Visualizing History

This weekend I spent some time reading a great book on the History of the of the Middle East – ‘A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years’ which I highly recommend, but for those of you who want to cover twice the number of years in less than two minutes and still actually learn something this interactive history map is incredible.

Much as I love reading I have always felt like getting the big picture of history is extremely difficult through books and even most history classes and I think that interactive media is extremely well suited to this. But who are all these people, you ask, the Hittites, the Seljuks? When it comes to digging deeper the map isn’t enough, wouldn’t it be great to have Apture in an interactive map like this? What do you think?