Mapping Terrorism in the United States

The Oregonian has mapped all terrorist attacks in the United States from 1970-2014. The data for the map comes from the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database.

The Terrorism in the United States, 1970-2014 map uses circular markers to show the location of each terrorist attack. The color of the markers indicate where deaths, injuries or no injuries resulted from the attack. The size of the markers indicate the number of deaths or injuries.

If you select a marker on the map you can read more details about the attack, including the year of the attack and the group / individuals who carried out the attack.


This isn't the first time that The Oregonian has mapped terrorism data. Back in November The Oregonian used CartoDB's Torque library to create an animated map of terrorism deaths around the world from 2001-2014. Deaths by Terrorism, 2001-2014 shows worldwide fatal terrorist attacks by month.

On its own the animated map layer might have been a little crass, reducing thousands of deaths to little flashing dots on a map. However The Oregonian has also added a couple of other data layers to the map to provide some much needed context.

The 'Deaths by Country' option adds a choropleth layer to the map, showing the number of terrorism deaths by country around the world. The 'Narrative' option allows you to select each individual terrorist attack on the map to view a summary about the attack and the original news source for the data.