An interactive timeline mapping 133 years of U.S. involvement in foreign regime changes — from the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893 to military strikes in Venezuela in 2026. Fly-to animation, century navigation, pulsing markers. Making the history of American empire impossible to look away from.
Every American foreign policy debate treats each intervention as a discrete event — a specific administration, a specific crisis, a specific set of justifications. The Iran coup of 1953. The Guatemala coup of 1954. The Chilean coup of 1973. Each one is taught, if it's taught at all, in isolation.
What happens when you put all 29 events on the same map, spanning 133 years? The pattern becomes undeniable. This isn't a series of regrettable mistakes or exceptional circumstances. It's a continuous foreign policy tradition.
The visualization doesn't editorialize. The geography and the timeline do the work. The argument is structural.
The interactive format matters here — it makes the reader an active participant in the reckoning. You navigate the timeline yourself. You fly to each country. You read what happened. The accumulation is yours to experience.
The dataset covers 29 events across four centuries, from the military occupation of Cuba and the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, through Cold War covert operations in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Chile, to the 21st century invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the 2026 U.S. military operation in Venezuela.
Each event is documented with primary sources and Wikipedia citations.
The dataset is hand-curated from primary sources, Wikipedia, and declassified government documents. Each event has a date or date range, a geographic coordinate for the map marker, a zoom level for the fly-to animation, a headline, a narrative summary, and a source link.
The events are organized into four century segments — 19th Century, 20th Century (1901–1959), 20th Century (1960–2000), and 21st Century — corresponding to distinct foreign policy eras. The century navigation tabs let readers jump to any era directly, providing context for the volume and type of interventions in each period.
The Cold War era (1953–1994) accounts for the largest concentration of covert operations — the CIA's decade-by-decade involvement in the political life of countries on every continent.
These six represent the range — from 19th-century territorial seizure to Cold War covert operations to 21st-century military action. The full 29 are navigable in the live map, each with documented sources.
Each navigation action — clicking Prev/Next, clicking a dot, clicking a century tab, pressing an arrow key — triggers a Leaflet flyTo() animation that moves the map to the relevant country at a pre-set zoom level. The transition takes 1.2 seconds. The reader watches the world move.
After the fly-to lands, a pan offset adjusts the map vertically so the pulsing gold marker sits above the event popover rather than behind it. The information and the location are always visible simultaneously.
The fly-to animation makes the geography come to life — you feel the distance between the Hawaiian Kingdom and Iran, between Guatemala and Chile. The map makes the reach of American power legible.
The map is keyboard-navigable from end to end. Left and right arrow keys move through the timeline. Escape closes the popover. The century tabs are keyboard-accessible with Enter and Space. The dot row scrolls smoothly to the active dot on any navigation.
The map itself is marked aria-hidden="true" — a decorative layer for sighted users. All substantive content lives in the popover and timeline, which are fully accessible. Screen reader users navigate the events via the popover's structured content, not the map.
The progressive counter — 01 / 29 — gives users a persistent sense of where they are in the sequence. The century tabs provide high-level navigation for users who want to jump between eras rather than progress linearly.