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Second World War battlefield at dusk with soldiers, aircraft, smoke and ruined cities.
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Start here · 1939 CE – 1945 CE

The Second World War

World War II became a global fight against dictatorship and genocide.

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8 connected stories

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Europe in the 1930s: marching columns, mass rallies, and the shadow of another war gathering over the continent.

Modern

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The Causes of the Second World War

1919 CE – 1939 CE

Berlin in the 1930s beneath Nazi banners and mass rallies

Modern

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Nazi Germany

1933 CE – 1945 CE

Unemployed workers, police, blank campaign boards, newspapers, and anxious passersby crowd a rain-darkened late-Weimar street.

Modern

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The Rise of Adolf Hitler

1919 CE – 1934 CE

The gatehouse of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi killing centre, photographed after liberation in 1945

Modern

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The Holocaust

1933 CE – 1945 CE

Carrier aircraft, burning ships, occupied cities, and island fighting across the vast Pacific war.

Modern

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The Pacific War

1931 CE – 1945 CE

German columns moving east in 1941 as Soviet cities burn and civilians flee the widening front.

Modern

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Operation Barbarossa

1940 CE – 1942 CE

RAF fighters and German bombers over southern England as searchlights and fires mark the opening of the Blitz in 1940.

Modern

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The Battle of Britain

1940 CE

Allied troops landing in Normandy as landing craft open under fire and smoke rises across the coast in June 1944.

Modern

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D-Day and the Liberation of Europe

1943 CE – 1945 CE

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85 stories

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85 stories in chronological order

The planned cities and river plains of the ancient Indus Valley civilisation.
StoryPrehistoric

The Indus Valley

7000 BCE → 1900 BCE
Planned cities reveal a brilliant civilisation we still cannot fully read.
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Bronze ritual vessels, oracle bones, and royal temples from the Yellow River civilisations of ancient China.
StoryPrehistoric

Early China

5000 BCE → 771 BCE
Bronze, writing and kingship shaped early China.
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The ancient cities of Mesopotamia rising from the floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates.
StoryPrehistoric

Mesopotamia

6500 BCE → 539 BCE
Between two rivers, people built cities and invented writing.
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A Persian royal figure overlooking a monumental palace terrace with carved reliefs, columns, guards, and gathered subjects
StoryClassical

The Persian Empire

550 BCE → 330 BCE
Persian kings ruled a vast empire through roads and royal power.
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Buddhist monks teaching lay followers near a stupa and trade road in ancient India.
StoryClassical

The Rise and Spread of Buddhism

534 BCE → 232 BCE
The Buddha's teaching grew into a faith across Asia.
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Qin Shi Huang overlooking officials, soldiers, standard weights, coins, and bamboo records after the unification of China.
StoryClassical

Qin China and Unification

403 BCE → 202 BCE
Qin unification created the model for imperial China.
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Mauryan officials and advisers studying maps and palm-leaf records inside a palace overlooking Pataliputra and the Ganges.
StoryClassical

The Maurya Empire

322 BCE → 185 BCE
One dynasty united much of India for the first time.
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Sunlit temples above a bustling Greek polis, hoplites assembling below as philosophers debate in a colonnaded square
StoryClassical

Ancient Greece

800 BCE → 146 BCE
Greek city-states shaped ideas about politics, art and war.
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Roman and Carthaginian forces facing one another across the Mediterranean during the Punic Wars.
StoryClassical

The Punic Wars

264 BCE → 133 BCE
Rome and Carthage fought to rule the Mediterranean.
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Alexander the Great on horseback leading his cavalry charge at Gaugamela, the Persian army breaking before him across a vast open plain
StoryClassical

Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic World

359 BCE → 30 BCE
Alexander's conquests spread Greek power across the ancient world.
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The Nile flowing past temples, pyramids, and royal cities of ancient Egypt.
StoryPrehistoric

Ancient Egypt

3100 BCE → 30 BCE
The Nile helped Egypt's pharaohs rule for thousands of years.
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The Roman Republic with senators, citizens, soldiers and the growing city of Rome.
StoryClassical

The Roman Republic

509 BCE → 27 BCE
Rome's republic conquered widely before power fell to emperors.
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The Han dynasty at its height, with Chang'an, imperial officials, frontier soldiers, and Silk Road routes extending west.
StoryClassical

The Han Dynasty

202 BCE → 220 CE
The Han dynasty gave China institutions and a lasting name.
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Celtic leaders and warriors look over a hillfort settlement before Roman conquest.
StoryClassical

The Celtic World Before Rome

800 BCE → 400 CE
Celtic communities shaped Europe before Roman conquest.
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The Roman Empire at its height, with imperial architecture, roads, soldiers and Mediterranean trade.
StoryClassical

The Roman Empire

27 BCE → 476 CE
Rome grew from one city into an empire that shaped the world.
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Early Muslim armies overlooking a walled city across a desert landscape at sunrise.
StoryMiddle Ages

The Rise of Islam

610 CE → 762 CE
Islam began in Arabia and spread across continents.
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A Roman city falling into ruin as Germanic warriors cross the frontier
StoryClassical

The Fall of Rome to Early Medieval Europe

376 CE → 800 CE
Rome's fall opened the way to medieval Europe.
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Charlemagne with bishops, scholars and Frankish soldiers overlooking a Carolingian city at sunset.
StoryMiddle Ages

Charlemagne and the Carolingian Empire

751 CE → 843 CE
Charlemagne built a western empire after Rome's fall.
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Timber halls, misty fields, shield walls and monastery towers in Anglo-Saxon England.
StoryClassical

The Anglo-Saxons

410 CE → 886 CE
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms helped create early medieval England.
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Viking longships crossing rough northern seas toward coastal settlements and trade routes.
StoryMiddle Ages

The Viking Age

793 CE → 1066 CE
Viking voyages brought raids, trade and settlement across Europe.
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Armoured Norman horsemen during the Norman Conquest of England.
StoryMiddle Ages

The Norman Conquest of England

911 CE → 1154 CE
One invasion in 1066 changed England for centuries.
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River traders, wooden strongholds and domed churches in the medieval world of Kievan Rus.
StoryMiddle Ages

Kievan Rus

862 CE → 1240 CE
River trade helped build the medieval world of Rus.
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Scholars, translators, merchants and astronomers working beside books, maps and instruments in Abbasid Baghdad.
StoryMiddle Ages

The Abbasid Golden Age

750 CE → 1258 CE
Baghdad became a centre of books, science and big ideas.
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Crusader knights marching beneath a blazing sun toward the walled city of Jerusalem
StoryMiddle Ages

The Crusades

1095 CE → 1291 CE
Wars over Jerusalem reshaped Europe and the Middle East.
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Mongol horsemen crossing the vast Eurasian steppe.
StoryMiddle Ages

The Mongol Empire

1162 CE → 1294 CE
Steppe riders built the largest land empire in history.
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A medieval castle overlooking farmland and a village of serfs
StoryMiddle Ages

Feudalism and Medieval Society

800 CE → 1300 CE
Land, loyalty and the Church shaped medieval daily life.
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Medieval monks illuminating manuscripts in a great stone abbey
StoryClassical

The Rise of the Medieval Church

476 CE → 1309 CE
The medieval Church grew powerful through monasteries and popes.
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A wealthy Malian ruler watches merchants weighing gold in a busy Sahelian city with mud-brick architecture, camels, scholars and traders.
StoryMiddle Ages

The Mali Empire

1200 CE → 1400 CE
Mali grew rich through gold and trade, then amazed the medieval world.
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A Byzantine ruler overlooking Constantinople, Hagia Sophia and ships on the Bosporus beneath imperial purple banners.
StoryClassical

The Byzantine Empire

330 CE → 1453 CE
The eastern Roman Empire survived for centuries from Constantinople.
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French and English soldiers clashing outside a medieval city during the Hundred Years War.
StoryMiddle Ages

The Hundred Years War

1328 CE → 1453 CE
England and France fought for a crown for more than a century.
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Illustrative reconstruction: Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine in a Norman royal hall with clerks and guards; a symbolic view of dynastic government around 1180.
StoryMiddle Ages

The Plantagenets

1154 CE → 1485 CE
Three centuries of kings, conquest and a crown divided against itself.
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Illustrative reconstruction of a late-fifteenth-century English royal army assembling under a royal banner on misty fields.
StoryMiddle Ages

The Wars of the Roses

1453 CE → 1487 CE
Rival kings, changing loyalties and a crown no victory could fully secure.
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Early Christians gathering across the Roman world as imperial cities, churches and manuscripts mark the spread of the faith.
StoryClassical

The Rise of Christianity

30 CE → 1500 CE
Christianity grew from a small movement into an empire-wide faith.
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Tenochtitlan rising from Lake Texcoco with temples, causeways and Aztec warriors.
StoryMiddle Ages

The Aztec Empire

1200 CE → 1521 CE
The Aztecs built a great city empire before Spanish conquest.
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Ocean-going caravels arriving on distant shores during the Age of Exploration
StoryMiddle Ages

The Age of Exploration

1415 CE → 1600 CE
Ocean voyages connected continents in a new global age.
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Renaissance scholars and artists in an Italian city, surrounded by books, architecture, and scientific instruments.
StoryMiddle Ages

The Renaissance

1304 CE → 1600 CE
Old learning, new art and fresh ideas helped remake Europe.
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Queen Elizabeth I presiding over a flourishing Elizabethan court during England’s golden age
StoryEarly Modern

The Elizabethan Age

1558 CE → 1603 CE
Elizabethan England mixed theatre, sea power and royal danger.
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King Henry VIII presiding over a court during the English Reformation
StoryEarly Modern

The English Reformation

1527 CE → 1603 CE
A royal divorce turned into a religious revolution.
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A Tudor royal court with Henry VIII and richly dressed nobles in a grand palace interior
StoryMiddle Ages

The Tudor Dynasty

1485 CE → 1603 CE
Tudor rulers reshaped England through power, faith and family.
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Parliamentarian and Royalist forces preparing for battle during the English Civil War
StoryEarly Modern

The English Civil War

1642 CE → 1660 CE
King and Parliament fought over who should rule England.
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Astronomers and natural philosophers observing the cosmos with early scientific instruments.
StoryEarly Modern

The Scientific Revolution

1500 CE → 1720 CE
New experiments changed how people understood nature.
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Mughal emperor and courtiers in a richly decorated palace overlooking the Taj Mahal under construction beside the Yamuna River.
StoryEarly Modern

The Mughal Empire

1526 CE → 1739 CE
Mughal rulers built one of India's richest and most powerful empires.
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American revolutionaries and British troops facing each other during the struggle for independence.
StoryModern

The American Revolution and Early Republic

1763 CE → 1791 CE
Thirteen colonies rebelled and created a new republic.
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Revolutionary Paris — crowds storming the Bastille, the tricolour rising over the old order.
StoryModern

The French Revolution

1787 CE → 1799 CE
France's old order collapsed into revolution, terror and republic.
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Illustrative reconstruction: a symbolic imperial assembly around 1500, with princes, clergy, clerks and a city delegate representing the empire’s many centres of authority.
StoryMiddle Ages

The Holy Roman Empire

962 CE → 1806 CE
An imperial crown, many centres of power and eight centuries of negotiation.
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Napoleonic armies crossing Europe between revolution and empire.
StoryModern

Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars

1789 CE → 1815 CE
Napoleon turned revolution into empire and total war.
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British steamships and sailing vessels bombard Qing coastal defences during the Opium Wars.
StoryModern

The Opium Wars

1757 CE → 1861 CE
British gunboats forced China into unequal treaties and lasting crisis.
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Union and Confederate soldiers advance across a smoky battlefield as enslaved people move toward freedom in the distance.
StoryModern

The American Civil War and the Abolition of Slavery

1861 CE → 1865 CE
Civil war decided the Union's survival and ended slavery.
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Factories, steam engines and railways of the Industrial Revolution.
StoryEarly Modern

The Industrial Revolution

1700 CE → 1870 CE
Machines and factories changed work, cities and everyday life.
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British imperial soldiers and Boer fighters on the South African veld during the Anglo-Boer War.
StoryModern

The Anglo Boer Conflict

1880 CE → 1902 CE
Britain's war with the Boers showed the human cost of empire.
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Emperor Meiji and officials overlooking a modernising Japanese city with railways, factories and imperial ceremony.
StoryEarly Modern

The Meiji Restoration

1603 CE → 1905 CE
Japan overthrew old rule and raced into the modern world.
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The Forbidden City in Beijing under the Qing dynasty, seat of imperial rule over the world's most populous empire.
StoryEarly Modern

The Qing Dynasty

1644 CE → 1912 CE
The Qing built China's largest empire before revolution ended it.
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First World War soldiers in muddy trenches at dawn beneath smoke and artillery fire.
StoryModern

The First World War

1914 CE → 1918 CE
One assassination helped pull Europe into total war.
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Crowds and armed workers in Petrograd during the Russian Revolution of 1917.
StoryModern

The Russian Revolution

1905 CE → 1922 CE
Revolution turned Russia's imperial collapse into Soviet power.
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Ottoman banners over Istanbul, with soldiers, merchants, mosques, and imperial ships linking three continents.
StoryMiddle Ages

The Ottoman Empire

1299 CE → 1923 CE
A small frontier dynasty became an empire across three continents.
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Delegates signing the Treaty of Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors in June 1919, watched by silent Allied officials as Germany's representatives took their seats
StoryModern

The Treaty of Versailles and Its Consequences

1918 CE → 1933 CE
A harsh peace after World War I helped fuel future conflict.
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Berlin in the 1920s, with crowds, political tension and the Reichstag in the background
StoryModern

Weimar Republic

1919 CE → 1933 CE
Germany's first democracy faced crisis before Hitler took power.
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Unemployed workers, police, blank campaign boards, newspapers, and anxious passersby crowd a rain-darkened late-Weimar street.
StoryModern

The Rise of Adolf Hitler

1919 CE → 1934 CE
Hitler used crisis and propaganda to destroy democracy.
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Europe in the 1930s: marching columns, mass rallies, and the shadow of another war gathering over the continent.
StoryModern

The Causes of the Second World War

1919 CE → 1939 CE
A fragile peace helped open the road to another world war.
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RAF fighters and German bombers over southern England as searchlights and fires mark the opening of the Blitz in 1940.
StoryModern

The Battle of Britain

1940 CE
Britain's air defence stopped Hitler's invasion plans.
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German columns moving east in 1941 as Soviet cities burn and civilians flee the widening front.
StoryModern

Operation Barbarossa

1940 CE → 1942 CE
Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union became a catastrophe.
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Allied troops landing in Normandy as landing craft open under fire and smoke rises across the coast in June 1944.
StoryModern

D-Day and the Liberation of Europe

1943 CE → 1945 CE
D-Day opened the road from Normandy to Nazi Germany.
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Japanese carrier aircraft on a flight deck at dawn with a warship in the background.
StoryModern

Imperial Japan

1868 CE → 1945 CE
Japan modernised fast and built an empire it lost in total war.
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Berlin in the 1930s beneath Nazi banners and mass rallies
StoryModern

Nazi Germany

1933 CE → 1945 CE
Germany's democracy collapsed into dictatorship, war and genocide.
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The gatehouse of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi killing centre, photographed after liberation in 1945
StoryModern

The Holocaust

1933 CE → 1945 CE
Nazi persecution became genocide, and memory became a duty.
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Carrier aircraft, burning ships, occupied cities, and island fighting across the vast Pacific war.
StoryModern

The Pacific War

1931 CE → 1945 CE
Japan's empire spread across the Pacific before defeat.
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Second World War battlefield at dusk with soldiers, aircraft, smoke and ruined cities.
StoryModern

The Second World War

1939 CE → 1945 CE
World War II became a global fight against dictatorship and genocide.
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Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin seated together at Yalta in 1945 — the last photograph of the Grand Alliance before the Cold War began to divide the world they had won
StoryModern

Origins of the Cold War

1941 CE → 1947 CE
Allies became rivals and divided the postwar world.
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A sweeping view of ships, ports, colonies, and anti-colonial protests across centuries of British imperial history.
StoryEarly Modern

The British Empire

1588 CE → 1947 CE
Britain built a vast empire that resistance later helped undo.
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Illustrative reconstruction: anonymous Chinese rural civilians carrying grain supplies beside Communist soldiers in northern China around 1948.
StoryModern

The Chinese Civil War

1927 CE → 1949 CE
A broken alliance, a revolution’s survival and a country divided.
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Korean War battlefield with soldiers advancing through smoke across a divided peninsula.
StoryModern

The Korean War

1950 CE → 1953 CE
War and outside intervention left Korea divided.
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Anonymous analysts and officers study aerial photographs, radio equipment, and naval plotting boards during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
StoryModern

The Cuban Missile Crisis

1962 CE
For thirteen days, the world stood close to nuclear war.
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AI-generated reconstruction of ordinary participants at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963.
StoryModern

The Civil Rights Movement

1954 CE → 1968 CE
Ordinary people challenged segregation and changed American democracy.
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An Ethiopian emperor on horseback with clergy, soldiers and imperial attendants in the Ethiopian highlands.
StoryModern

The Ethiopian Empire

1855 CE → 1974 CE
Ethiopia fought to stay independent before revolution ended its empire.
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American soldiers arriving in Vietnam as helicopters and jungle warfare define the conflict.
StoryModern

The Vietnam War

1955 CE → 1975 CE
Vietnam's war changed Southeast Asia and Cold War politics.
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A Mao-era rural commune shows a communal dining hall, schoolyard, bicycles, field labor, and distant industrial chimneys.
StoryModern

Mao's China

1949 CE → 1976 CE
Mao transformed China through revolution, control and upheaval.
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A brooding, minimalist Cold War skyline under a heavy grey sky, suggesting division, surveillance, and nuclear tension
StoryModern

The Cold War

1945 CE → 1991 CE
Two superpowers divided the world under nuclear threat.
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Citizens, clerks, soldiers, noticeboards, and a plain armored vehicle fill a winter Moscow street as Soviet authority unravels in 1991.
StoryModern

The Collapse of the Soviet Union

1985 CE → 1991 CE
Reform and nationalism brought down the Soviet Union.
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Soviet military parade in Moscow with red banners, soldiers, armoured vehicles, and a plain red wall panel.
StoryModern

The Soviets

1917 CE → 1991 CE
The Soviet Union rose from revolution and fell in 1991.
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South Africans queueing with identity documents in a rural setting during the transition from apartheid rule.
StoryModern

Apartheid South Africa

1910 CE → 1994 CE
South Africans resisted apartheid and won the right to vote.
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The former Yugoslav flag flies above travellers crossing a city square at dusk.
StoryModern

The Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia

1945 CE → 1999 CE
Yugoslavia's fragile union collapsed into nationalism and war.
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Skylines, cranes, container ports, and party symbolism representing China's rise from post-Mao recovery to global power.
StoryModern

The Rise of China

1976 CE → 2020 CE
China used reform and party control to become a global power.
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A fractured world map lit by digital networks, military aircraft overhead and rising skylines in Asia
StoryModern

The World After The Cold War

1991 CE → 2020 CE
After the Cold War, globalisation met new conflict and rivalry.
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Lower Manhattan in smoke, the Pentagon under guard, and American soldiers framed against the long post-9/11 wars.
StoryModern

The United States After 9/11

2001 CE → 2021 CE
After 9/11, America changed how it fought and watched the world.
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A winter view across Pyongyang civic space shows distant monuments, apartment blocks, loudspeakers, guards, and civilians moving under an overcast sky.
StoryModern

The Kim Dynasty

1945 CE → 2026 CE
North Korea's ruling family built a state around survival.
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