The History of the World Map

It has been a boom week for Wikipedia-sourced history maps. In the last five days I've reviewed Landnotes & Globe of History, and I’ve now stumbled on another Wikipedia based history map - the Time Travel App.

Time-Travel App is a world history explorer that uses Mapbox, OpenHistoricalMap, and data from Wikipedia to let you browse historical events, important people, cultural realms, and even media items on a global map.

The map displays four distinct categories of historical information, each marked with its own custom icon:

• Events - battles, discoveries, political changes, cultural milestones

• Persons - the birthplaces, homes, or activity centers of notable historical figures

• Realms - empires, kingdoms, dynasties, and cultural groups

• Media - historically relevant media items or resources linked to a place

Each item links to the relevant Wikipedia article, making the map a kind of geographically anchored index of world history.

The Time-Travel App uses a timeline slider that controls which markers appear on the map. Move the slider to the year you're interested in and the map reveals only the events, persons, and realms relevant for that moment in time.

The Time-Travel App also uses OpenHistoricalMap data to show the historical borders relevant to the date shown. However, the map does display the modern current city and town place-name for easy reference.

I suspect that large language models may be partly responsible for this sudden influx of Wikipedia-sourced global history maps. AI tools are now remarkably good at pulling structured data out of Wikipedia, summarizing events, and even generating much of the scaffolding needed for a historical mapping application.