The overall shape of the timeline, shown in Figure 1, uses the visual metaphor of a long and winding path to implicitly convey the notion that historical developments are not linear.  The path extends beyond 1920 to highlight the notion that the story of suffrage did not end with the 19^th amendment.  Events beyond 1920 that are highlighted on this timeline include the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924 (which granted Native Americans citizenship), the Magnuson Act in 1943 (which granted Chinese residents the right to citizenship), and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 (which prohibited states and localities from imposing barriers to voting).  While I did not add any events beyond the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the path extends beyond this date, suggesting that the story goes on.  The dates on the timeline are spaced out to scale, so that the viewer gets a clear sense of the amount of time that passed between events.

The page loads with an animation of the timeline unfolding to visually engage the user, and to hopefully encourage them to hover on or to click on the dates. The principle of progressive disclosure is applied here, where information is only revealed upon the user’s request. There is a challenging balance between overburdening the user with too much information at once and making the user work too hard to retrieve the information. Here I chose to let the user decide what they want to see, while being mindful that the user needs to be enticed and rewarded for interacting with the work. To motivate the user to click on a date, there is a hover feature on each date, where the date is highlighted and an image pops up, as shown in Figure 2.  A casual non-committed user can wave their mouse over the page to see different images pop up over each date, and this will hopefully pique their curiosity.