The answers on this page are also the project's structured description: they are generated from /edumaps_en.jsonld, the file that search engines and generative engines read.

What is Edumaps?

Edumaps is a free interactive historical world atlas, published at edumaps.ar. It places historical events on a world map that moves through time: you choose a moment or a period, and the map shows what happened then, where it happened, and what else was going on around it. It is an independent educational project, started in 2018 and based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

How does Edumaps work?

Every historical event in Edumaps — a fact — has a date, a location and one or more thematic categories. The map draws the events for the moment or period selected in the time control. Moving that control repopulates the map, so history is explored as a continuous journey through time and space instead of as a list of dates. Selecting an event opens its description, its media and its links to related events.

Is Edumaps free? Do I need an account?

Edumaps is free to use and there are no ads. No account is needed to explore the map or to follow a lesson. An account — created directly or through Social sign-in — is only needed to save personal preferences and to contribute or correct content.

What period of history does Edumaps cover?

Coverage runs from 10,000 BCE to the present day, worldwide. Dates carry an explicit precision — day, month, year, decade, century or millennium — so an event known only to the century is not shown as if it had a known day. Events that last over time can be entered with a start and an end date, and the map can be pointed at a whole period rather than at a single instant.

What languages does Edumaps support?

Edumaps has two content languages, Spanish and English. Both the interface and the historical content exist in each, and the language is chosen from the menu or with a lang parameter in the URL. The site also shows regional flag variants — Argentine, Mexican, US, Canadian and others — while serving the same two content languages.

Where does the historical information in Edumaps come from?

All data comes from open data sources. Information is captured automatically and then parsed, enriched and reviewed. Geography and historical borders draw on OpenStreetMap, Historical Basemaps and CShapes; relevance ranking uses the Danker Wikidata PageRank dump; the world population readout comes from Our World in Data. Every source is open and credited on the technology page, together with its licence.

How much historical data is behind Edumaps?

The pipeline has processed roughly 5 million candidate historical events for English and 3 million for Spanish, drawn from the open sources above. How many of those are visible on the map depends on the data period selected, the user device capacity and the relevance rules.

What is a lesson in Edumaps?

A lesson is a guided narrative that walks you through a historical topic as an ordered sequence of steps on the map. A step can point at a real event or travel between two of them, drawing the route as the story advances. Lessons run from about ten to thirty minutes and are labelled initial, intermediate or advanced. Examples include the first circumnavigation by Magellan and Elcano, the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the history of the space race.

What categories does Edumaps use to classify historical events?

There are nine thematic categories: Art and Culture, Biography and Anthropology, Infrastructure and Industry, Politics and Economy, Science and Inventions, War, Sports, Crime and Justice, and Nature. Each has its own colour on the map and its own switch, so you can narrow the view to the themes you care about, and the search can be restricted to the categories currently selected.

Does Edumaps show historical country borders?

Yes. Edumaps renders the political borders as they stood in the selected year, so the countries on screen match the period being explored rather than today's map. Border periods for a territory are stitched into a continuous history, including cases where a state was succeeded by another under a different name.

How does Edumaps decide which historical events to show?

Every event carries a relevance score built from several signals, including how well documented and how widely linked it is. The map shows the most significant events when you are looking at the world from a distance, and reveals more specific ones as you zoom in. The selection is balanced across time, space and category, so no single region or theme crowds out the rest of the view.

Who is Edumaps for?

Students, teachers and anyone curious about history. It is used for self-study, in the classroom, and as a reference for placing an event in its context. A desktop screen with good resolution gives the fullest view, but the map also works on tablets and phones.

How is Edumaps different from a timeline or a printed historical atlas?

A timeline shows sequence but not place; a printed atlas shows place but freezes one moment. Edumaps combines both: the map moves through time, so you see an event together with what was happening near it and elsewhere in the world at the same moment. That correlation is the point — the Cuban Missile Crisis reads differently once the Bay of Pigs the year before and Gagarin's flight on the other side of the world are visible alongside it.

Can I contribute or correct a historical fact in Edumaps?

Yes. Sign in, enable contributor mode in your profile, and an edit control appears next to each event; new events can be added from the main menu. A contribution needs a title, a description, a date with its precision, coordinates and at least one category. There is also plenty to do beyond content — the project welcomes help with history research, data quality, development and design.

Does Edumaps track its visitors or sell their data?

No. Edumaps uses no third-party tracking or analytics tools and does not sell any data. For registered users only a name and an email address are stored, to run the account; a pseudonym is welcome. Accounts and their data can be reviewed, updated or deleted at any time, and the project follows the GDPR and Argentine Law 25.326.

What technology is Edumaps built with?

Edumaps runs on open-source components for the browser and the service layer. The stack is deliberately small so the project stays fast and simple to run. Libraries and data sources are credited, with their licences, on the technology page.

Can I download the Edumaps historical data?

There is no bulk download and no public data API. The collection is meant to be explored through the map at edumaps.ar. The upstream open sources it is built from — Wikidata, OpenStreetMap, Historical Basemaps, CShapes and others — publish their own data under their own licences and are listed on the technology page.