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

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.

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...

The history of infographics: cave art to interactive visuals

When did humans first create infographics? This article and related infographics detail how artistic data representations have evolved alongside humans and other hominins. The roots of infographics can be traced back to cave paintings, such as...

What was life like as a slave in the US?

Over 2,500 former slaves were interviewed by writers and journalists in the late 1930s as part of the US Federal Writer's Project. The collection recorded images and firsthand verbal accounts of life as a slave, eight of which are highlighted in this article at the Library of Congress. See the humanity in each of these individuals with their firsthand accounts.

How the US government used photography to fight poverty

In the 1930s, the US was in crisis, and the government turned to photography to win public support. Images of rural poverty stirred empathy, shifting public opinion and helping pave the way for New Deal reforms.

An archive of the art of the Sanborn fire insurance maps

For a century, US insurance companies used Sanborn Fire Maps to decide the premiums customers would pay for fire insurance. These maps were designed to show the building materials used in each structure in 12,000 communities across 300,000 maps. While they have become obsolete, these maps are still useful for historians and urban designers, and anyone interested in lovely, original typography. Dive into the most artful Sanborn Fire Maps with this passion project collection.

Abolitionists shaped American history from the Revolution to the Civil War

Abolitionists of all backgrounds organized against slavery from the founding era onward. Historian Manisha Sinha argues that their decades of activism fundamentally shaped American democracy and made emancipation possible.

Everything you need to know about demography in 10 graphs

This 17-minute video explains the future of the world through demographic data points. Dr. Paul Morland has published three books on demography. In this talk, he shows how demography is a powerful lens to view global transformations. Included are...

Enslaved and in debt: the French roots of Haiti's struggles

This investigative infographic details how Haiti was forced to pay for its freedom twice: once in blood and once in cash. In August 1791, Haiti's enslaved population launched a revolt against French colonists, successfully establishing Haiti as a...

Explore a comprehensive archive of US presidential election data

This University of California, Santa Barbara archive compiles presidential election data from 1789 to the present, including popular vote totals, turnout figures, and contextual resources that explain how the electoral process and political landscape have evolved.

The origins and growth of the Juneteenth holiday

The American holiday of Juneteenth celebrates the emancipation of African American slaves, a process which unfolded over the four years of the Civil War and several months afterward. June 19 took on special significance as the day Union officials proclaimed slaves free in Texas in 1865, the last holdout after the Civil War ended. Roughly 4 million people were freed from slavery as a result of emancipation. Read this brief article summarizing the holiday's development.

Visualizing how American men and women spend every hour of the day, by decade of life

Drawing on three years of Census time-use data, the tool tracks 12 activities—sleep, work, housework, caregiving, TV, and more—across age groups from the 20s through 70s. One persistent gap: women spend 45 more minutes per day on housework than men on average.

More than 2,000 Black Americans were victims of racial terror lynchings from 1865 to 1876

The Equal Justice Initiative documented over 2,000 lynchings of Black people during Reconstruction—violence that attempted to restore white supremacy, suppress Black political power, and terrorize communities in the aftermath of emancipation.

See a census of college students dating back to 1850

The first mention of college students in census surveys dates back to 1850, when officials realized a sizeable proportion of Americans lived on campus. More modern data from the National Center for Education Statistics capture the growth in the student population, with a breakdown beginning at the end of World War II with gender and type-of-institution data.

Visualizing 100 years of Pulitzers

This fascinating data visualization breaks down a century of Pulitzer Prizes. Award categories are laid out against a timeline, and the symbols used to represent each winner indicate the topic of the winning work; the number of prizes won by that outlet thus far; and whether the prize was awarded to an individual or a newsroom. For the best viewing experience, zoom in using the magnifying glass on the cursor until it hits full-screen mode.

A graphic illustration of death tolls in historical events and wars

Which killed more, the American Civil War or the Korean War? Hurricane Katrina or the Titanic sinking? You’ll be surprised how wrong you are about death tolls.

The South built its wealth largely from slave labor

Before the Civil War, the Southern economy relied on roughly 4 million enslaved people producing cash crops such as cotton, rice, and sugarcane. Their forced labor generated immense profits—the South produced 75% of the world's cotton by 1860.

Did a Smithsonian anthropologist steal people's brains?

This comic examines "racial brain collection" of Ales Hrdlicka, the Smithsonian's head of physical anthropology during the early 1900s. Hrdlicka was a white supremacist who sought physical evidence for his theories on anatomical differences between...

Explore the important legislation that has shaped US immigration policy

Read about pivotal immigration legislation from the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act—the first law restricting immigration by nationality—through DACA, examining how economic conditions, national security concerns, and social attitudes shaped American immigration policy throughout history.

Visualizing Ben & Jerry's legendary flavors

This delightful data visualization breaks down all the flavors of Ben & Jerry’s across the globe, exploring every possible combination of base flavors and mix-ins.

Explore new and contemporary perspectives with Emerging Civil War

Emerging Civil War brings together historians and writers who offer fresh research, essays, and battlefield stories that uncover overlooked events, people, and places—showing that scholarship on the war is still evolving over 160 years later.

The college degrees with the highest unemployment rates, visualized

Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows which college degrees have had the highest unemployment rates in the US as of May 2025. Degrees in anthropology, physics, and computer engineering ranked high on the list.

Read 'The New Negro,' the influential collection edited by Alain Locke

The 1925 anthology features early works by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, WEB DuBois, and more. You can read it in its entirety—for free—through the Internet Archive.

The current federal budget, deficit, and debt, in charts

The US Treasury regularly publishes updated data on the federal budget, and this site hosts visualizations of that data. See reports on spending, revenues, deficits, and where the national debt stands.

The Freedmen's Bureau was created to assist formerly enslaved people after the Civil War

Created in 1865, the Freedmen's Bureau aided 4 million formerly enslaved people and some poor Southern whites—distributing food; mediating labor disputes; and founding thousands of schools, including HBCUs Howard, Fisk, and Morehouse. Despite major achievements, the bureau was dissolved in 1872.

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

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

Explore an interactive map built from more than 100,000 survey responses on where people find joy in their lives

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

The original copy of the Declaration of Independence is not a pristine document, and even features a smudged anonymous handprint in the bottom left corner.

See 33 images that became central to huge scandals, including a young Charles and Camilla, Michael Jackson's baby on a hotel balcony, and Hugh Grant's mugshot.

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.

The first line of 'immortal' human cells, which can divide indefinitely and are used in scientific research, was nonconsensually taken from a Black woman.

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.

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

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.

The Brothers Grimm were lawyers before they were storytellers, and became interested in fairy tales as they began investigating how rules and customs had been passed down through cultures.

See images of medical cases of firework injuries shared on this 'Instagram for doctors.' (Warning: Graphic content)

The story of Dollree Mapp, whose legal challenge over her 1957 conviction for possessing "obscene material" led to a major strengthening of the Fourth Amendment

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

View the ten deadliest tornadoes in US history.

The word 'jazz' evolved from 'jasm,' 19th-century American slang for 'energy'

'Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,' a work by American painter Thomas Moran, inspired Congress to establish Yellowstone National Park.

Gerrymandering works through two techniques: cracking opposing voters across districts to dilute their power, and packing them into a few to waste their votes in lopsided majorities.

Clever Hans was a 1900s horse that was believed to be able to solve math equations, tell time, and read and comprehend German, until a psychology student discovered how he got his answers.

The American Society of Civil Engineers' infrastructure report card gave the US a C in 2025, its highest grade since the project launched in 1998.

How the most famous Ebola book, The Hot Zone, which sold 3.5 million copies and was translated into 30 languages, got aspects of the disease so wrong.

Play the role of a student in a game where you try to navigate college and remain debt-free, selecting different income levels, high school experience, race, ethnicity, and more.