Meet the History Globe: Spin the World and Travel Through Time

History usually arrives as a list. Dates in one column, names in another, and the places where it all happened fade into the background. But stories have an address. A ship blows up in a harbour. A lake goes quiet in the hills of Cameroon. A forest falls flat in Siberia. Put those addresses on a map and history starts to feel like somewhere you could visit.

That is the idea behind the History Globe, a new interactive 3D globe on Aglena. Every history story on the site gets its own pin, set at the place where it happened. Today the globe holds 69 events, from a pharaoh’s pyramid capstone around 1850 BCE to the 2018 vote that retired the metal kilogram in France. Spin it, slide through time, and see what turns up.

Seeing stories side by side changes how they read. Cluster the pins around the North Atlantic and you notice how many disasters came from ships and harbours. Narrow the timeline to a single war and the map fills in with inventions, accidents and odd experiments that you would never connect in a list. Some of the best moments are the surprises: a pin in the middle of the ocean, or two strange stories that happened a few miles and a few decades apart.

Put those addresses on a map and history starts to feel like somewhere you could visit.

How to use the History Globe

The globe works in any modern browser on desktops, laptops, tablets and phones. Open it and it starts turning slowly on its own. Here is how to steer.

On a phone held upright, the globe pulls back so the whole Earth fits across the width of the screen, with the timeline tucked underneath. You can still pinch to get closer.

1. Spin the globe

Click and drag on a computer, or drag with a finger on a touch screen, to turn the Earth to any region you like.

2. Zoom in and out

Scroll with a mouse wheel or trackpad to move closer. On a phone or tablet, pinch with two fingers. Zooming helps when a few pins sit close together, as they do around Europe and the east coast of North America.

3. Travel through time

The timeline bar along the bottom has two handles. Drag the left one to set the earliest year and the right one to set the latest. Pins outside that span fade away, and the line under the bar tells you how many events are showing and which years you picked. With everything in view it reads “69 events · 1850 BCE – 2018”.

Just above the bar, small marks show where the stories sit in time, so you can see where they bunch up before you drag anything. Events from the same year share one mark, which is why the 69 events fit on 59 marks, and the shared ones are picked out in gold. Under the bar, a few dates (1018, 1918, 2008 and 2017) help you get your bearings, with smaller unlabeled ticks in between.

On a computer, rest the pointer on a mark to see what it holds. A single story shows its date and title, such as “1850 BCE, Capstone of Amenemhat III’s pyramid”, while a shared mark lists every event from that year. Point at a tick instead and it tells you how far back it sits: the one at 1018 reads “1000 years before 2018”.

The bar is not spaced evenly, and the small LOG SCALE label between the two end dates is the clue. A logarithmic scale gives recent centuries more room and squeezes the distant past. Most of the stories are from the last few hundred years, and an even bar would cram them into a sliver at the right-hand end. Here, everything before the year 1 fits into less than a tenth of the bar, and the halfway point lands in the late 1950s. Drag the left handle to the middle and the globe shows only the 19 stories from 1957 to 2018.

Press the play button at the left end of the bar and the globe moves through history for you. A 50-year window jumps forward from one story to the next, oldest to newest, so pins appear and fade as the years go by. Press it again to pause.

4. Read the colors

Each pin is colored by the kind of story it marks. Coral pins are disasters, lilac pins are politics, light blue pins are science, mint pins are engineering, and gold pins are culture. Right now science leads with 25 stories, followed by engineering with 16 and disasters with 14.

5. Open a story

On a computer, rest the pointer on any pin and a small preview pops up with the story’s photo, title and date, so you can browse before you commit. Click the pin, or tap it on a phone or tablet, and a card opens with a photo, the place, the category, the date and a short summary. The globe turns to bring that pin to the front. Hit Read the article to go to the full story, or close the card with the × in its top corner and keep exploring. On a phone, tapping an empty part of the globe closes the card too. You can also move between pins with the Tab key and press Enter to open one.

6. Find it from any page

You do not need to remember the address. Look for the small spinning globe icon in the site header. On a computer it sits just to the right of the search box. On a phone it sits next to the search icon at the top of the screen. One click or tap takes you to the globe from anywhere on the site.

Where to start

Not sure where to spin first? These pins are a good way in.

Halifax, 1917. Two ships collided in the harbour of Nova Scotia’s capital, and one of them was full of explosives. Read about the Halifax Explosion, then look at how many other harbour disasters sit nearby.

Boston, 1919. A tank of molasses gave way and sent a sticky wave through the North End. The Great Molasses Flood is still one of the strangest disasters on the map.

Siberia, 1908. Something from space flattened millions of trees near the Tunguska River. The Tunguska event is one of the most remote pins on the globe.

Antikythera, Greece. Sponge divers pulled a corroded lump of bronze from a shipwreck and found gears inside. The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient computer hiding in plain sight.

Western Australia, 1932. Soldiers with machine guns took on thousands of emus, and the emus held their ground. The Great Emu War is exactly as odd as it sounds.

Cameroon, 1986. A quiet crater lake released a cloud of carbon dioxide that spread through the valleys below. The story of Lake Nyos is one of the saddest pins on the map, and one of the most fascinating.

For the oldest story on the globe, slide the timeline all the way left and find the capstone of Amenemhat III’s pyramid in Egypt. For one of the oddest wartime ideas, look up Project Pigeon, the plan to let trained birds steer a bomb.

More pins on the way

The globe grows with the site. Each new history article gets its own pin when it is published, so the map will keep filling in with new places and new years. The newest pin sits on San Nicolas Island, off the coast of Southern California, and marks the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island, who lived alone there for eighteen years before a crew brought her to Santa Barbara in 1853. Some regions are still thin, which only makes the next spin more interesting.

So pick a spot you have always wanted to visit, or a year you know nothing about, and start exploring the History Globe.

Further reading