War Atlas: An interactive cartography of every named war in human history
waratlas.org
waratlas.org
There's a reason print maps have a standard set of colors, with very light blue for oceans, white for land backgrounds, and a variety of dark colors for features. The "modern white-on-black web aesthetic" only really works for text- and figure-heavy pages, where you must then use very light colors (white, yellow, light orange, light green) for features/lines.
ublock origin on mobile isn't worth it when brave exists.
An interesting effort though, and at least this one has a decent page about sourcing.
Getting borders exactly right has been pretty crazy to wrangle. Just doing it with LLMs hasn't proven a good route so I've been hand-correcting things slowly but surely. Long road to go.
Claude's TLDR of what's causing the problem (may or may not be accurate): "That animation loop is almost certainly leaking memory: each time-step it draws new border geometry (GeoJSON/vector shapes) but doesn't free the old frames, so RAM climbs without bound. When you interact — especially auto-playing the timeline — the tab grows until it swallows all 62 GB of RAM + swap and the kernel kills it."
Curiously, the website works just fine in chrome on android.
Blink monopoly strikes again, I guess.
Maybe it's a firefox bug that was introduced somewhere after 140? idk
EDIT: Now I see you installed it via flatpak. That is also a source of endless inconsistencies and instabilities. So you should maybe try the native fedora rpm.
1. Appreciate all the comments on how to make this better! This was a passion project to try to fulfill a dream project of mine I've had for well over a decade, and it's far from done. Any of your suggestions on how to improve it (the implementation, the data accuracy, etc.) are things I'll work to improve.
2. If you want to know more about its origins, you can read here: https://www.jtroll.com/writing/introducing-war-atlas.html
3. Yep, this was a Claude project. I'm not an engineer, so using an LLM was a necessary part of the process and it was a lot of fun.
4. I'm painfully aware that when one tries to encapsulate "every single conflict in human history," some data sets become incomplete or incorrect. The problem with this being a passion project in nights & weekends between being a parent and having a job is it's never done and frankly never peer reviewed; so your comments are very useful! Like I said, keep suggestions coming and I'll work on improvements.
The gravity of attempting to map the history of human conflict is heavy, but I hope everyone who took a moment to scrub the timeline here came away with some new insight. It was eye-opening and inspiring to make, and to try to respect that gravity. Cheers, all.
The areas where you see fewer wars don't necessarily lack written historical records, it might just be that nobody bothered to translate those records into a machine-readable format yet. (I'd guess this map is based on Wikidata.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_War
But to be fair, this is really cool.
Robinson Projection would be much more accurate.
Imagine foreign policy being distorted by the Mercator projection.
Let me guess, you're American? For the US, once Northern America was settled, the US established and the conflicts with Natives and the Brits resolved, all you had was the Civil War...
But here in Europe, up until 1945, it was constant warfare. And that not just the large wars between entire countries that some czars or emperors drew up, there were also countless unnamed skirmishes and dealings between all the countless fiefdoms.
No part of that statement is accurate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
As that list shows, that's not how things happened. There were major wars with the Native Americans all throughout the 19th century.
If for some reason you only want to include wars with Europeans and European colonies (I have no idea why you would though), the Mexican-American war, and the Spanish-American war are the big ones you missed. The War of 1812 was also another big war after the US had previously resolved our conflict with the British.
There were tons of other smaller skirmishes in North America. The Patriot War, the Aroostook War, the Reform War, the Cortina Troubles, the Utah War etc.
>once Northern America was settled
You can't even begin to say "once North America was settled" until the end of the 19th century.
the explosion of dots from the civil war is really something!
> Estimates: 600,000+ Ukrainian military deaths; 100,000+ Russian deaths; 30,000-40,000 civilian deaths.
This is VERY wrong. Almost all estimates go for at least 3x higher Russian casualties than Ukrainian. Russia has been attacking for 4+ years just throwing bodies at the problem with Ukrainians defending with technology. Where do these estimates even come from? Makes me question the validity of the information on this site
The UI looks like what Claude would generate, and I'd guess the data was scraped and compiled the same way - but it's not clear how it could reference a Wikipedia page and use numbers that contradict it.
Unless russian efforts to flood the internet with English-language news sites pushing the russian narrative into training sets and retrieval [2] are working. There is even a website tracking the known russian networks that flood the internet with news articles [3].
[1] https://waratlas.org/#year=2026&conflict=russo-ukrainian-war...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/21/english-langua...
Anyway, the Western stereotype of "Russian human wave attacks" is mostly wrong. Even when Russia is just throwing bodies into the fray (like the convict troops in Bakhmut), those can't really be described as "human wave" tactics (again, they're small infantry teams infiltrating at night). And Ukraine has thrown lots of hastily mobilized cannon fodder at the front as well: look for videos of protesting TDF soldiers and their relatives on Telegram if you don't believe me.
I feel like you're not really replying to the comment above.
If Ukraine is treating their soldiers better now, it’s at least partly because they’re running out of them.
We are talking about the numbers being way off, and you are seemingly picking a bone with Ukraine. It’s like you are having an entirely separate and somewhat related discussion.
But the numbers for Ukraine and russian federation seem to be swapped: Ukraine does not even have 600 k soldiers, so probably in 10-20 or so years cannot have these many loses without front collapse.
Even the Russian MOD own numbers for recruitment and numbers stationed in Ukraine shows that there is at least ~1.1 million personal missing.
PS Also, some numbers count civilians and others just count military. And usually civilian dead > military dead in most wars.
I can't find numbers or more information about this because Google has stopped returning results that match my queries.