Skip to main content

The timeline can be navigated with the “Scroll Left” and “Scroll Right” buttons or by dragging the pointer to a date on the timeline waveform (located at the bottom of the screen on the desktop version and on the left of the screen on mobile). To filter by a particular topic and see a smaller section of the data, make a selection on the dropdown “Filters” menu or click “Search” to do a keyword search. Hover over the abbreviated filter tags in the blue boxes to see the complete name of the filter, or click a filter to display all the data with this tag. If you want to take a deeper dive into a specific topic by viewing a narrative essay page and a curated timeline, click on “Stories.”

Read More

The majority of American urban water systems are now public.

1900s

ENV
SANI

Large-scale public water systems are created to ensure standards of cleanliness. Sewers will soon follow; whereas other utilities like gas and electricity will be much slower to be made public, or will remain private altogether. Prior to the 20th century, water systems were a mix of private and public infrastructures.