When reading a history book, I sometimes have a hard time internalizing when the events are taking place. Sure, I know the dates, but it takes a bit of effort to put them in a broader context, to understand where in history they belong. What usually helps is to put them in relation to other contemporaneous events. To play around with this, I've made Meanwhile Map. You select a date and a time window, then scroll around the world map to see a list of contemporaneous events. For example, yes, the Mughal Empire was founded by Babur in the 1520s, but it paints a different picture in my head when I see that this roughly coincides with Cortés' capture of Tenochtitlan, or that it's close to the Siege of Vienna. Example link: https://meanwhilemap.com/#y=1520&m=1&span=120&off=founded,pe...

On the technical side, the app is a single static web page. It uses Wikidata for data (via SPARQL) and OpenHistoricalMap to show the events on the political map of the time. It's open source (https://github.com/ea/meanwhilemap/tree/main), vibe coded as an experiment. All processing is client-side, and no data is tracked other than simple visitor counts.