fdw / timelines

A visualization of humanity's history

Timelines

The Link

https://fdw.github.io/timelines/timelines.html

Vision

A lot has happened in humanity's history. And while it's easy to pin a date to each singular event, or even put related events into a shared context, it's not easy to see everything in relation to everything else. What music was popular while Napoleon waged wars? (Definitely Bach, maybe already Mozart) How much preceded Leonard da Vinci Christopher Columbus? (Not at all, Columbus is one year older).

This project wants to visualize these different facets of our history and how they may have influenced each other, how they relate, how - ultimately - nothing is independent.

Selection

Of course, it's impossible to show everything, then it's just crowded. Instead, I tried to pick representative events and people so that the overall view is complete while a lot of details are not. This curation is of course completely arbitrary. If you have anything to add or to correct, please open a PR! There's lots of stuff I haven't even heard about that should be on here.

I must also admit that my view is very western-centric and as much as I try, there's still not a lot of other things on here.

Accuracy

Obviously, the data is not, and cannot, be accurate. Some things just don't have a singular beginning, or maybe they do and we just don't know it. Therefore, the data is a best effort, usually based on Wikipedia.

If you have better data (and the sources to prove it), you are welcome to open a PR!