History animated map of the settlement of the mainland territory of the United States of America (so, excluding Alaska and Hawaii) by non-Native people, since the discovery of the continent, every year.
This video should have been done using Wikipedia only, but along the way, actually incorporated places without any date of existence were completed with other sources.
It contains all the incorporated places (cities, towns, villages in some states, townships in NJ ..., only less than ten could not be included). They have the bigger dots (which are not at all orrelated to the actual or historic population).
Unincorporated settlements (sometimes called "hamlets"), census-designated places and ghost towns are included as well, but only those which have a founding date on Wikipedia, and have smaller dots. Missouri, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, which have almost all dates on Wikipedia had more smaller dots, to not to appear overpopulated.
Forts and some missions, essentially the Spanish, are also included if their localisation is not inside or juxtaposed to another settlement.Each settlement begins with the earlier date of settlement mentionned on Wikipedia, preferentially when the first permanent settlement with the first inhabitant begins ; if this is not mentionned, it use the date of founding of the town ; or the date of the opening of the post office ; or the date of incorporation; or the, in the case of an incorporated settlement, it was researched elsewhere. This is one of the main limits: as the Wikipedia data was used primarily, it can display a delayed first date of settlement instead of the real one which could have been earlier, especially for few thousands unincorporated communities where the year of the post office opening is shown as the year of the first settlement.

Few incorporated towns (few dozen), which had none of this data, had their first date of census used, in the case of a fort or non-incorporated settlement - it was excluded from the map.
That's why this is not exhaustive map of all populated places in USA, and contains I'd say about two thirds of them: almost of the incorporated towns (about 22,000), some former settlements and ghost towns (about 2,000) and only about 15,000 CDP, unincorporated settlements and 300-400 forts. Forts outside of WIkipedia, like on northamericanforts.com, were not treated. Some places which lasted only one year were non included. If you are a mapper and want to complete the work, write in the comments.
Another limit, is that for very small articles, the distinciton between ghost towns and still inhabited towns was made only on the classification of the article in the "ghost twosn" or "unincorporated communities" category.
Settlements in Oklahoma (Indian Territory) during the XIX century by the relocated Native people are also included and showed with blue color.

All the music except one (which is a downloaded MIDI) was covered by making files using Anvil Studio, played on YAMAHA MidPlayer and recorded with Audacity.


The state borders and the background topographic map were not made by me and downloaded from the mentionned sites at the end of the video.

The counter has only an indicative role, but in reality is useless.

Time of making: about 9-10 months.


A tutorial to make this kind of video is already posted, however it doesn't go into the details.
Description to be continued.
Known mistakes among processed data:
-Spanish Fort (Colorado) in 1820 showed as US
-Adams Onis Treaty border between Mexico and US changed in 1819
-Fredonian Rebellion in 1826 missed
-Cataldo Mission missed
-some short-lived (less than a year) settlements were not put (like Apalachicola Fort, rare ghost towns)
-Albany, NY: abandonned 1618-1624? and possessed by Dutch 1673-1674
-French leader (Bonaparte) in 1803 not mentionned
-Mount Vernon, Clarksville (disputed Miller County AR, now TX) sometimes shown in green

Tribute to the composer Ennio Morricone which music most inspired me to continue on this project among the others and who passed away three months ago.


Like if it worth, or comment!
#historymap #everyyear

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