50 events, grouped by the kind of thing that happened rather than the century it happened in. Monuments going up, engineering that rewired ordinary life, revolutions and protests, first crossings and first flights, disasters that rewrote the rulebook, and the cultural moments that changed what everyone could read, see and hear. Every one is a real place with real coordinates, rebuilt as a 360° scene you can look around inside — and a page explaining what is happening and which details fix it to a particular year.
The world's most recognisable structures, caught mid-build
Construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza · Parthenon Under Construction · Colosseum Construction · and more
Open collectionRails, bridges, canals and assembly lines that rewired daily life
Opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway · The Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace · Opening of the Metropolitan Railway · and more
Open collectionCharters, crossings, sieges and marches that moved power
Signing of Magna Carta at Runnymede · Boston Tea Party · Washington Crossing the Delaware · and more
Open collectionTreasure fleets, landfalls and the first machines to leave the ground
Zheng He's Treasure Fleet Expedition · Cortés Arrives in Tenochtitlan · Mayflower Landing at Plymouth Rock · and more
Open collectionEruption, fire, earthquake, iceberg and crash
Eruption of Mount Vesuvius · Great Fire of London at Pudding Lane · San Francisco Earthquake and Fire · and more
Open collectionPrinting, painting, decipherment, electric light, stage and stadium
Gutenberg's Print Shop · Michelangelo Painting the Sistine Chapel Ceiling · Shakespeare's Globe Theatre · and more
Open collectionEvery event here had to clear the same three tests. It has to be tied to a specific place — a named street, field, deck or building site, not a country and a decade. It has to be datable from what you can see, which in practice means the architecture, tools, clothing or vehicles in frame narrow it to a span of years without a caption. And it has to have left something behind: a rule, a border, a building, a book, a habit.
That is why the collection skips some events you might expect and includes some you might not. A treaty signed in a room with no surviving description makes a poor scene. A bakery lane in 1666, a mission compound in 1836 or a zebra crossing in 1969 makes an excellent one — because standing in it, you can work out roughly when you are.
From the Great Pyramid in 2570 BC to Liberty Island in 2011. Each row links to the event's own page.
Three things, usually: it changed something that stayed changed, it happened somewhere specific enough to picture, and somebody wrote it down at the time. Fame is really a record-keeping accident — plenty of larger events left no image and slipped out of the story.
The construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza in 2570 BC. The most recent is the Statue of Liberty's 125th anniversary in 2011, which gives the collection a span of about 4,580 years.
Yes — that is the point. Every event here is a full panorama you can look around inside, either as a page with the background and clues, or as a round in the free game where you place it on a map and guess the year.
Most of them predate photography, so they are researched reconstructions: documented locations, dated construction methods, period clothing and technology, rendered as 360° scenes. Where photographs exist, they inform the reconstruction.
The clue lists work as source-analysis prompts, the questions and answers work as a worksheet, and the game gives students a low-stakes way to argue about dates. No account is needed to play the first rounds.
The same scenes, sorted by century, by country, or shuffled into a scored game.