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History & Time
Historical maps, timelines, primary sources and the strange experience of seeing a moment in time laid out as an interface.
16 sites
A history map with a timeline slider, layered with rulers, religions, battles and linked encyclopedia articles.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Scanned American newspapers from 1770 to 1963, full-text searchable, which is a dangerous thing to discover on a weeknight.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Over a hundred thousand high-resolution scanned maps, georeferenced and free to zoom into more or less indefinitely.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
One search across thousands of American libraries, archives and museums, with curated exhibitions layered on top.
- 1 hr+
Fifty million digitised items from European museums, libraries and archives, behind one search box.
- 1 hr+
An interactive world atlas you can scrub year by year from 3000 BC, watching every border redraw itself.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Every event on Wikipedia plotted as a dot across fourteen billion years, filterable down to one category at a time.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Old photographs pinned to the exact street corner where they were taken, fading into the modern view behind.
- 10 min
Photographs, manuscripts, sheet music and film from the largest library in the world, mostly free to reuse.
- 1 hr+
The searchable index of American federal records, running from founding documents to recently declassified memos.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Georeferenced Ordnance Survey sheets you can fade against satellite imagery to see exactly what got demolished.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Search hundreds of thousands of scanned historical maps by place and date, held by libraries worldwide.
- 10 min
Eighty thousand New York photographs from the 1870s onwards, mapped to the corners they were shot on.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Stanford's model of travel in the Roman world — pick two cities and get the cost, season and days by road or sea.
- 10 min
- Desktop
A daily high-resolution photograph from the early twentieth century, usually with commenters identifying the buildings.
- 2 min
Millions of images and 3D scans from the Smithsonian's collections, released with no copyright restrictions at all.
- 10 min
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
History & Time: questions
How many sites are in History & Time?
16 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
16 of the 16 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
7 of 16 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 16 are safe for work and 16 work with the sound off.