historical-basemaps

This project offers georeferenced historical boundaries of world countries and cultural regions, designed for mapping historical data on a global or continental scale. It aims to provide ready-to-use basemaps for researchers and enthusiasts alike. The data is available in the GeoJSON format, making it easily importable into GIS software like QGIS, or usable with web mapping libraries such as D3 and Leaflet.

Several applications have been developed using this dataset, including "Historic Borders" and "Point in History," which allow users to explore historical geographies interactively. The project maintains a lightweight index.json file summarizing the available years and corresponding GeoJSON filenames, along with the countries present in each file.

As an open-source initiative, contributions are welcome to enhance the accuracy and coverage of the historical maps. Users can report errors or contribute to the project to help improve this valuable resource for historical geospatial analysis and visualization.