The 5-foot-long chart below has an ambitious goal: To record 4,000 years of history in a single graphic. Drawn by John B. Sparks of Rand McNally and Company in 1931, the chart traces world history ...

It all began when he saw a copy of a world history timeline by Oxford that came out in 2011. “I felt only Europe was truly represented in it. It had little from the rest of the world,” he says.