About the project
A timeline you can read in two directions.
Presidents in Time arranges all forty-seven U.S. presidencies as a single portrait grid. Columns run left to right from Washington to the present; rows descend in four-year steps from 1729 onward, aligned to inauguration years. Read down a column to follow one life across the decades — born, coming of age, rising to office, and beyond. Read across a row to see who was living, and who was leading, in any given four-year window.
A gold ring marks every four-year row in which a president held office. Because each row is a single term beginning at an inauguration year, a two-term president rings exactly two rows. When a president died or resigned in office, the successor shares that term's row — so William Henry Harrison and John Tyler both carry the ring in 1841, exactly as history demands.
How to read it
- Hover any portrait for a card with the president's term, party, and a one-line summary.
- Empty tiles mark years before a president's birth or after their death, in two subtly different warm tones.
- Dimmed, sepia-toned tiles are placeholders — periods with no portrait assigned yet.
- Use the filter to isolate any subset of presidents; the view is shareable by URL.
- Hover a year on the left edge to copy a permalink straight to that row.
Credits & attributions
- Data
- President metadata compiled from public historical record; each card links to Wikipedia.
- Portraits
- Currently placeholder imagery. Intended to be replaced with public-domain portraits from Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress.
- Typography
- Spectral (serif) for editorial text; a system sans-serif for interface chrome.
- Build
- Vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no frameworks, no build step.
Future content
This page is a home for essays, methodology notes, and source documentation as the project grows.