Most documents in this atlas were written to bind a state or end a war. These ten were letters, and each shows what a written exchange between a few people can preserve: a friendship, a quarrel between rulers, a debate...
10 stops
This path sets down the oldest known law codes beside the constitutions, declarations and treaties that later tried to limit rulers and end wars. It runs in date order, so a reader can see the same problem handled again...
12 stops
Eleven documents that are not famous treaties or constitutions show how people have used writing to regulate, guide, record and persuade. Read in order of when each was written, they run from an ancient Sanskrit law...
11 stops
These eight documents each settle a question of who holds, owes or may use a piece of the world, from a church property register of 1432 to a river agreement whose dams were removed by 2024. Read in order, they show...
8 stops
These ten documents all belong to the life of the Christian churches, and the order follows their dates. The path starts with the medieval book of papal biographies and a twelfth century commentary on canon law, passes...
10 stops
Each document on this path is an agreement struck between parties who were rivals, competitors or opposites, from a Persian concession of 1872 to a disputed memorandum of 2024. Read in date order, they show what...
12 stops
This path begins with five treaties that ended wars between revolutionary and Napoleonic France and its opponents, from the separate peaces of 1795 to the settlements of 1814, and then follows seven constitutions and...
12 stops
This path follows nine documents in which popes, emperors, kings and church commissions settled who holds authority over bishops, land, doctrine and conscience. It runs from the medieval bargain that ended the...
9 stops
Most famous ancient documents are law codes and royal decrees, but the written record of the ancient world also holds a king's victory monument, schoolbook wisdom, garrison letters, tax tablets and a scrap of scripture...
10 stops
Between the Jay Treaty and the Hossbach Memorandum, states used written agreements, public doctrines and private letters to define who stood with whom. This path follows eleven such documents in order, from...
11 stops
These eleven documents show how a written text became the way peoples and rulers announced a new political order, from the French declaration of rights in 1789 to Tanzania in 1967. Some came from revolutions and...
11 stops
These nine documents follow the Allied powers from stating their war aims in 1941, through the surrenders and the settlement of 1945, to the first postwar statements of policy and law. Read in order, they show how a...
9 stops
This path follows English and British constitutional documents in the order they were made, from a baronial attempt in 1258 to make the king govern by advice, through the statutes and bills that set rights and the...
8 stops
Eight treaties show three old empires losing ground along their borders. Each stop is a settlement that ended a war or imposed terms, and read in order they move from the Ottoman retreat in central Europe to Persian...
8 stops
Rulers have always wanted their reigns written down, and the records they left, carved in stone, written on papyrus or clay, or compiled by clerks, are how we know many of them at all. This path runs from the oldest...
10 stops
These ten documents follow how the world wrote its agreements after the Second World War: surrenders and armistices that ended fighting, regional pacts and arms treaties that tried to keep peace, and later agreements on...
10 stops
These eight documents follow Napoleon Bonaparte from his first great peace settlement to the diplomacy that undid his empire. Each stop is a treaty, code or act that either extended French power or fixed the limits...
8 stops
Not every document that changed history was signed in public. This trail follows eight diplomatic messages and private agreements from 1870 to 1946, in the order they were written, from an edited telegram that helped...
8 stops
These eight documents follow Asia and Africa through a century of treaty making. The path begins with agreements forced or pressed on weaker states, runs through attempts at control by Japan and France, and ends with...
8 stops
Ten treaties, in date order, show how wars were closed on paper: who signed, what was ceded and what each settlement changed in the map or the balance of power.
10 stops
Nine documents, from a medieval charter to a nineteenth-century manifesto, show people and rulers writing down who may hold power and what protections others can claim. The path runs from the Haudenosaunee council to...
9 stops
This path follows thirteen twentieth-century agreements in the order they were signed, from the harsh peace imposed on Soviet Russia in 1918 to the treaty that founded the European Economic Community in 1957. Together...
13 stops
Each of these ten texts is a step in how people in what became the United States claimed the right to govern themselves, argued about what that right meant, and then rewrote it. The path runs from a 1620 agreement...
10 stops
Each document on this path settled, on paper, who would hold which land or authority, and several of those lines are still argued over. They run from the Iberian division of the world in 1494 to the Camp David Accords...
10 stops
These eight documents, from a Bronze Age diplomatic archive to the self-portrait of the first Roman emperor, show how written records from the ancient world survive and how scholars learned to read them. The path runs...
8 stops
From an artisan clay-type printer in Song China to a debate over whether the Angevin dominions were ever really one empire, this trail follows a single research pass through the evidence historians argue about and why...
6 stops
The atlas's own spine, start to end: seven conventional periods, from the first stone tools to the present day, with the boundary between each one honestly marked as a historians' convention rather than a fact carved in...
7 stops
Ten people, almost none of them architects, whose money, taste and sometimes sheer stubbornness put up some of the twentieth century's most famous buildings: an oil heiress who fired her architect, a physician who sued...
10 stops
Nine rulers, four thousand years apart at the ends of this trail, each of whom left the world measurably different than they found it: a law code, a conquered empire, a rebuilt cathedral, a pilgrimage that moved the...
9 stops
This atlas divides the human past into seven eras, and every boundary between them is a real scholarly argument, not a clean line. This trail walks the seven in order, from the vast unrecorded stretch of prehistory to...
7 stops
Seven centuries in fifteen stops: a charter that limited a king in 1215, the era that gave the world a new way of knowing, the chartered companies that grew into empires, and the speculative bubbles that punctuated the...
15 stops
Three kings named Edward ruled England for a hundred and five years, 1272 to 1377, and between them reshaped how the kingdom was governed, who belonged in it, and who it fought. This trail walks the century in order: a...
11 stops
Four civilizations newly added to the atlas, from Bronze Age Anatolia to medieval Cambodia to southeastern Africa, and the honest disagreements historians still carry about when each one truly began or ended.
4 stops