HISTORYPRINT
Discover your city's historical DNA
What it is
HistoryPrint takes a city — any city — and tells you how much of human history happened within reach of it. It scores proximity to roughly 13,000 events spanning five thousand years and assembles a personality archetype out of the patterns it finds. Plagues converging on your region? You're a Survivor's Legacy. Revolutions clustered around your streets? Born in Fire.
The point is not precision. The point is to stand in the shadow of everything that ever happened nearby and feel the weight of it.
Where the data comes from
The events database draws on Wikipedia and Wikidata historical event lists, curated and normalized into a single schema (year, lat/lng, category, significance, era, description). Multi-regional events that span centuries and continents — Black Death, the Industrial Revolution, the Crusades, the Holocaust, the Mongol campaigns and a few others — are stored as a primary point plus a list of locally-relevant cities and dates, so a Moscow query for the Black Death surfaces 1353 (Moscow) rather than 1347 (Bucharest, where the European pandemic was first localized in the dataset).
Categorization, significance scoring, and the archetype taxonomy are subjective. Reasonable historians would draw the lines differently.
How the score works
For each event near you the contribution is:
(significance/100)² × exp(−distance/decay) × era_weight × category_weight × 1000
decay is 500 km for war/battle events (they only mark the place where they happened) and 1500 km for everything else (revolutions, pandemics, technological breakthroughs all radiate outward). era_weight rewards older events (an ancient siege outweighs a 20th-century one of the same significance) so contemporary noise doesn't drown out civilizational milestones. category_weight reflects how widely an event historically reshaped its region — pandemics and genocides high, individual battles low.
The archetype is decided from the same per-category signal, but with a sharper proximity decay (300 km) and a rarity-dampening factor: rare categories don't get unfair weight just because the dataset has fewer of them.
Known limitations
Significant cities tend to score in the same neighborhood as their famous neighbors — Berlin is close to Auschwitz, the Holocaust dominates the breakdown, the Survivor's Legacy archetype fires for half of Central Europe. That's a feature of the input, not a bug.
Most events outside Europe, North America, the Middle East, and East Asia are under-represented in the source datasets. We're aware. If you spot a wrong date, location, or category, click an event marker on the map and use the “Report incorrect data” link inside the drawer.