Every History Crunch timeline in one place. Each one walks a topic in order, one event at a time, and every entry links to the full article behind it. Open any of them and you can narrow the whole timeline down to a single question.
Ancient Rome is the story of how a town on a river in central Italy came to govern the whole Mediterranean, and then how it stopped.
The Middle Ages is the thousand years between the fall of the western Roman Empire and the Renaissance, and it is the period most people know least accurately.
The Crusades were two centuries of wars in which the Christian rulers of Europe tried to take and hold Jerusalem and the land around it, and the Muslim rulers of Egypt and Syria tried…
The Renaissance, French for ‘rebirth’, is the three centuries in which Europe rediscovered ancient Greece and Rome and made from them new art, new learning and, in the end, new science.
The Aztec Empire rose in less than a hundred years and fell in two.
The Black Death is the plague pandemic that reached Europe in 1347 and killed about half of everyone in it within four years, the largest share of a population any disaster has ever…
The Age of Exploration is the two centuries in which European ships worked out the shape of the world, opened sea routes to Asia and the Americas, and destroyed two of the largest…
The Age of Absolutism is the three centuries in which the kings of Europe gathered every power of the state into their own hands and claimed to hold it from God.
The Age of Enlightenment is the long argument, running from Luther’s theses in 1517 to the Congress of Vienna in 1815, over a single question: what should we believe, and on whose…
The Age of Imperialism is the period in which a handful of countries came to rule most of the world.
British imperialism in India is the story of how a trading company chartered in London in 1600 came to govern a subcontinent, how the Crown took over from it in 1858, and how a…
Slavery in the United States ran for two hundred and forty-six years, from the sale of about twenty Africans at Jamestown in 1619 to the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in…
The American Revolution is the story of how thirteen British colonies argued themselves out of an empire and then had to invent a country.
The Industrial Revolution is the two hundred years in which human beings stopped making things by hand in their own homes and started making them by machine in somebody else’s building.
The Napoleonic Era ran from the coup that made a Corsican general the ruler of France in November of 1799 to his final defeat at Waterloo in June of 1815, and this timeline reaches…
The French Revolution was the ten years in which France destroyed a thousand-year-old monarchy, declared that men are born free and equal in rights, executed its king and queen, killed…
The Age of Nationalism is the century in which the idea that a people should govern itself in its own state remade the map of Europe.
The American Civil War is the story of a country that could not agree whether slavery should spread, tried to settle it three times by compromise, and then fought about it for four…
The Scramble for Africa is the forty-four years in which European powers took almost the entire African continent.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 ended three centuries of rule by the tsars and created the world’s first communist state.
World War I was fought from 1914 to 1918 between the Allies, led by France, Britain, Russia and from 1917 the United States, and the Central Powers, led by Germany, Austria-Hungary and…
The Great Depression was the worst economic collapse in the history of the modern world.
Nazi Germany was the dictatorship that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party built on the ruins of Germany’s first democracy and ran from 1933 to 1945.
The Holocaust is the murder of six million Jews, two out of every three in Europe, by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945, together with millions of others the…
World War II killed more people than any other war, an estimated 70 to 85 million.
The Cold War was the forty-six-year contest between the United States and the Soviet Union that began when the Second World War ended and finished when the Soviet Union did.
The Korean War was the first hot war of the Cold War and the only war of the twentieth century that has never ended.
The Vietnam War was the twenty-year fight over whether Vietnam, divided in 1954, would be reunited under the communist government in Hanoi.
Each timeline can be filtered to a single research question, which turns it into a short ordered path through the events that answer that question. Every path has its own web address, so a question can be set as an assignment and a student opens the timeline already narrowed to it.