A living atlas of world history
Rewind any place
to any decade
Turn the globe, pick any five years, and read what was happening there, with pictures and film from the time. Click anywhere new and WorldRewind researches it for you.
About and featured storiesRewind any place to any decade
WorldRewind is an interactive world history map. Turn the globe, pick a place, and move the timeline to any decade. Each story tells you what happened there and then in plain words, with pictures and film from the time, the borders of that year, and what was going on elsewhere in the world at the same moment.
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In August 1883 the volcanic island of Krakatoa tore itself apart in one of the most violent eruptions in…
Paris marked the centenary of the French Revolution with the Exposition Universelle, and Gustave Eiffel's…
Pierre de Coubertin's revived Olympics opened in Athens in April 1896, with 241 athletes from 14 nations…
After a failed French attempt in the 1880s, the United States took over construction in 1904. Ten years and…
Before dawn on 18 April 1906 a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck the northern California coast. Fires burned…
British and French forces launched a vast offensive against German lines on 1 July 1916. The British Army…
Food shortages and war losses brought crowds into the streets of Petrograd in February 1917 and forced Tsar…
Once the hyperinflation of 1923 was tamed, Weimar Germany entered a brief boom. Berlin became one of the…
After years of speculation the New York Stock Exchange collapsed in late October 1929, with Black Thursday…
Severe drought and decades of deep ploughing stripped the topsoil from the southern plains. Huge dust storms…
On 6 August 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, followed three days later by a second…
British rule in India ended at midnight on 14 to 15 August 1947, when the subcontinent was divided into India…
After victory in the Chinese Civil War, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China from Tiananmen…
On 6 March 1957 the Gold Coast became Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African colony to gain independence from…
In the mid-1960s London became the capital of youth culture. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Mary Quant's…
On 16 July 1969 a Saturn V rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center carrying Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin…
On the night of 9 November 1989 East German authorities opened the border crossings after a garbled press…
In April 1994 South Africans of all races voted together for the first time, with long queues stretching…
At midnight on 30 June 1997 Britain transferred sovereignty over Hong Kong to China after 156 years of…
Inspired by the uprising in Tunisia, hundreds of thousands of protesters occupied Tahrir Square in January…
Collections gather stories from different places and decades that have something in common.
See where events took place and what the borders looked like at the time. It helps with world history, US history and European history classes, and with revision before a test.
Put the globe on the classroom screen, move the timeline, and let students compare places side by side in the same decade.
Look up the city you are visiting and rewind it decade by decade, so the streets and sights make more sense when you get there.
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Text written by WorldRewind. Photos and film load from Wikimedia Commons and are credited individually. WorldRewind is an independent project and is not affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation.