The Huge Map of Who Lived When Reveals Which Cultural Figures Walked the Earth on the Similar Time: From 1200 to Current
We might name the time by which we dwell the “Information Age.” Or we might describe it extra vividly because the period of Invoice Gates and Jeff Bezos, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewartwork, Beyoncé and Bob Dylan. Whatever you consider the work of any of those figures in particular, you’ll be able to onerously deny the influence they’ve had on our culture. Had been we living a century in the past, we’d have stated the identical of Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller, James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald (although he hadn’t fairly published The Nice Gatsby but), Pablo Picasso and Charlie Chaplin, Marie Curie and Sigmund Freud.
Had been we living within the 12 months 1225, our lives would’ve overlapped with these of Leonardo Fibonacci, Francis of Assisi, Rumi, and Thomas Aquinas, in addition to each Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai Khan.
All that is laid out visually in The Huge Map of Who Lived When, created earlier this 12 months by a Pinkdit consumer referred to as Profound_Whatever. As Huge Suppose’s Frank Jacobs writes, the map reveals surprising cases of contemporaneousness, similar to that curhire U.S. President Joe Biden “for a couple of 12 months was alive similtaneously Nikola Tesla (1854–1943), the Serbian-American inventor who developed the alternating curhire (AC) system that’s used for distributing electricity.”
For “another, newer (and extra baffling) overlap: The lifetime of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973), who wrote The Lord of the Rings, coincided ever so slightly with that of Eminem.” Going farther into the previous, how many people have been fully conscious that “Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), and Martin Luther (1483–1546) have been contemporaries of every other”? Or that “the lives of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) and René Descartes (1596–1650) synced virtually perfectly with every other, regardless of the one being the caninematically Puritan figurehead of the English Civil Struggle, and the other the daddy of modern, rationalist philosophy by giving doubt to a central position within the purswimsuit of fact”?
The Huge Map of Who Lived When makes use of a color-coding system to divide the figures whose lifespans it charts into eight categories, including artists (Leonardo da Vinci, Rube Goldberg), thinkers (John Locke, Charles Darwin), “business & indusattempt” (including famed pirates from Henry Morgan to Blackbeard), and “leaders & dangerousdies” (Napoleon, Adolf Hitler). All of it reminds us that we’d give anyfactor for an opportunity to satisfy a few of them, or to remain out of the trail of others. In fact, the individuals we consider as having outlined a particular historical period weren’t at all times regarded that method by eachone else who lived on the identical time: somefactor it willn’t harm to keep in mind when considering our personal place in history.
Related content:
5‑Minute Animation Maps 2,600 Years of Western Cultural History
180,000 Years of Religion Charted on a “Histomap” in 1943
The History of the World in One Video: Each Yr from 200,000 BCE to Right now
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the ebook The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceebook.
