Atlas
A trail is a short, ordered route through the atlas. Each stop says why it comes next, so a journey reads as an argument rather than a list. Start one, leave, and come back: your place is kept in this browser, and you do not need an account for that.
These ten leaders each held office at a point when their state's direction was contested, and each left an institution, a program or a settlement that outlasted them. The path runs from the American Civil War to the end...
10 stops
This path follows one long argument about what makes rule legitimate and orderly, from a moral-example theory of government in ancient China to a twentieth century theory of law as a hierarchy of norms. Each stop adds a...
13 stops
This path follows ten twentieth-century leaders in the order they took power, from the Bolshevik seizure of 1917 to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Each built a regime that reshaped how its country was governed, by...
10 stops
Every government on this path answers the same question, who actually holds executive power, and the answers differ by constitution. The path runs from a seven-member collective executive through parliamentary and...
11 stops
This path follows ten figures from Asia and Africa whose careers ran through colonial rule, revolution and the building of new states, from a reformist writer executed in 1896 to the ruler who resigned in 1998. It is...
10 stops
This path follows eight women who led national governments, in the order they first took office, from the first woman prime minister in 1960 to the first woman elected head of state in Africa in 2006. Each stop shows a...
8 stops
This trail follows eleven political thinkers and statesmen in roughly chronological order, from the seventeenth-century social contract writers to twentieth-century theorists of power, legitimacy and justice. Each stop...
11 stops
From the six-nation coal and steel pact of 1951 to the euro's own central bank, the institutions that govern the European Union were built treaty by treaty over sixty years. This trail follows that construction...
11 stops
Eight ideologies, eight different claims about why a government should be obeyed: reason of state, consent of the governed, organic social function, national performance, consensus, plebiscitary bond, communal...
8 stops
This wave's own shape is a natural trail: from the systems that define who holds power, through the mechanisms that move it day to day, to the agencies that carry out the policies a government sets.
10 stops
Trails are curated by the atlas. Where you have got to in one is remembered by your own browser and is never sent to us.