CHAINS OF HISTORY · THE EYE THAT CONNECTS
The Eye of History
History as a living network. Every event and every person is a sphere of light carrying its image; move closer and it opens into the picture itself. The sap flows from cause to consequence. Tap any node to read or hear its story, or press Journey and let the chain tell itself.
From Colony to Superpower
70 nodes · 112 sources
Where it starts: Jamestown 1607
In 1607, 104 Englishmen waded ashore on a Virginia marsh, in a land already home to powerful Native nations and claimed by Spain and France. Over the next 338 years tobacco, slavery, revolution, a continent seized by purchase, treaty and war, a civil war over slavery, railroads, steel and immigrants built a nation that two world wars lifted to the top. Follow the chain of causes from a starving fort to the deck of the USS Missouri in 1945, when the United States held the bomb, the dollar and the keys to the new world order.ENTER THE STORY →
The Founders and the Constitution
68 nodes · 110 sources
Where it starts: Magna Carta 1215
In the summer of 1787, fifty-five men shut themselves in a sweltering Philadelphia room and invented a government, borrowing ideas that ran back through Locke and Montesquieu to an English meadow in 1215. They quarreled, nearly walked out, bargained over slavery and the power of small states, and produced four pages that nine states then had to be argued into accepting. This chain follows the people, ideas and fights behind it, and the women, enslaved people and Native nations left out of the room, through the amendments that slowly widened 'We the People.'ENTER THE STORY →