PED 3183

Tool for timelines and maps for students.

"If we can be culturally conditioned to imagine that the "fallen" somehow "sacrificed" themselves for an end loftier than just the battlefield - be it empire or freedom or a new federation - then the prosaic ugliness of war death and survivor torment becomes ever more remote from the politicians who are ultimately responsible for it."

"Last week, ceremonies were held in Tanzania and Kenya to mark the anniversary of the moment in 1914 when German forces marched into British Kenya, the only German invasion of British territory during the First World War. The government of Tanzania explained that the centenary of the Great War, in which Tanzania, then the colony of German East Africa, was an important battlefield, offers Tanzanians an opportunity to ensure that the "country's role and sacrifice during the First World War is remembered"."

Historian Dan Snow finds out how one low-tech weapon system in the First World War had a huge impact: barbed wire.

This animation distils hundreds of years of culture into just five minutes. A team of historians and scientists wanted to map cultural mobility, so they tracked the births and deaths of notable individuals like David, King of Israel, and Leonardo da Vinci, from 600 BC to the present day. Using them as a proxy for skills and ideas, their map reveals intellectual hotspots and tracks how empires rise and crumble The information comes from Freebase, a Google-owned database of well-known people and places, and other catalogues of notable individuals. The visualization was created by Maximilian Schich (University of Texas at Dallas) and Mauro Martino (IBM).