History websites for the curious

History is easier to love when you can poke it. The history websites in this category are archives, timelines and time machines built for curious people rather than students cramming for an exam.

Histography is a dot-filled timeline where every dot is an event from Wikipedia, stretching from the Big Bang to today; scrub through it and click to read. Who Was Alive? lets you type a year and see which historical figures overlapped, which is a quick way to discover that two famous people were practically neighbors. David Rumsey Historical Map Collection offers tens of thousands of scanned old maps you can overlay with modern ones.

The web has a history of its own, and it is well covered. The Wayback Machine stores billions of snapshots, so you can look up a site from your childhood and see what remains. oldweb.today goes further, displaying archived pages inside emulated period browsers. Then there are the odd corners: Priyom.org documents number stations on shortwave radio, and TEXTFILES.COM preserves text files from the dial-up bulletin board era.

If you prefer your history in readable chunks, Damn Interesting and Futility Closet specialize in strange true stories and forgotten curiosities.

Keep exploring with the interesting websites list, the Nostalgia & Retro category, or Internet Rabbit Holes. To jump to a random decade, there is always the button.