Visualizing the trans-Atlantic slave trade in two minutes

A timelapse mapping more than 30,000 Transatlantic slave ship voyages

Roughly 12 million people from Africa were forcibly moved to North and South America over two centuries. This map meticulously showcases every ship's origin, destination, timeline, and more, revealing the scale of the Transatlantic slave trade.

Trans-Atlantic and intra-American slavery: a visual database

This interactive database provides insight into the trading of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. This database offers maps, articles, timelapses, videos of 3D slave ship models, and searchable databases on enslavers and the enslaved. According...

Mapping the known ports involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade

Based on historical logs, this interactive maps shows info from various ports of departure and arrival during the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The trans-Atlantic slave trade brought over 10 million enslaved people to the Americas

During the Atlantic slave trade (1526-1867), about 12.5 million Africans were forced onto ships; only 10.7 million survived to reach the Americas. Fewer than 400,000 arrived in what became the United States—the rest were taken to the Caribbean or Latin America.

A map of slavery's spread across the US

Need a visual on how prevalent slavery was in the US? Scroll through this interactive map and timeline based on census data from 1790 to 1860.

Nineteenth-century, hand-drawn infographics on US slavery and race

In the second half of the 19th century, researchers studying the behavior of the millions of emancipated Americans after the Civil War used "information graphics" to cut through the noise of racially charged debate. In this collection from Stanford, you can see century-old, stunningly hand-drawn data visualizations showing racial demographics, the effects of emancipation on cotton prices, and more.

See a data visualization of the East India Company's trade

This tool visualizes the East India Company’s trade from 1760 to 1834, letting you track shipments of tea, textiles, metals, and more. Users can sort by commodity, origin, destination, and date to see London’s vast imperial supply network that shaped the British Empire.

Visualize the global Venezuelan diaspora

This visualization maps Venezuela’s mass diaspora, showing how millions have fled abroad—primarily to Latin America, with significant flows to the US and Europe—creating one of the most significant displacement crises in the world.

Visualizing the world's food supply chains

The world's food supply chain is complex and lopsided, with much of the world's nutrient-rich food ending up in Europe and North America. This visualization illustrates the paths our food takes around the world, from starchy vegetables in...

The history of the British Empire—all in a single take

This video delivers a rapid, rhyming walk-through of the British Empire—filmed in one continuous shot aboard a sailing ship and featuring costumed actors portraying figures from Sir Francis Drake to Pocahontas.

View animated battle maps from every major skirmish of the war

The American Battlefield Trust's animated maps trace every major Civil War battle with moving troop lines, narration, and historical context—bringing the strategies, turning points, and human cost of the war to life.

The American cockroach is actually from Africa—an apparent hitchhiker aboard ships carrying enslaved people—with evidence suggesting it may have arrived in the New World as early as the 1600s

This podcast delves into the history of Periplaneta americana and explores why the bugs elicit such fear, disgust, and, at times, shame. The bug likely climbed aboard the slave ships because they had both unprotected food sources and places to hide during their journey.

A map of global drug trafficking

The worldwide illegal drug trade continues to flourish. Accounting for almost 1% of the world’s financial revenue, the cocaine trade alone boasts an annual turnover of an estimated $85 billion. This infographic, from Around the World: An Atlas for...

Trace the rise of oil: from early drilling to today’s global power

This animated map video vividly illustrates how petroleum shaped global politics and industry—from 18th-century uses and 19th-century drilling booms in North America to today’s OPEC strategies, shale revolution, and geopolitical oil influence.

A British Airways pilot mapped every flight of his career into a data art series

James Harding logged every flight he had flown in a software program and rendered the results into 3D globe animations, charts, graphs, and more. You can view the visualizations here, along with career stat breakdowns and a description of his project.

The transatlantic cable allowed for communications between North America and Europe

It had significant impacts on just about every industry, including finance. Specifically, the transatlantic cable made it so that real-time financial transactions could take place across the Atlantic, and allowed for much faster sharing of information that increased global market accuracy.

The American cockroach is actually from Africa, an apparent hitchhiker aboard ships carrying enslaved people, with evidence suggesting the bug may have arrived in the New World as early as the 1600s.

Hamilton learned about global trade before he was a teenager

Before he moved to America, Hamilton worked as a clerk around age 12 at the Caribbean trading firm Beekman and Cruger, handling shipping documents, inspections, and port logistics. He eventually managed the day-to-day operations of a trading charter that immersed him early in Atlantic commerce.

How long it takes to travel by train from various cities

This interactive allows users to see how long it would take to move from one city to another in Europe via trains.

An animation illustrating the enormity of the universe

Look around you. Where are you? Where is this place you are occupying? Somewhere in a room, maybe in a city on a continent on a planet orbiting a star in a galaxy among billions. But… where is all of that?

Coffee production took off in the 1800s

Coffee production in South America took off in the 1800s, with Brazil establishing itself as the largest global producer in the 1840s. Today, the country grows over one-third of the world's beans and consistently leads in global coffee production, with other Latin American countries like Colombia and Guatemala.

See a visualization of the Japanese attack

This animated visualization reconstructs the two-wave Pearl Harbor strike—showing the flight paths, ship positions, and timing that allowed Japan’s carrier force to severely damage Battleship Row in just 110 minutes while catching US defenses off guard.

4-minute overview of gold mining in the Amazon rainforest

A 2022 NBC news investigation of gold mining in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest. Much of the $3B in illegal gold is trafficked to the US every year.

Track where your plastic trash will be in 20 years

This map illustrates the fate of floating plastic 20 years from now. Simply add a location of choice and see the journey unfold.

Explore an interactive map of battles from the American Revolution, along with detailed summaries of each engagement

Satellite imagery of the massive seaweed blob in the Atlantic

A belt of sargassum seaweed that stretches from the west coast of Africa to the Gulf of Mexico is the largest on record for March.

See how each of the more than two million known species relates to each other—and to common ancestors—in this zoomable tree of life.

See how each of the more than two million known species relates to each other—and to common ancestors—in this zoomable tree of life.

Explore our favorite visualization of the immense scale of space, from an astronaut to the size of the observable universe

Visualize the path of every solar eclipse from 1900 to 2099 and see what each looks like when observed from different locations on Earth.

See how Ebola tore through Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia in 2014-2016.

Stanford built a Google Maps for the Roman Empire, revealing how much it cost to travel in the ancient world

Volcanic activity may have triggered the Black Death by spewing gases that led to crop failures in Europe, thus forcing the import of grain ships with plague-infested fleas.

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital that was home to an estimated population of 200,000 to 400,000.

Quincy Jones' 'Big Band Bossa Nova' helped introduce bossa nova—a jazz-influenced Brazilian genre—to the US

Explore chaos in this simulation of two double pendulums, where small differences in the release angles produce wildly different outcomes.

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

Watch how deep-sea mining equipment collects and processes polymetallic nodules—metal-rich, potato-shaped rocks—from the ocean floor and creates environmentally damaging plumes of sediments.

The US dollar is the most widely circulated currency in the world, and is involved in nearly 90% of global transactions

Walt Disney's early film 'Alice's Wonderland' was a groundbreaking innovation in the silent film era

Hear about the 250-year history of the United States Postal Service, complete with some of its strangest deliveries, important innovations, and the figures that made it an American institution.

Watch this video that uses Lego bricks to explain how venture capital works.

Hear 50 years of iconic hip-hop samples, the genre's foundational looped tracks

Alzheimer's can lead to brain shrinkage, with an average of around 2% of volume reduction per year

In 2018, 26-year-old missionary John Allen Chau was killed by tribesmen after attempting to reach and evangelize on India's isolated North Sentinel Island

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

El Niño, Spanish for 'the boy,' was named after Jesus Christ because the phenomenon resembled the weather changes observed around Christmastime.

Electrical grids worldwide must double their power delivery capacity by 2050 to meet surging demand from AI and electric vehicles.

The 19th-century painters of the Hudson River School were among the first American romantics, with portraits that displayed the natural beauty of the young country.

For centuries, it was common to sleep in two shifts: a few hours at the beginning of the night, and a longer period beginning around midnight