About OneWorld History (prototype)

OneWorld History is a globe-and-timeline view of history, starting with Canada. Drag the slider to move through time. Pins appear once their event has happened; events from the last 25 years of the selected date glow brighter. Click a pin or a coloured tick on the timeline to read about it. Under Histories, pick a nation, empire or conflict for a short historian-style overview with its sources.

A note on the borders. These maps follow a European-style political-map convention and are approximate. Indigenous nations' territories often overlapped and were shared, and Indigenous nations did not disappear when these maps stop drawing them. Use them as a starting point for discussion, not as an authoritative record.

Residential schools. This layer marks places where children were taken from their families. Pins appear for the years each site operated. Precision varies (exact, approximate or predicted) and is shown for each site. No photographs or records of deaths are shown. Support: National Indian Residential School Crisis Line, 1-866-925-4419 (24 hours).

Data & credits

• Historical borders: historical-basemaps by André Ourednik and contributors, licensed GPL-3.0. The globe now shows historical world borders from 500 BCE to today (simplified for this prototype); the exceptions are 1848–1877, which use adapted North America maps for 1848 and 1853 (OneWorld edits of the same source).
• Globe imagery: Natural Earth II (public domain, naturalearthdata.com), bundled with CesiumJS and always loaded underneath as the offline fallback. The base map is NASA Blue Marble shaded relief & bathymetry (Blue Marble Next Generation; credit: NASA Earth Observatory / Reto Stöckli, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), streamed with no key from NASA EOSDIS GIBS. NASA imagery is public domain (not copyrighted in the US); NASA does not endorse this project. "We acknowledge the use of imagery provided by services from NASA's Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS), part of NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS)." No other satellite imagery (Esri, Sentinel-2) is used.
• Subnational borders: Canada: Natural Resources Canada, Territorial Evolution of Canada, 1867 to 2003, Open Government Licence – Canada (contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada); the 2003 boundaries are carried forward to today. United States: Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, Newberry Library (states and territories, 1783–2000; carried forward to today). Simplified for this prototype. British colonies before 1867 are approximate: drawn with their 1867 boundary and shown dashed.
• Places: hand-curated list of settlements, trading posts, forts and cities, with years and earlier names taken from the linked English Wikipedia articles (CC BY-SA 4.0) and Wikidata (CC0). Positions and some years are approximate.
• Culture and polity labels: clicking a label shows the opening sentences of the matching English Wikipedia article (CC BY-SA 4.0, linked) and a Wikidata link, with our own note on how the source map uses the label. Labels and shaded areas come from historical-basemaps.
• Globe engine: CesiumJS 1.140, Apache-2.0. No Cesium ion services are used.
• Residential school locations: Orlandini, R. (2019). Residential Schools Locations Dataset, Borealis, doi:10.5683/SP2/RIYEMU, licensed CC BY 4.0. Province codes harmonized, photos omitted, NCTR cross-reference added.
• School records and years: National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (names, IRSSA years and links only). Kivalliq Hall and the Newfoundland and Labrador schools are not shown yet (location licence still being confirmed).
• Curriculum: Ontario Ministry of Education, History, Grades 7 and 8 (2026 revisions) and Canadian History since World War I, CHC2D/CHC2P (2026), dcp.edu.gov.on.ca. © King's Printer for Ontario, 2020–26. Codes and short excerpts are credited; summaries marked "paraphrase" are our own wording. Event links are our editorial reading, not Ministry endorsements.
• Images: from Wikimedia Commons, public domain or CC0/CC BY/CC BY-SA only, reduced copies stored locally. Each image shows its author, licence and a link to its Commons file page. CC BY-SA images remain under their licence.
• Guided tours: narration is our own text. The CHC2D tour follows the Ontario course; nation tours (Histories → Nations → Take a tour, starting with a free 5-minute history of Canada) are general national histories triangulated from open survey sources, drafts for teacher review. The Canada tour comes in three tones, Patriotic, Neutral (default) and Critical, which share one locked set of facts, dates, places and sources and differ only in emphasis and wording; each step lists its sources. "Narrate" uses your browser's built-in speech voice, with no account and no cloud service. Overseas context borders come from the same historical-basemaps data (GPL-3.0). Histories tours (Empires → Roman Empire, Conflicts / Wars → First World War, Other → Christianity and Judo; free, 5 minutes) are also our own text, triangulated from Britannica, The Canadian Encyclopedia, government and museum sites, the NCTR, the IJF and Kodokan, and academic works (DOIs and catalogue links per step); Grokipedia is cited alongside the other sources and listed the same way; Wikipedia is used only as a pointer. The Roman tour has three Viewpoints (Patriotic, Balanced default, Critical) on one fact spine; the First World War tour has Sides, with Overall built and Allies and Central Powers coming soon. During these tours the globe shows world borders for each step's period (historical-basemaps, GPL-3.0; ancient borders are approximate), and the year box shows BCE/CE dates. The timeline runs from the earliest dated event in the corpus (753 BCE, Rome's traditional founding) to today; in the full view the centuries before 1500 are compressed into the left part of the bar (a marker shows where the scale changes). Picking a Histories entry or starting its tour zooms the timeline to that span; clearing the pick or closing the tour restores the full range. Before 1500 the globe shows the nearest world border map (none before 500 BCE). Tour stops and events carry Wikimedia Commons images (public domain, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA only), each captioned with its title, author, licence and a link to the file page. Report issue (under the sources in the side panel and in the tour box) saves a note on this device only for now; nothing is sent. Research notes with triangulation tables are in docs/.
• Related media & sources: links only, to the NFB, Wikipedia, archives, Canadiana, the Internet Archive and Open Library. The "critical context" blurbs are drafts for teacher review.
• Histories overviews: our own wording, drafted from the linked English Wikipedia articles (CC BY-SA 4.0) with Wikidata links (CC0). Contested points are labelled; figures are rounded. Draft for teacher and historian review.
• Event summaries: written from the linked English Wikipedia articles (CC BY-SA 4.0); each article panel links its source.