Evidence you can check, and take with you
- Investigate
- Design and reading
- Sharing and links
Investigate became stricter about dates and sources, cites historians by name, and lets you keep and share your own judgements.
- Fixed: a cause is never filed against its own dates. Something that began after the event is no longer listed as what led to it; the Xiongnu’s causes had included Mongolia in 1947.
- 42 claims argued by historians, each citing the scholarship for and against: Doyle and Schama on the debt behind 1789, Figes and Fitzpatrick on the war behind 1917, Heather against Halsall and Goffart on the Huns and the West, Keynes against MacMillan and Marks on Versailles, Kuhn and Platt on the Taiping and the Qing.
- Each link names the documents behind it, so you can see which sources agree and which deny it.
- Mark any link convincing, possible, doubtful or reject. Your judgements travel in the link you share, and a rejected link is set aside where you can find it again.
- Background data: every dataset the atlas draws on or knows of, drawn as a bar across five thousand years, so you can see at once which reach the year and place you asked about, and what each says there.
- A path to another entry: the shortest chain of recorded causes and successions between two entries, every step named.
- Take it with you: the whole investigation as plain text, with its sources and a link back to the view, to copy or download.
- Keyboard: 1–5 switch the kinds of evidence, d changes the depth, the arrow keys walk the list, ? opens the guide. A third level of depth reaches a war’s battles through its campaigns.
- The map’s layers and playback speed now travel in the link too.
- Fixed: people Wikidata links to a war only as participants, such as a novelist and a chemist under the First World War, are no longer listed among its causes.
- Fixed: on a phone the atlas now offers the map and search, and a search result opens on the map.