About this project
An experiment in radical history,
seen from several angles at once.
The Radical History Timeline is a work in progress. It uses AI to pull 4,144 dated events from 9 books (these numbers will change as more books are added) - works of anarchist, labor, and radical history - and attempts to arrange them so the threads connecting them become visible.
A single event in a history book is a sentence. A thousand events on a page is a wall of dates. The point of this project is to find shapes in between: to see how an uprising in Andalusia in 1933 was concurrent with the Bund organizing in Warsaw and with anti-fascist militias forming in Berlin - and how their isolation from each other shaped what came next.
To do that, the timeline experiments with several views of the same dataset:
- The horizontal timeline lays every book's events along the same calendar, scaled non-linearly so the densely-documented modern eras get the room they need.
- The map turns time into a cursor you can drag or play. Events pulse where they happened, when they happened. Press play and watch events unfurl across continents.
- The vertical view is the traditional one: cards, decade headings, alternating columns. Useful for slow reading.
- Tag lenses let you isolate a thread - “The Rise of Fascism,” “Anti-Fascism,” “Kurdish Liberation” - and watch it cross books, decades, and continents. The lens URL is shareable.
- Meanwhile, inside every event drawer, surfaces what else was happening within ±5 years elsewhere in the world. Sometimes the loudest thing about an event is the silence around it.
Every event is anchored to a verbatim quote from its source book, with chapter and page citation. Nothing is paraphrased. Where stories emerge, they emerge from the arrangement of facts the authors themselves wrote down.
This is a personal experiment, still being shaped. New books, lenses, and views are being added. Errors and rough edges are expected - if you spot one, the data is open.
Start exploring on the timeline or browse the source books.