title: Plotting duration on a timeline in Python
body: <p>I'd like to plot the sequential spans of different people vertically on a shared (temporal) x-axis. My data looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>    Name                start       end
  0   John Rutledge   1790-02-15  1791-03-05
  1   William Cushing 1790-02-02  1810-09-13
  2   James Wilson    1789-10-05  1798-08-21
  3   John Blair      1790-02-02  1795-10-25
  4   James Iredell   1790-05-12  1799-10-20
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Desired output is something like this:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/5ouNw.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/5ouNw.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>I've seen some fairly complex 'roll-your-own' versions of this, but isn't there something simple?</p>