Culture Atlas is designed to be an immersive overview of major world cultures past and present. The idea for it came from the teaching methods of the late NYU professor of music history, Walter Reinhold (1940-2006). Reinhold designed sixteen courses covering medieval to 20th-century music, art and history, which he taught to over 2,000 students during his years at New York University and Kean College of New Jersey.

Reinhold’s curricula were designed to include over 3500 years of developments in music, art & architecture, history, literature, and religion & philosophy. He believed this broader contextual approach (vs. conventionally siloed studies within a singular discipline such as art history) was necessary to truly understand terms like “gothic” or “baroque”. The company was incorporated in 1988 with the release of Culture 1.0: The Contextual Guide to Western Civilization (for the Apple Mac), and culminated with the release of Culture 4.0 (CD for Mac & Windows) in 2000. 

Since Reinhold’s untimely passing in 2006, the company has been extending his vision to an overview of all world cultures. Over the intervening years we have built Culture Atlas into a growing database of more than 250,000 records (articles, images, maps, videos, etc.), and we have reconfigured our software to create a portable interactive version of this immersive educational experience for Apple iPad® and a web-based version for wider distribution.