Not sure if this is allowed as an answer, but here goes. I’m not sure about a “Google Maps” of history (meaning an app dedicated to spitting out historical bits of information in places you search/drop a pin), but you might like checking out local historical societies. At least in the US, many towns, even small ones, will have a group of people interested in keeping records of the town and they may even have a small museum.
As an example, here’s one for Park City, Utah: though relatively small at only around 8,000 people, it has a long history of silver and lead mining dating back to the mid-1800s. When that industry declined, the town managed to bounce back as a ski/snowboard hotspot and became home to the largest independent film festival in the country. Check out the website for information and if I remember right there are a couple of small museums.
Your hometown likely has something similar! The people in local historical societies are always super passionate and I’m sure they’d love to chat with you. Also, there are a surprising number of books/photo essays floating about even featuring small towns, so you can Google those as well for your hometown/wherever you’re visiting. Hope this helps!
The Google Field Trip app was perfect for this back when it still existed. It cross-referenced a number of databases and partnered with a publisher specializing in local history books to do location-based articles. So if you went by a location with a historic site that had any data from those books, you could read about it.
Google and tech generally seem to have lost interest in this sort of thing after augmented reality peripherals did not catch on. Field Trip was shut down completely in 2019. The location-based tech behind it was basically a test run for Pokemon Go.
driftscape kinda sort of. Don’t know if it’s international (I’m Canadian) but it has a map interface and you navigate through historic sites, plaques and monuments, with write ups about each place of note. I use if more to find cool places to visit, then to find what happened where I am. It’s not exactly what you are looking for, but it’s very cool.
Check Pastvu. They let you explore photos from different years and see their exact locations and dates.
Based on your previous Reddit posts I assume you are located in the US. If you ever visit the UK, there are at least two sites that offer something what you are looking for. One of them is Layers of London, which lets you browse through historical maps with overlays on the contemporary map of the city. It also includes many points of interests, which are added by historians and volunteers alike. There is also the Capturing Cambridge project, which offers even more localised information (including photographs and brief histories). This one is a really inspiring project, which I always recommend people as something that should be replicated at other locations too.
Keep in mind that Digital Humanities is a sub-field on its own, and many people are using maps to explore historical data. In relation to the US, check out for example the Footsteps to Freedom: Underground Railroad Study Tour or the Chronicling America visualisation by the Library of Congress. There is a page that collects these kind of "Story Maps", which you can access here.
Clio is a crowdsourced database where you can search for historical sites and insights by location. It relies on submitted entries, so it should update over time (and you may be able to add things yourself!). I keep meaning to write some entries about beer history in different locations.
Also, Next Exit History is an app that uses your phone's location to show you nearby historical sites. I haven't used it much myself.
While I unfortunately haven't yet found something precisely what you're describing, i.e. a map of the world where you can just click on any place and get everything that's ever happened there (though that sounds awesome), if you're interested in a particular city or region, you might try googling if there's a history wiki for it. Those obviously have the same limitations as any wiki, so maybe don't cite them in your dissertation, but there's often an incredible amount of information collected by local history nerds.
Just as an example, there's the Wien Geschichte Wiki for Vienna. It's in German, but DeepL or Google Translate shouldn't have too much trouble with it, and it's absolutely fascinating. I often walk through the city just googling random street names to find out the entire life story of that obscure dude it's named after, how it was named before he died 200 years ago, everything that happened in it since then, interesting details about historic architectural details on various buildings, and so on. Granted, not every part of the city has that level of detail (inner districts generally have more, because they've been part of the city longer and records are thus better) but still, there's a lot of great stuff to be found.
You may want to give https://www.historypin.org/en/ a try. You can search by city and view collections of pins in your city. These are usually pictures, documents, or other information tied to properties or places. I worked on a grant project for a landmark commission to pin documents from a historic site survey done in the early 1990s to the corresponding properties on the map.
Queering the Map is a community led digital archive that strives to document important experiences in the lives of LGBTQ+ people in the physical space - the website works similarly to Google Maps with over 80,000 'pins' all over the world that you can read through. While it could be debated that some of these stories are not History, exactly, and the map does only focus on sharing the experiences of this particular group, I think it is still interesting enough to mention and look through.
I am not aware of a good complete solution. I am however aware of a few map related tools and websites that (Depending on where on the world you are) do offer a few good insights:
A lot of wikipedia articles have location data attached which some map tools can utilize. For example OsmAnd is an open source app for phones (both Android and Ios) which has the ability to toggle a wikipedia layer showcasing all the wikipedia articles available for nearby locations. It also is a nice app regardless as it makes use of open street maps with offline maps.
Unfortunally I have found that for big history it is quite nice and also sometimes as a general starting point for area history but that for details it isn't that adequate as Wikipedia simply doesn't have the articles available. So it certainly does fill part of what you ask for but it isn't as complete as you might like.
For the Netherlands there is also this website: https://www.topotijdreis.nl/ Which is a repository of maps of the past 200 years for the Netherlands it is worth pointing out that if you zoom in other more detailed maps while be shown. I recently have used it to better understand the growth of a city nearby. There might be similar tools/websites available for other countries.
Also for the Netherlands there is this map available which shows all buildings color coded by age.
If you live in Sweden, the National Heritage Board has this map with all locations that have been registered by the Board, along with basic information and notes on how to read up on more details.
Can be a bit overwhelming in places though :)
This is going to sound crazy, but my partner and I actually learned a lot about local history by playing Pokemon Go. A number of the Poke Stops are historical sites that otherwise don't have much signage - while wandering one day we spun a Poke Stop that turned out to be a late 1800s carriage factory building. The app had a short history described and we noticed that it was open to the public - so we wandered in and found some beautiful displays of antique horse-drawn carriages in the lobby! We also found out that a stone marker that had been worn down beyond legibility was actually a grave, marking where three British soldiers had been killed in a bar fight shortly before the onset of the Revolutionary war.
For Ireland, here are a few wonderful websites:
https://geohive.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=9def898f708b47f19a8d8b7088a100c4
This is the National Townland and Historical Map Viewer provided by Ordnance Surveys Irelnand; it overlays historical cartography over a modern-day map.
https://www.archaeology.ie/archaeological-survey-ireland/historic-environment-viewer-application
This is provided by the National Monuments Service of the Department of Housing, Local Government, and Heritage. It's an excellent resource which locates various archaeological sites and objects on a modern-day map along with a short description of them, related bibliography (e.g. references to archaeological journals referencing them), and other associated websites and resources for each item. There's easily thousands and thousands of entries - anything from the background 19th century farmhouses to ancient ringforts, or the location of local fulachtaí fia (a type of cooking pit). It's an incredible tool for getting a geo-spatial understanding of all of these objects and their relationships to present day localities!
https://www.archaeology.ie/underwater-archaeology/wreck-viewer
Finally, this is also by the National Monuments Service - a similar application but for the location of shipwrecks; anything from sunken vessels of the World Wars off of the coast of Cork and Kerry to the wrecks of the Spanish Armada off the coast of Streedagh Strand in Co. Sligo from 1588.
This may help in the US.
It really depends on where you live! I'm a historic preservation consultant in Austin, Texas and we have a lot of resources that I use daily in my work. Most states have some sort of resource like this:
TxDOT's historic resources viewer
Texas Historical Commission's historic resources viewer
Texas Freedom Colonies (towns built by freedmen after the civil war) Atlas
General US resources:
Historic aerial imagery viewer
These are far from the best/only resources -- there are SO MANY maps like this out there. These are just the ones I use the most. There are also a ton of self-made maps on Google Maps, like this Texas Music Venues map. Also, most big cities will have some sort of preservation planning viewer (like this one for San Antonio).
So, it's definitely dependent on which city or state (if you're in the US) you live in. I know some colleagues when I briefly worked in Ireland used a very good map viewer that was Ireland-specific, so these kinds of resources exist everywhere.
There’s an app called izi.TRAVEL that allows you to search for history walking tours in a specific area, and listen to the audio as you walk from place to place (it also offers transcripts for deaf/ HoH people). The one downside of it is that it’s dependent on the local historical society of the area you’re looking at, so there may be no tours at all in certain places.
these are amazing. can someone help me find a site like this for Kolkata?
Yeah the northern Ontario lake that I live and work on once had two Hudson’s Bay Company fur trading posts on it in the early 19th century. I’ve always dreamed of finding out more details about them and who might’ve moved through them and when, etc but I can’t find anything about them aside from the fact that they existed.
You’d think a company like HBC would have a strong and detailed documentation (they probably do on an old dusty shelf somewhere inaccessible) but as far as online records go I haven’t been able to find shit.
Explore Here is an iPhone app that maps historical events/locations based on your location. Here's the description from the app store:
"There are ~130k Historical Markers in the US and the world, marking historically important moments in time. Placed along roads, highways, in historic towns, Historical Markers provide bite sized pieces of history. Now, there's an app to explore them all!
Features
- Map of over 130k Historical Markers
- View Marker Info Offline
- Search Markers by Title
- Toggle Data Feeds
- View Markers in Catalog (Pro)
- Filter Markers by Category (Pro)
- View Hidden, Missing & Removed Markers (Pro)
- Save Markers (Pro)
- Background Tracking & Alerts (Pro)
- Manage Data (Pro)
- Read Markers Aloud (Pro)
Data
ExploreHere displays data from a variety of sources, Historical Marker Database (hmdb.org), the National Park service, NOAA, and many more to come. If you find a marker that is not in the app, submit it to us and once approved, you'll see it in the next release of the app!"
Sandborn Maps may be of interest to you. They are a fantastic resource, and can be found online at the Libarary of Congress, state archives, and various university archives. They're fire insurance maps from about the 1880s through the 1950s, and show locations of structures and their uses. They won't tell you what happened near you, but they'll help tell you what "near you" looked like in the past.