THE WORKINGS, SHOWN
How these maps are made
An atlas that argues about the past owes you its methods. This page is the honest version: what the maps are built from, where they simplify, and what we read.
THE BASE MAP
All cartography builds on Natural Earth (1:10m), a public-domain dataset, projected and simplified in our own pipeline. Coastlines, lakes and the country polygons you see are Natural Earth’s — nothing is traced from copyrighted atlases.
MODERN BORDERS, PERIOD NAMES — A STATED APPROXIMATION
The base polygons are modern country shapes, deliberately: they are accurate, consistent and legible, and readers know them. Period reality is painted over them — names, statuses, occupations and splits change with the timeline, and purpose-drawn overlay zones carry the borders that matter to the story (Vichy France, the Crusader states, the khanates, the shrinking Confederacy). Every atlas says so in its own legend: modern coastlines and borders are used as approximations. Where a modern shape would actively mislead — East Prussia inside modern Russia, for instance — the polygon is split so the period map reads correctly.
HOW OVERLAY BORDERS ARE VERIFIED
Overlay zones are checked, not copied. Reference datasets — CShapes 2.1, historical-basemaps, and the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places — are used for verification only, because they contain errors of their own. The house rule: before any borrowed border is adopted, it must pass anchor tests — named places that must fall inside or outside it. Borders that fail verification are drawn by hand from the scholarship instead.
UNCERTAINTY IS NAMED
Casualty figures appear as ranges, because that is what the evidence supports. Debated turning points are presented as debated. Causes and effects are argued, not asserted — every chapter’s study layer says why historians think what they think, and where they disagree.
SITES OF MEMORY
Atrocities are marked on these maps as memorials, with sober copy. They are never quiz questions, never point-scoring, never gamified. That is a house rule without exceptions.
PRIMARY SOURCES AND COPYRIGHT
The IB notes quote primary sources. Texts are public domain (old enough, or official government documents) or openly licensed, quoted with their creator, date and origin; modern in-copyright writing appears only as a short quotation for criticism and teaching, with a full citation. Photographs come from public-domain or openly licensed collections, credited on the source. We never reproduce IB papers, mark schemes or guide text.
HOW THE IB ALIGNMENT IS DONE
The eight atlases with IB notes tag each chapter to the parts of the new IB History course it helps with (first exams May 2028), in our own words. Maps of History is independent: it is not affiliated with or endorsed by the International Baccalaureate Organization, and IB course names describe alignment only. What the atlases do for each paper →
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Using these maps
The map images on this site are drawn by Maps of History from public-domain cartography (Natural Earth) and are © Maps of History. You may embed any dated map free of charge with the embed code on its page, keeping the attribution link. Teachers may use the maps in their own class materials and slides with the credit “Maps of History, mapsofhistory.com”. For any other use — print, books, products, commercial sites — write to [email protected] for permission.
FURTHER READING
The standard works behind each atlas — a starting shelf, not a bibliography. Authors and titles only; find them at your library.
The Rise and Fall of Rome, 264 BC – AD 476
- Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
- Adrian Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell
- Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire
- Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic
- Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Climate and Innovation: The Norse and the Aztecs, c. 790–1521
- Kirsten A. Seaver, The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America
- Jesse Byock, Viking Age Iceland
- Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings
- Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
- Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs
- Matthew Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés
- Frances F. Berdan, Aztec Archaeology and Ethnohistory
- Vera S. Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City
The Crusades, 1095–1291
- Thomas Asbridge, The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land
- Christopher Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades
- Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History
- Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades
The Mongol Empire, 1206–1294
- Timothy May, The Mongol Empire
- David Morgan, The Mongols
- Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
- Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World
The Industrial Revolution, 1750–1914
- Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective
- Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence
- Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: Britain and the Industrial Revolution 1700–1850
- Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History
- Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution
- E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
- E. Patricia Tsurumi, Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan
The Age of Revolutions, 1775–1848
- Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789–1848
- C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins
- R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution
- Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
Two Roads to Independence: Haiti 1789–1838 and Kenya 1895–1978
- Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution
- C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins
- Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
- Julia Gaffield, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution
- David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire
- Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya
- Tabitha Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau
- Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya
The American Civil War, 1840–1877
- James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom
- Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution
- Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering
- Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative
Remaking the State: Meiji Japan 1600–1912 and Post-Soviet Russia 1964–2000
- Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan
- Mark Ravina, To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan’s Meiji Restoration in World History
- Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present
- Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1910
- Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000
- Chris Miller, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy
- Serhii Plokhy, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union
- Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus
The Russian Revolution, 1855–1924
- Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution
- W. Bruce Lincoln, The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia
- David Moon, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, 1762–1907
- Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, 1881–1917
- Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution
- Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution
- Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War
Indian Independence & Partition, 1857–1964
- Barbara D. Metcalf & Thomas R. Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India
- William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal
- Eric Stokes, The Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of 1857
- Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts
- Sugata Bose & Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia
- Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition
- Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi
- Ornit Shani, How India Became Democratic
The Great War, 1871–1923
- Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers
- Hew Strachan, The First World War
- Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace
- Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August
China in Revolution, 1911–1949
- Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China
- Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II
- Frank Dikötter, The Age of Openness: China Before Mao
The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953
- Oleg Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator
- Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941
- Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism
- Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin
- R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933
- Sarah Cameron, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan
- Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History
- Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment
The War Room — WW2, 1936–1945
- Antony Beevor, The Second World War
- Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won
- Ian Kershaw, The End: Germany 1944–45
- Max Hastings, All Hell Let Loose
- Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
The Cold War, 1945–1991
- John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History
- Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History
- Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
- Serhii Plokhy, Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis
The Decolonization of Africa, 1945–1994
- Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present
- Martin Meredith, The State of Africa
- Elizabeth Schmidt, Foreign Intervention in Africa
- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Protest and Change: Second-Wave Feminism and Tunisia, 1945–2015
- Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America
- Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave
- Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA
- Jocelyn Olcott, International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History
- Mounira M. Charrad, States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco
- Béatrice Hibou, The Force of Obedience: The Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia
- Kenneth J. Perkins, A History of Modern Tunisia
- Safwan M. Masri, Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly
Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990
- Ben Shephard, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War
- R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War
- Gerard Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order
- Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee
- Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations
- W. Courtland Robinson, Terms of Refuge: The Indochinese Exodus and the International Response
- UNHCR, The State of the World’s Refugees 2000: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action
- Gil Loescher, The UNHCR and World Politics: A Perilous Path
The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976
- Andrew G. Walder, China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed
- Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine
- Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962
- Roderick MacFarquhar & Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution
- Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After
- Tsering Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows
- Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split
- Michel Bonnin, The Lost Generation
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