(Originally posted on my old blog 11/27/2007. And the map’s still on my wall.)

Back in August, when I spoke at the 2007 HSC Conference in Sacramento, the speakers’ booth, where my books were being sold, was opposite a booth from a company called MapLink, which, naturally, was showing a huge variety of maps.

I kept staring at one of them, not quite able to figure it out from a distance, and finally I went over to get a better look at what turned out to be the“World History Timeline: the rise and fall of nations,” produced by Oxford Cartographers.

I’ve had it on my wall above my desk for the past three months, and I’m still fascinated by it. It shows continents on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal axis, so you can see what was happening when in the world.

That big orange blob is the Roman Empire. The United States is a smallish purple blob down in the lower righthand corner, which looks larger than it should compared to the Roman Empire because as you move right—toward the present—the timeline stretches out, so that more recent times take up more space.

Even so, it rather puts American history in a somewhat larger perspective.