Your personal, shareable archive of human history
Generate quiz questions based on your timeline data. Questions are tailored to events you've added and references you've read.
Record your key insights and learnings about history
A shared tool for exploring and recording human history. Add events, track empires, quiz yourself, and collaborate with others.
The main view shows historical events, states, religions, cultures, and periods laid out across time. Use the filters at the top to show specific categories, and the tag bar to filter by subtypes like war, science, or trade.
Click any event bar to view details, edit it, add notes, or attach references. You can drag events vertically to rearrange rows, and use the zoom controls or mouse wheel (Ctrl+scroll) to zoom in and out.
Use "Export CSV" to save your timeline data and "Import CSV" to load events from a spreadsheet. The "Sample CSV" button downloads a template you can fill in.
The map view shows historical borders from GeoJSON basemaps. Use the time slider or play button to scrub through history and watch empires rise and fall.
Click any territory on the map to see its details. If it matches a known entity, you can add it directly to your timeline. For unrecognized territories, use "Create State Entity" to define a new entity.
The sidebar lists all active territories for the current time period. Linked entities (already in your timeline) are written in red.
Test your knowledge with auto-generated questions based on your timeline data. Choose difficulty (beginner, intermediate, advanced) and the source of questions (all events, your added events, or events linked to your references).
Question types include: date questions ("When did X happen?"), identification ("What happened around year X?"), chronology ("Which came first?"), true/false, and entity identification.
Events you create are tagged with your name. Use the "Users" dropdown to filter the timeline by contributor. Click "Join" on another user's event to add it to your own collection.
This timeline includes a "People-years scale" toggle that changes how time is distributed across the horizontal axis. Instead of spacing years evenly, it weights them by how much lived human experience they contain.
The idea is simple: a calendar year in 2025 contains far more human life than a year in 100,000 BCE, because today's population is thousands of times larger. On a traditional timeline, 300,000 years of prehistory dwarfs everything else. But those millennia, lived by small populations, contain roughly the same amount of cumulative experience that humanity now accumulates in just 25 years. The people-years scale compresses that long, sparsely populated past and expands the densely populated recent centuries, giving a more accurate picture of where human experience actually concentrates.
For more on this idea, see A Timeline of Human Experience.
I am hungry for feedback! If you catch bugs or have feature requests, chances are I can implement them quite quickly. Feel free to DM me, leave a comment on my blog, or create a GitHub issue.