the melting pot

Extremism in history

107 extremist groups, parties, movements and ideas across two thousand years, every geography. Press play and watch where and when each one appeared. Every entry is stamped with what stands behind it: a dataset, scholarship, or a Claude comment, an editorial call by an AI model, argued on the card.

165 BCE
Unverified draft

Press play. Each group or idea will appear here as it shows up on the map: one square per entry, its color telling you which family it came from.

The record is not evenly kept, and neither is this list: 107 entries from two millennia are a curation, drafted by Claude from general knowledge in July 2026 and not yet fact-checked. Extreme here does not require violence: it means one-dimensional: a politics that ranks a single consideration above every other practical one and cannot see the world along any other axis; violence is a subcategory, not the definition. Inclusion is not equivalence: this map holds the Khmer Rouge and movements that never hurt anyone; the stamps and blurbs carry the differences. Entries no dataset supports wear a mustard claude comment stamp with the reasoning on the card, so you can disagree with the judgment rather than mistake it for data.

Just appeared

The word each era used for extremism

occurrences per billion words, English books, 1800 to 2019
The 1820s feared fanaticism, 1971 feared radicalism, 2005 feared terrorism, and extremism is still climbing at the edge of the corpus. Source: Google Books Ngram (en-2019, smoothing 3), fetched July 2026. A word's frequency measures attention, not danger.

Who each word was attached to

most-printed named groups attached to each word in books, by decade: leader first, runners-up beneath
For each decade, the most-printed named modifiers of each word: the leader in full, up to four runners-up in small type beneath it; generic ones like “political” and “religious” excluded, because the names show who was being accused. Read down the columns: revolutionary terrorism holds from the Jacobins through the 1920s, then the target changes fast: Nazi in the thirties, Jewish in the fifties, urban in the seventies, state from the eighties on; “philosophic radicalism” is the Benthamites, “agrarian” the Populists, “student” is 1968; and fanaticism has been pinned to Islam in English books almost without interruption since the 1850s. The label drifts from Moslem to Muslim to Islamic, the habit doesn't. A cell in ink marks a new leading name taking over. Same source and caveat as above: this measures what books said, not what was true.

The ledger

All 107 entries, oldest first, with their stamps.

Each entry carries an influence rating, Claude's judgment of how far its effect reached: 1 · contained mostly influenced its own members; 2 · local influence shaped its city, country or region for a time; 3 · changed history changed the course of history.