MnemoClio

The history of every country on one timeline you can move.

Drag the timeline to travel through time. The wheel zooms from five centuries down to five years. Press Play and the cursor runs: what it passes lights up on the timeline and on the map, and lands in the feed.

The cartridge id is @mnemosyne-plugins/mnemo-clio. Its code lives at Mnemosyne-OS/MnemoClio.

What is on it

• 197 countries, plus ended states and territories. Each name is written in the language of its country.
• Regimes and their successions, wars with their battles and fronts, and the great periods that contain several wars.
• Heads of state and heads of government, term by term.
• About 20,700 events by subject: Births, Works, Discoveries, Knowledge, Buildings, Treaties and constitutions, Revolts and struggles, Disasters, Exploration and space, Movements, Sport and more.

Some subjects keep only the best known items, and the window says so. A country with few events has few on Wikidata. It does not mean it had little history.

Move through time

• Drag to travel, use the wheel to zoom, double-click to dive in.
• Zoom in, Zoom out and Whole timeline sit in the Display menu, with the names setting.
• Play and Pause run the cursor. Play speed sets the years per second.
• Go to… jumps to a year. Loop the screen replays what is on screen.
• At random picks a year that has events, then lets time run.

Countries and layers

• Add a country… takes a name in any language: "Japan", "日本", "Ottoman". The 15 best covered adds the most documented ones. Back to 5 countries resets the list.
• Layers turns on or off Events, Wars, Rulers, Epidemics and Religions. only shows one layer alone.
• War clouds draw a cloud over the battles of each war.

The map

The map follows the cursor. It shows battles as large dots and the places of the decade as small dots. Globe turns it into a globe.

Today's borders ship with the cartridge. Borders of the time come from another project under the GPL-3.0 licence, so MnemoClio does not carry them. After you press Download the maps, your computer downloads the map of each date you look at from GitHub, 1 to 3 MB each.

Layout sets the share of the screen: Timeline, Balanced or Map.

Cards

Click anything to open its card. A card links to Wikidata and shows a Wikipedia summary. Meanwhile, elsewhere lists what happened the same year in the other countries.

Names

Original language writes every name as on Wikidata. Names in your language uses the Wikidata translation where there is one. Names without one stay in their own language, in italics.

On the board

• A fact on the board pins a known event on your board, a new one each day. Dates are years: it says "in 1789", never "on this day".
• Exploded view opens the map, the timeline and the panel as three windows on a desktop of their own. Single view goes back.

Where your data goes

• The history data ships with the cartridge and is read from your disk.
• Borders of the time are downloaded from GitHub, only after you agree.
• Card summaries are read from Wikipedia when you open a card.
• Pour the history of a country into memory writes one Memory Pack for that country, one chronicle per moment. The chat uses it once you pick that pack in its scope. It needs the knowledge folder, set in the Memory Packs tab of MnemoHub.

Data sources and licences, as listed in the cartridge:

• Events, regimes, wars, rulers: Wikidata, CC0.
• Today's borders: Natural Earth, public domain.
• Borders of the time: historical-basemaps by A. Ourednik, GPL-3.0, not shipped.
• Population: HYDE 3.3, Gapminder v7, UN WPP 2024 and the World Bank, via Our World in Data, CC BY.
• Card summaries: Wikipedia, CC BY-SA.

For agents

Action	Effect	What it does
status	read	The years on screen, countries, subjects, what is open.
listCountries	read	Countries, ended states and territories, with ids.
search	read	Events, wars, regimes, rulers and periods by name.
meanwhile	read	What happened elsewhere the same year.
goTo	write	Glides to a year or a period.
chooseCountries	write	Adds, removes or sets the countries.
setLayers	write	Subjects, wars, clouds, rulers, epidemics, religions.
open, close	write	Opens or closes a card.
zoom, move	write	Zooms, or moves the cursor by years.
setView	write	Names language and borders of today or of the era.
random, play	write	A random moment, or play and pause.

Voice examples: "show the French Revolution", "move the timeline 50 years forward", "show what happened elsewhere that year", "show me a random moment".