History of the World: Every Year from 2500 BC to 1720 AD скачать в хорошем качестве

History of the World: Every Year from 2500 BC to 1720 AD

You can zoom anywhere on the map while the video plays. For the best experience, set the quality to the highest setting and turn on subtitles — they’ll show you the year. Unfortunately, the video isn’t available in Russia. — The idea for this project actually goes back to 2020, during the Covid lockdowns. With so much time at home, I started thinking about making a global history map. After finishing my video about the history of Europe, it felt natural to expand the concept to cover the entire world. I began working on it — and quickly realized just how massive the project truly was. YouTube has always been something I do in my spare time, but mapping every border from 2500 BC all the way to today was on another level. It meant creating about 4,500 maps. For the whole world. And they had to be accurate. I started multiple times, stopped multiple times, and honestly wondered if it could ever really be finished. Life moved on. The pandemic ended. I got married, became a parent, and life became full in the best way. YouTube slowly faded into the background. But every now and then, I’d think about the project — and feel like I had left something unfinished. The biggest obstacle was always the scale. I needed more time, and I needed a way to draw maps much faster. So I experimented, changed my workflow, and eventually found several improvements. First, I built a huge database of existing yearly maps from across the world. The most precise maps were already on YouTube. Creators like Emperor Tigerstar, Ollie Bye, and others had done incredible work. Together, they had essentially mapped global history year by year. Their contributions are worth more than many history textbooks. Huge thanks to them — this project would not exist without what they created. I downloaded their videos, cut them into individual yearly frames, and used them as references: Emperor Tigerstar for the Americas and Oceania, Ollie Bye for Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and my own work for Europe. I combined everything into a single timeline and traced every year — then spent another year reviewing and correcting it all. Second, I automated as much as I could. My first version used a different color for every country, but it ended up being unreadable. So I wrote a JavaScript tool to recolor all maps automatically. Labels were also often off-center, so I built another script to reposition them. And thanks to Power Automate, my computer was sometimes running for days straight on its own in 2024. It saved enormous amounts of time. Third, I built the map backward. I started in 2025 with a detailed world map — complete with rivers and administrative regions — and then worked backward, adjusting borders as history moved into the past. Fourth, I simplified things. Many animated maps try to include too much detail. I wanted clarity and enjoyment. So I removed secondary coloring like vassal states and colonies and cut unnecessary complexity (for example, every tiny Rus principality or Anatolian Beylik). Every label had to be readable on a phone screen. That meant making tough choices — like removing the Americas and Southern Africa until 1450 — because before then, most recorded activity was concentrated in a narrow area from Central America to Peru, and showing everything would have cluttered the view. Fifth, I split the world into six regional maps: North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania — linked only by small connectors like Panama, Suez, and the Urals. Working region by region felt less overwhelming and made it easier to catch mistakes, since each new frame builds on the previous one. All I still needed was a long stretch of uninterrupted time. That chance came in summer 2024, when I had a three-month break between jobs. I devoted myself entirely to the project — and with the new techniques, progress exploded. I made roughly 80% of the video that summer. I kept refining, simplifying, and correcting through 2024 and 2025. And now, in January 2026, the journey is complete. I’m incredibly proud to finally share: History of the World: Every Year