MCP

The Humanity Atlas MCP server lets an assistant such as Claude ask questions across many lives at once.

Connect Claude

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol: a way for an assistant to use tools from a service. In Claude, add a custom connector with the address https://humanityatlas.com/mcp. Claude sends you here to sign in and then asks you to approve it; after that it uses the tools as you. Any MCP client that signs in the same way can connect.

Every signed-in reader gets stats from both tools. Names, articles and images come with full access: a one-time $2.99 from your Account page, where you can also see and remove the apps you have connected.

The server uses MCP over streamable HTTP; requests are POST.

The two tools

Both tools read from the atlas. They do not change its records.

• rank counts people and their moments grouped by role, place, year, decade, century, month or person. It returns stats — each group's people, moments, count and share — or names only. order chooses what ranks the groups: people, moments, or, grouped by person, the distance they travelled.
• people returns the people who match, as names, articles — each matching moment's text — images — each matching moment's pictures with their credits — or stats, the totals only. Lists come a page at a time, and each person comes with their birth and death years and how far they travelled in their life, in kilometres and miles.

Both take any combination of kind of moment, place, role, year and month. Birth, death and burial mean the person's own; visit means every other moment. Leave the kind out to include all kinds of moment. BC years are negative: -44 means 44 BC.

Both also take a point and a distance from it — lat, lon and radius, in kilometres or, with unit, miles, up to 5,000 km — which works anywhere on the map, whether or not the place has a page; text, words in a moment's title or text, in any word form; and a span of years, from_year to to_year.

Places and roles are those the atlas has pages for. If a place name is ambiguous, the answer returns candidates to choose from rather than a guess.

Questions it can answer

• Which roles visit Paris most?
• When do writers visit Paris?
• Which places are most visited in a given year or month?
• What is the most popular time of year to visit a place?
• Who were all the people who visited a place in a given year or month?
• Who was born in a given place, year or month?
• Who is buried in Vienna?
• What is the most likely birth month for a writer?
• Who was within 50 km of Tartu, and when?
• In which decade did most people come there?
• Who is associated with the Beagle?
• How many sieges happened within 300 km of Tartu between 300 and 1960?
• Which writers travelled furthest?

How to read an answer

Counts are people, each counted once per group, unless the answer is ordered by moments. Someone with two roles counts under both, so shares can add up to more than 100%. The answer says when this applies. Every answer states how many people and moments it rests on.

Moment counts are people's moments, not events: a siege three people in the atlas attended counts three times, and one none of them attended is not here. An answer that counts moments says so.

“Most likely” means among the notable people in the atlas. A birth-month ranking describes those recorded lives; it cannot tell you the likelihood for people as a whole.

Answers by month use only moments whose dates are known to the month, and say how many moments were left out. If the sources say a person was not present at a moment, that moment counts as nothing.

The pages are the API too

Every moment and every life has a stable address, server-rendered in full. An assistant fetching that address can read the record without running JavaScript. /sitemap.xml lists them all.

Anything read from the atlas carries its sources' licences. Reuse means honouring those licences — see Terms.