With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Infographic of the Week: The planet’s history of violence over 4,000 years in one simple map


A new ‘geography of violence’ map reveals where in the world major battles in the past 4,000 years have taken place. 

The interactive journey through 'every battle' has been created not from historical records but from entries to Wikipedia. 

It was created by a Dutch company LAB1100, a research and development firm established by Pim van Bree and Geert Kessels. Explore the map here.

They used Wikidata and DBpedia, which extracts structured information from Wikipedia, on 'Military Conflicts' to create the interactive visualisation. 

“Primarily we wanted to see what we could do with the data provided by Wikidata and DBpedia in terms of geographical and temporal references attributed to records classified as 'war' or 'Military Conflicts',” van Bree and Kessels explained. ...

Read entire article at The Telegraph