WW9 Atlas

The Americas, by the receipts

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

EVIDENCE

PROOF LIBRARY FILES

Pick one or more. Applies to cards, places and routes.

NATION, PEOPLE OR WORD

Keeps only what mentions it, across every layer.

ARTIFACTS

Only ones with a photo

Also show artifacts the museum only places by country (spread around the country's center)

Names on the map Language Theme Connection linesCaused, part of, followed, influenced, made by Marker size Land height in 3DHow tall the terrain stands Moving routesCaptive routes flow toward where people were sent Distance Open where I left offRemembers your map, view and layers on this device

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.

Each story walks the map stop by stop, straight from the data, with the receipt behind every stop.

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
Our lens how we read it
Open not yet proven
Colonizer lens the colonizers' version, on trial
Killed failed the test

THE COLONIZER LENS

This is our record, for us. Most of the paper about our people was written by the colonizers who were taking our land, our labor and our names: colonial officers, captive traders, Indian agents, census takers, courts, missionaries. They are hostile witnesses. We keep the colonizers' papers, because their own words convict them. But watch how it always goes: wherever our ancestors built, the colonizer lens sends in a "lost race," "white gods," "Hebrew wanderers" or "ancient aliens" to take the credit. Somehow it is never us. It is always us. When you see Colonizer lens, that's the colonizers' version on trial: who wrote it, and what it covers up. The cover-up scorecard.

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.

All time show undated