GO TO
BORDERS ON PAPER
These are lines drawn on paper by the governments that wrote them, not the land's own borders. They follow the timeline.
THE SKY
LAYERS
YOUR ROOTS
Put your family on the map: each person and the places in their life. Then play your line and see what was happening around them, year by year.
TWO MAPS, TWO FOCUSES
This Atlas reads the Americas through our own lens. Its sister project, Chronoseer, maps the whole world and every era the way the history books tell it: wars, empires and borders over time. Want the in-depth world view? Set the two side by side.
EVIDENCE LABELS
Record the document says it
Pattern documents line up
Lens our reading
Open not yet proven
Disputed argued, often by a hostile witness
Killed failed the test
HOSTILE WITNESSES
Most of the record about our people was written by the people taking our land, our labor and our names: colonial officers, slave traders, Indian agents, census takers, courts and missionaries. In a courtroom they would be called hostile witnesses. We still use their papers, because their own words convict them, but we never take their word as the last word. When a claim is Disputed, ask who wrote it and what they stood to gain. Read more.
WHERE THINGS SIT
Sites and routes sit on their coordinates. Museum artifacts sit at their find place when the museum gives one, otherwise at their culture's homeland or their country, spread out so you can tap them, and each card says which. Proof cards sit at the place they name.
BROWSE AS A LIST
Every layer as plain pages you can read, search and share: the Atlas index. Every Proof Library card: the Proof Library.
SOURCES
People, businesses and sports: Wikipedia's categories and list pages, placed by Wikidata where they were born or are based. Photos: Wikimedia Commons (free licenses only). Videos: YouTube IDs on the record. The drug war: hand-checked, with a source on every point. The sky: computed in your browser with Astronomy Engine (MIT). Artifacts: The Met, Art Institute of Chicago and Cleveland Museum of Art open-access collections. Photos shown only where the museum marks them public domain. Maps: OpenFreeMap / OpenStreetMap, AWS Terrain Tiles, Sentinel-2 cloudless by EOX, USGS The National Map. Borders on paper: treaty cessions from the U.S. Forest Service, Tribal Lands Ceded to the United States (Royce's Schedule of Indian Land Cessions, CC BY 4.0); paper claims from historical-basemaps by André Ourednik and contributors (GPL-3.0, source), a work in progress.