All the Wars of the United States — Semiotic

Name: Semiotic
Author: Elijah Meeks

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All the Wars of the United States

Charts of war usually focus on casualties. But what does it mean when there are “only” a few hundred casualties but it wipes out a culture? What does it mean when there are many low-level wars in different parts of the world? This timeline shows wars as described on Wikipedia that the United States has taken part in during its existence and splits the periods using CKMeans revealing what seem to be very clear semantic periods: A revolutionary period focused on establishing the early United States, a period of conquest internally and with the beginnings of a colonial influence, a time of growing international influence and the current Pax Americana which, like the Pax Romana, rarely closes the doors of the Temple of Jupiter.

118

conflicts

maximum concurrent

years without a listed war

56 years

Texas-Indian Wars

1775–2026 · five spheres

Conflict as a continuous condition

Hover a conflict to inspect it

American Revolutionary War1775–1783 · European

Read source ↗

European

Native

Colonial

Latin American

Internal

Four eras of violence

The early conflicts center on sovereignty and survival. The long nineteenth-century middle is dominated by forced expansion across Native lands. Later periods shift toward overseas intervention, regional influence, and finally sustained global military reach.

Concurrency makes continuity visible

The line beneath the lanes counts active conflicts in each year. Long-running campaigns overlap many shorter actions, making the timeline read less like isolated episodes and more like overlapping systems of military activity.

The inverse view

All the Peace of the United States

37 years

Each dot marks a year in which none of the conflicts in this dataset was active. Reading the absences alongside the war lanes makes their scarcity explicit.

Why a custom ordinal layout?

Semiotic owns the frame, responsive rendering, scene graph, accessibility table, and theme. The custom layout supplies the domain-specific geometry: packed interval bars within five ordinal lanes, period bands, a shared time axis, focus targets, and the concurrent-war line.

JSX

import { intervalLanesLayout, activeCountOverDomain } from "semiotic/recipes" // The recipe owns the packed sub-tracks, period bands, lane labels, and time // axis. We reserve a bottom strip and compose the concurrency line on top. const warTimelineLayout = (ctx) => { const base = intervalLanesLayout({ ...ctx, config: { laneAccessor: "sphere", startAccessor: "startYear", endAccessor: "endYear", domain: [1770, 2026], lanes: SPHERES, unit: 1, minBarWidth: 5, bottomInset: 82, color: (war, sphere) => COLORS[sphere], }, }) return { nodes: base.nodes, overlays: <>{base.overlays}<ConcurrencyLine /></> } } const countsByYear = activeCountOverDomain(wars, { start: "startYear", end: "endYear", domain: [1770, 2026], }) <OrdinalCustomChart data={wars} layout={warTimelineLayout} categoryAccessor="sphere" valueAccessor="startYear" oExtent={SPHERES} rExtent={[1770, 2026]} projection="horizontal" annotations={periods.map(period => ({ type: "x-band", x0: period.start, x1: period.end, label: period.name }))} width={width} height={650} />

Adapted from Elijah Meeks'full war timelineand the earliercategorized timeline. The historical list begins with the source's 2015 snapshot and is extended through July 1, 2026 from official Defense Department, combatant-command, and NATO records. It remains one contestable perspective, not an authoritative taxonomy.