Atlas of American History
An honest, source-driven interactive atlas — 469 nodes, 838 connections, every claim carrying its receipts.
Context
Interactive history products tend to collapse into one of two shapes: textbook chronology that connects nothing, or a feed that connects everything and cites nothing. I wanted a third shape — the full documented record, connected, so a reader can open any card and pull the thread. That required treating honesty as an information-architecture problem: a labeling policy that distinguishes documented fact from formal charge from association from contested claim, applied node by node, with sources visible on every card.
My role
Solo — dataset design, information architecture, interaction design, and the build: 469 nodes and 838 typed edges (each carrying a year, a plain-language note, a weight, and lens tags), a labeling and sourcing policy, an image pipeline that license-checked and credited 109 public-domain portraits, and a self-contained static build — no framework, no build step, deployable anywhere as a folder.
The Connection Rail Interactive
One documented thread · Pull it
Focused card
Connections · chronological
Every connection in plain words, in time order, with the receipts one click away. The full Atlas holds 838 of these.
The system
A time spine of nine eras carrying 47 presidency hubs; everything else anchors to one of them. Opening any card slides out a detail sheet — summary, significance, a "denied → declassified" block where the record demands it, and Sources: the receipts. The centerpiece is the connection rail: a card's relationships unravel down the right edge in chronological order, each in plain words — "← carried out by CIA, 1947" — and each one clickable, with a breadcrumb back-stack, so following the trail never means getting lost. Seven lenses recolor the whole atlas to one pattern at a time: Follow the Money, Who Paid the Price, the Declassification Clock, How Power Was Built, Who Could Vote, Promise vs. Practice, Heritage.
The hard call
The connections are the content — and every one had to be defensible. The tempting version of this product implies more than it can prove; the boring version proves nothing worth connecting. The policy drew the line explicitly: document, label, and link what the record supports; mark what's contested as contested; omit what can't carry a source. It's the same posture the AI case studies argue for, applied to knowledge itself — trust is earned by showing your work and refusing to overclaim.
Outcome
A working discovery tool where history reads as a connected system rather than a list — deployed as a single static folder, live on this site. Pull a thread; it holds.