The timeline you will see visualized below is the final product of an independent study during the Fall semester of 2017 between myself (Madeline Kauffman, class of 2018) and history professor Karl Qualls at Dickinson College. Before the project officially began, Professor Qualls and I sat down to discuss what I wanted to get out of the independent study. I knew that I wanted to focus on presenting history within a digital context, as such media are becoming more and more prevalent within today’s society. Through several conversations and meetings, the idea of creating an interactive and digital timeline accessible to all who cared to seek it out was born. The next step, however, was to create a clear focus for the timeline. While I began the work with five or six ideas (including the French Revolution of 1848 and the works of Locke and Hobbes to name two), I decided to focus my project on the man who has always fascinated me: Karl Marx. Marx, though a nineteenth-century figure, remains relevant in today’s world, as his numerous works and ideas continue to hold their influence over various aspects of modern society. Though I had hopes to connect the life and works of Karl Marx with the ideas of Adam Smith and the greater era of the Industrial Revolution, time constraints and the amount of work required for just the depiction of Marx proved to be too great, and thus, the following timeline focuses only on Marx himself.

To create the timeline , I utilized the open-source software, TimelineJS, which presents various tools to aid in the viewing experience of the project. If you wish to have the event tabs towards the bottom of the timeline appear larger, use your cursor to click the (+) button. This will increase the zoom of the tabs and create greater space between the events. If you wish to zoom out, simply press the (-) button.

The timeline is separated into six separate eras: Childhood and Education,  Entrance into Journalism and Affiliation with Rheinische Zeitung, Exile in Paris and Brussels,  1848 Revolutionary Events and Writings,  Exile in London: Before Das Kapital, and  Exile in London: After Das Kapital. Key words are affiliated with each of the eras. If you wish to find a specific publication or aspect of Marx’s life, you may utilize the document search tool (CTRL+F for PC, COMMAND+F for mac)  on your computer to bring you to the specific era that includes the term you searched.

I additionally created a Google Earth “tour” to map out Marx’s travels throughout his lifetime. If you wish to explore the virtual tour, please copy the following link to download and save the file and open it up in a Google Earth program: http://blogs.dickinson.edu/digitalhistory/files/2017/11/Karl-Marx-Tour-1.kmz 

For those who do not have Google Earth, visit https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1HP0eaNLPdyYc4cU0GR6oAoOGEYF5Awjq&usp=sharing