With just one day remaining in the 2016 election cycle, it’s now possible to tally up the last two years of campaign spending reports and get a near-final look at what the Clinton and Trump campaigns have spent. The...
Watch the rise of human cities, beginning with [arguably] the world’s first city in 3700 BC and continuing up to the present. Use the controls at the bottom to pause/resume the map and to move back and forth in...
Today we have satellite images that let us see how the Earth’s surface changes from year to year. That’s a short time frame on the scale of planetary shifts, but the images still show some striking trends, such as the...
From 1820 to 2013, 79 million people obtained lawful permanent resident status in the United States. The interactive map below visualizes all of them based on their prior country of residence. The brightness of a country corresponds to its total migration...
Through most of its history, the federal government did not have the power to tax incomes. How was it funded before the income tax? Today’s national debt is big by historical standards, but it has been bigger. When was...
Click the map to stop and start the animation gif version Looking over the historical results of U.S. presidential elections, I keep coming back to the same conclusion: the political landscape we’ve been living in for the past few decades...