] https://www.dk.com/uk/book/9780241226148-history-of-the-worl...
When I was still reading to my children in the evening, after running through all the standard texts (Narnia, _The Hobbit_, _The Lord of the Rings_, Susan Cooper's _The Dark is Rising_, H. Beam Piper's _Little Fuzzy_, &c.), I decided I wanted to read biographies to them, in chronological order, starting in as far back in history as was possible --- that was a surprisingly difficult list to put together (arguably because I missed texts such as: _Isaac Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology: The Lives and Achievements of 1195 Great Scientists from Ancient Times to the Present Chronologically Arranged_), so we did a dry run of just American Presidents --- this worked quite well, and I found it expedient to read an "adult" biography to pair with a children's one so as to anticipate and answer questions which came up during the reading. Unfortunately, my wife's job schedule changed and we stopped this at Truman, but it was very helpful in improving my understanding of the ebb-and-flow of American history.
EDIT:
Interestingly, this has been posted about here in the past on multiple occasions, but none of them yielded any prior discussion AFAICT:
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=oldmapsonline.org
It would be really interesting to see this paired with a dataset such as:
Thanks, I just spent two hours exploring the history of Europe while I should really be working.
Cool, I wish the project all the best! Making an interactive historical atlas is a great idea but the path is not an easy one. We did a similar project and closed it about 5 years ago https://maps.chron.ist/ Had multiple iterations, and put a lot of effort into finding and drawing the maps. Later we found some support from the community and they promised to provide us with verifiable and trusted map sources... The so…