The atlas
for people who wonder.
Plot a battle. Trace a migration. Watch a city grow. A research-grade historical atlas that finally reads — for scholars, museums and the merely curious.
History on a map,
not a Wikipedia tab.
Built with historians, designed for everyone who reads in dates.
Event-driven cartography
Type a name, a war, a treaty. The atlas draws itself — geography, routes, key actors.
Time you can drag
Scrub through centuries. Layers fade in and out. Borders move. Cities grow.
Citations included
Every event sources to a primary or canonical reference. Export to BibTeX or Zotero in one click.
Document layers
Drop manuscripts, paintings, maps. Pin them to events. Read them in-place.
Compare two periods
Same place, two timeframes, side by side. The visualization historians keep building from scratch.
Publish anywhere
Embed in lecture notes, blog posts, museum kiosks, textbooks. Print at archival quality.
For the curious,
and the credentialed.
Hobbyists work free. Researchers pay less than a journal subscription.
Hobbyist
- 3 historical projects
- Built-in event database
- PNG export
- Public timelines (read-only embed)
- Community support
Scholar
- Unlimited projects
- Full citation manager (BibTeX, Zotero)
- Document layers (PDFs, images, manuscripts)
- Print-ready PDF export
- Period-comparison views
- No watermark
Institution
- Everything in Scholar
- Shared archive library
- Collaborative editing
- Museum-kiosk embeds
- API access
- Priority archival partnerships
Things historians actually ask.
Where does the event data come from?
A curated database built on top of Wikidata, the Library of Congress, Europeana and partner archives. Each event records its source and version. Scholar users can override entries with their own annotated versions.
Can I add events that aren't in the database?
Yes. Create custom events with your own coordinates, dates, descriptions and document attachments. They live in your project and are exportable.
Does it handle pre-modern dates and calendars?
Yes. Bettermaps History supports Julian, Gregorian, Hijri, Hebrew and several proleptic calendars, plus the standard BCE/CE notation back to 5000 BCE.
Can I publish my atlas as an interactive embed?
Yes — read-only public embeds are free on all plans. Custom-branded embeds and museum-kiosk mode are part of Scholar and Institution.
Are there academic discounts?
Scholar is already priced below most journal subscriptions. Verified students get an additional 30% off.