Meanwhile Map

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Meanwhile Map

What was happening around the world at the same time? Pick a moment in history and see the events, foundings and people from that period on a map with the borders of the day.

How to use it

• Pick a time: drag the slider or type a year (CE/BCE), choose the starting month and a window from 1 month to 100 years. ◀ ▶ (or Shift+←/→) step to the previous/next window.
• Explore: zoom and pan freely. Numbered circles are clusters; click to zoom in. Click a pin for a summary and links to Wikipedia, Wikidata and OpenHistoricalMap.
• Filter: click a category to show or hide it, double-click to show only that one. Founded & built and Births & deaths are off by default.
• Pins: solid = exact place, hollow = only the region or country is known, faded = already under way when the window opens. "Sometime in 1452" means the date is only known to the year.
• Share: the address bar always holds the current view, so you can bookmark or send it.

How it works

• Events come live from Wikidata: items with a date in the window, a location, and an article on some Wikipedia. They're ranked by how many Wikipedias cover them, and the categories come from Wikidata's own classification.
• The map is OpenHistoricalMap, filtered to the middle of the window so borders and place names match the period.
• Summaries and images come from Wikipedia. Images are shown only when freely licensed.
• Everything runs in your browser against these open services; there's no backend of its own, so results are only as complete as the open data: early periods and some regions are thin.
• Privacy: no cookies and no personal tracking. The site only counts anonymous visits (Cloudflare Web Analytics). The years and places you explore stay in your address bar and are never sent to us.

Meanwhile Map is open source: code, issues and ideas are welcome on GitHub.

Data: Wikidata (CC0) · Wikipedia text (CC BY-SA 4.0) · © OpenHistoricalMap and OpenStreetMap contributors · land cover © ESA/UCLouvain (GlobCover). Map rendering by MapLibre GL JS.

☰ Events

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Year From Window Max events Wikipedia Include events from other Wikipedias Include ongoing events Map labels

exact location approximate (region or country) ongoing