The short version is that VisualizeHistory.com helps explore and teach History in a visual way, as opposed to the more traditional textual version.

Verbosely speaking, Visualize History, a website for exploring history, uses temporal and geographical relationships to present history graphically. The site, visualizehistory.com, displays arbitrary historical data on top of a map, to allow for the correlation of history in space and time. By putting history in a graphic setting, implicit relationships show up to even the most basic user that would have been hard to spot otherwise. The user can navigate through history, choosing which topics and what time period to study at any time, and the user interface ideally is able to adapt to both broad and narrow queries.

The best way to understand is of course to explore the site. Right now, there is no public version up. I finished a proof-of-concept version, which can be found at http://proto.visualizehistory.com/.  I will be putting up different versions, but before that I need to pause in my development, reevaluate my choice of platform/stack and then dig back in.  Until then, I will be all talk.