A tree of knowledge

This is a reading syllabus rendered as a tree — 81 books of history and prehistory, arranged from the Big Bang at the root down through deep time to the twentieth century. Each book descends from the ones that make it legible: cosmology gives way to the origin of the Earth, then life, then us, then the long human story of states, empires, and the modern world. Click any book to trace its lineage all the way back to A Universe from Nothing. The ghosted frames are gaps — curriculum still unread, negative space waiting for a cover.

Built by Aaron Oswald as a visualization piece — one author, one dataset, no accounts. The tree is a hand-edited file in a git repository; covers and metadata come from the Open Library. Type is set in Georgia; the palette is stratigraphic, warming by era as you descend. Reviews live at aaronos.ai.