Annalium in the classroom

Annalium is a free, no-login world-history map and timeline. It answers one question well: what was happening elsewhere at the same time? That makes it a fast way to break students out of single-region, single-narrative thinking.

Everything below works on a projector or on student devices, in a browser, with no accounts and no installs. Events come from Wikipedia/Wikidata (CC-BY-SA); each event links back to its Wikipedia article for sourcing.

5-minute warm-up: “Meanwhile, elsewhere”

1. Project a single moment your class is already studying — for example, the height of the Tang dynasty and Abbasid Baghdad, 700–900 CE.
2. Ask: “Two of the wealthiest cities on earth, the same century, 4,000 miles apart. What was each one doing?”
3. Click two or three event markers and read the one-line summaries aloud.

The point lands in under five minutes: history happened simultaneously, not in tidy regional chapters.

20-minute activity: “Same year, different worlds”

Goal: students discover cross-regional simultaneity themselves.

1. Give each pair a year or window and a region to start from (or let them pick). Good prompts:
   • The Black Death, 1340–1360 — what was happening outside Europe?
   • The world in 1492 — what was happening away from the Atlantic?
   • The Mongol expansion, 1200–1300
2. Each pair finds three events on different continents in the same window, noting the date, place, and one sentence each (from the event card).
3. They build a shareable view — the URL in the address bar is the link — and paste it into the class doc with a one-line caption.
4. Discuss: which connections were causal, which were pure coincidence, and which regions have fewer pins — and why coverage is uneven (see the note below).

Exit ticket: “Name one thing happening on another continent during the event we studied this week.”

AP World History / IB use case

Annalium maps cleanly onto comparison and contextualization — two skills examiners reward and students find hardest:

• Contextualization: before analysing a document or event, students pull up the same window worldwide and list two or three contemporaneous developments elsewhere.
• Comparison: put two regions on screen in one window (e.g. Song China vs. high-medieval Europe) and compare state, economy, and conflict side by side.
• Periodization: scrub the timeline across a “turning point” and let students argue whether the break looks as sharp globally as it does in one region.

A teaching honesty note worth sharing with students: coverage follows Wikipedia, so Europe and military/political events are over-represented and many regions are thin. That bias is itself a good discussion — whose history gets written down, and where are the silences?

Attribution & reuse

• Event data: Wikipedia / Wikidata, CC-BY-SA 4.0. Each card links its source article.
• Historical boundaries: a hand-curated set in v1 (OpenHistoricalMap import planned); base map © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.
• Free to use and share in class. No login, no ads, no tracking beyond aggregate analytics.

The content of this page is released under CC BY 4.0 — copy it, adapt it, and hand it out.

Found a wrong date, border, or translation, or want a specific era covered for a unit? Email [email protected] — teacher feedback is especially welcome.
More ready-made links live on the Explore page.