Events in the Past Are More Recent Than They Appear
I built a tool to help visualize history.
I built a fun little history visualization called Histomap Reborn, inspired by John Sparks’ 1931 Histomap. It shows the relative power of civilizations over time, plus layers for technology, fiction, important people, etc.
What I loved about the original Histomap was the way it made history feel like an interconnected whole rather than a series of disconnected facts. I wanted to update it for the modern era and make it interactive.
Back to the Future came out in 1985. To me that movie feels recent. I remember it coming out when I was a kid. I had friends with “back to the future” lunchboxes. It was part of my childhood.
But here’s what messes with my head: 1985 is now closer to the end of World War II than it is to today. And yet to me, World War II is part of ancient history, in the same bucket as the Roman Empire and the Dinosaurs.
We tend to divide history into two categories: things that happened during our lifetime (recent) and things that happened before (ancient). This creates a strange distortion where everything before we were born feels equally distant, even when some of those same things feel “recent” to people not that much older than us.
When I was a child, I knew people who were alive during World War II. My grandfather was born in 1922. When he was a child, he would have known people who were alive during the US Civil War. And when those people were children, they would have known people who were alive when the United States was founded.
When I look at a date like 1850 and think “that was 175 years ago,” it sounds impossibly distant. But “three overlapping lifetimes ago” doesn’t sound distant at all.
In 1931, John Sparks created the Histomap: a five-foot-tall poster that attempted to show four thousand years of world history as a flowing visualization of relative power. Different civilizations appear as colored streams that widen and narrow as their power grows and shrinks. The Egyptians dominate early, then the Persians, then Rome rises and eventually falls, and so on through to the modern era.
It’s a brilliant piece of work, and became a cultural icon. My son Isaac used to have one on his bedroom door and he loved it. We’d often look at it together and talk about the questions it naturally provoked.
But the original Histomap has problems. It’s now almost 100 years out of date - missing two world wars’ worth of aftermath, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, the emergence of China as an economic superpower. The data on relative power doesn’t align with modern historical scholarship, and the visualization has a noticeable Western bias (China and India are far too small). And there’s a practical issue: with all the text running horizontally, it’s hard to show how long events actually lasted.
Isaac’s poster met a sad end when his younger brother Owen stuck a FedEx return sticker on it and we couldn’t get it off without destroying the poster. I’d been meaning to get him a new one, but the event planted a seed: what if I just built a better version?
I originally set out to faithfully replicate the original Histomap in modern form. But I ended up somewhere different.
The result is Histomap Reborn. It keeps the flowing power visualization along the bottom - that’s the original Histomap’s core insight. But above it, I added multiple bands showing different kinds of information: Technology, Fiction, Important People, Historical Eras, etc.
The idea is that you can see not just who was powerful at a given time, but what was happening. Was this the same time when the telephone was invented? Did this happen at the same time when that story you read was set? Who were the major world powers at that time?
It’s interactive. You can toggle which bands appear, adjust how much vertical space each band gets, and click on any event to pull up its Wikipedia entry. But you can also export the whole thing as a PDF and print it as a poster for your wall - if you want to replace the one your younger child destroyed.
Getting the data right was surprisingly tractable, thanks to a combination of good sources and AI assistance.
For the power balance visualization, I used GDP (PPP) data from the Maddison Project Database for the years that project covers, and had Claude make a best effort based on studying available research for earlier eras.
For the events, and grouping countries into per-decade power blocs, I had Claude Code do web searches and extract knowledge from what it found. This isn’t perfect - but it gave me a reasonable starting point that I could then refine.
This is the kind of thing that would have been months of work for a skilled human to do only a couple of years ago. We often talk about how AI is changing how easily we can write code, but the effect on how easily we can do research is maybe just as great. I also had Claude Code build the visualization itself, but that was much less work than organizing the data.
I’ve currently built three maps: United States, British, and World history. Partly this is because these are my countries (I grew up in England and live in America) and so I feel reasonably able to judge whether the output feels right.
I keep staring at the thing and keep finding new insights, or new questions it makes me want to find an answer to.
You can watch India turn from being a massive force to getting absorbed into the British Empire, and then see the British Empire abruptly collapse after World War II. You can see how America at the time of the Gold Rush was only a minor power. You can see how Thomas Edison lived through the Civil War and also World War I.
You can try it at histomap.robennals.org. I hope you find it thought provoking. If you’d like to add a map for a new country, or fix data Claude got wrong, then let me know, or just submit a pull request to fix it.