About Spoor
Not making the past smaller
What Spoor is
An app for learning history, for pupils aged 10 to 18, the curious, teachers and families. Every fact stands in its context: in its year, its era, its place, beside what happened elsewhere at the same time, and with the sources we know it from. You practise historical thinking yourself: reading sources, ordering time, cause and effect.
Three layers, always apart
For every moment we separate what happened (what historians broadly agree on), the background (causes and circumstances) and the interpretation (how historians read it, and how that reading changed). How an event was later remembered or used stands apart: history and memory are not the same.
Honest about doubt and about hard history
Where numbers are uncertain or historians differ, we say so briefly and neutrally, with the margin. War, colonialism, slavery and the Holocaust are told without softening and without sensation. We take no nationalist, colonial or ideological side.
A draft until someone reviews it
All content is currently a draft. It was carefully written and checked, but the label only goes once a historian or history teacher has reviewed a moment. Are you that second reader, or do you see a mistake? Write to contact@nealvdv.be.
Our foundation
Spoor comes from nealvdv, a business with a Christian foundation. For Spoor that means: honesty over hero stories, respect for everyone who appears in history, and naming the dark sides of the church's history honestly too. We tell history; we do not preach.
Private, no tricks, with maps we drew ourselves
No ads, no tracking, no required account and no streaks that breed guilt. We drew the maps ourselves, schematic and with modern place names. Spoor belongs to Kaft, a family of school apps, and is the sister of Draad, the app for reading the Bible in context. All three come from nealvdv.
State of the content
0/340 of 34 eras and moments reviewed.
What is coming
More moments (the goal is fifty), then threads through time, a source reader, a map and Then & Now, which makes prices and distances of the past recognisable.