Did you know that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Anne Frank were born in the same year? This connection initially seemed preposterous and yet is absolutely true. In order to connect the stories of Catholicism, Stoicism, and Ancient Rome together, I traveled to Rome in 2018 and began to understand the inevitable rise of Catholicism which no longer seemed so mysterious. Upon my return, I began to create a large paper copy of a timeline of the history of the world - from current time (2018) all the way back to 2000 BC.

I began by doing a sweep of the history I knew - white western civilization, mainly United States-centered. Using resources such as the Zinn Education Project, Re-thinking History, and This Day in History, I began to fill out the US history. As I intentionally researched the cultures and geographical histories less familiar to me (African, Asian, South American, Native/Indigenous, and African American), the connections between events became much clearer and also much weightier. These 3 panels—1700s, 1800s, 1900s—each are hand-painted and have image transfers. The hand-painted timelines contextualize history within each century while the images bring to life some of the timeline itself.