Hey history junkies! You’re gonna love this….(it also applies for hard working students in need of quick help). Instead of searching for those (sometimes tiny) Wikipedia maps from the x century or the x period where the x king & queen or caliph used to rule over big parts of the planet, someone has finally decided to make a decent & easy-sharing (embeddable) tool that allows us to quickly snap how frontiers have evolved over the past 5000 years.
Luis Múzquiz is the brain behind this idea which has been in development for the past 5 years. At first, only as a hobby and for the past year as a full-time project. A map which may become an essential tool for historians as it’s a fully interactive atlas that compiles the evolution of those kingdoms, caliphates, empires and now states with a year-by-year precision… “a system to represent the historical events and the geopolitical maps of any region or country in the world, for any given historical time period”.
The project now has a name: Geacron (where the tool is fully accessible) and will keep bringing new features over the coming months. For now you can not only look by year but also by country (type in “Mali” by default and it will bring you to the date when the country was created – 1236), and there’s an integration with Wikipedia for historical facts.
New features will include an open forum for history experts, integration with Britannica encyclopedia and hopefully mobile apps one day? A tool that Luis has been developing with GIS, although he considered Google Maps at first but ditched this option as they’re not naked maps by default.
We’ve already seen similar projects on-line like the Atlasofworldhistory or even some iPhone apps, but you can’t deny the potential and usefulness of this project….. until one day Google come up with their own version.
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