History-Related Sites on the Worldwide Web

 

The links below provide some starting points for research on many historical topics.*

Wikipedia articles are highly uneven in both their quality and their coverage. They are usually less reliable than articles in specialized research encyclopedias like Encyclopaedia Britannica. Still, neither of this type of source should be used as more than as a starting point for research you do in college.  Most importantly, you should know your instructors' rules about whether and how any encyclopedia, Wikipedia, or other source may be used in their classes.  While you may find some useful information in a Wikipedia or Encyclopaedia Britannica article, you may not rely on anything in any these tertiary sources as evidence to support any argument you make in your essays.  Copying Wikipedia articles is, of course, forbidden. You may only cite the Wikipedia if your research directly deals with the Wikipedia itself. 

*If you know of a link not listed here that should be included or find that a link is broken, please contact Lowell Skar.

 

UM - Dearborn History Resources:

The Mardigian Library at the University of Michigan Dearborn.

History related materials at the Mardigian Library.

There are various online dictionaries and encyclopedias available through the Mardigian Library webpage.

 

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor History Resources:

The Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Here is a full list of libraries at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Links to journals, collections, and document archives can be found at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor Library list of Selected History Sites.

Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other valuable reference tools can be found at the UM-AA Electronic Resource Shelf

 

 

 

Other History Resources on the Internet

Note: The UM-D and The University of Michigan links above also have more historical resources.

 

Research Tools:

For some basics on using the Internet for Historians from the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.

The Center for History and New Media is making a wide and expanding starting point for many historical topics and issues based at George Mason Univesity just outside of Washington, DC.

DoHistory.org, from the Film Study Center at Harvard University.

The Best of History Web Sites is self-explanatory.

The WWW-Virtual Library History Central Catalogue contains updated resources for many aspects of studying the past.

The BBC History site is a fine starting point for many historical topics, as is the BBC's joint site with the Open University of history materials.

Channel 4's History in the UK also has a website on various historical topics.

The Digital Librarians' History sites provide carefully selected web materials by librarians.

For materials on many history topics and approaches to for students of history, see The History Guide.

The University of California at Santa Barbara's Voice of the Shuttle (begun in 1994 and run by Alan Liu) has a page of links on History that is updated regularly and often quite interesting.

A good place to start historical research is the History section of Yahoo.

Explore a wide range of topics with Research It! from iTools.

Translate documents between languages with the Alta Vista Babel Fish page.

Simplify your research with dozens of fully searchable books at Concordance.com.

 

Writing Guides:

Zachary M. Schrag has a fine set of Guidelines for History Students on his blog.

Penning The Past: Advice on Writing in the Historical Disciplines (Alyssa E. Lodewick, Brown University)

Guide to Writing History Papers (Todd F. Carney, Southern Oregon University)

Some Tips on Writing Papers for History Courses (K. Austin Kerr, Ohio State University)

Writing the History Paper (Dartmouth University Writing Center)

Writing in History (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

History Tool Box (University of Colorado at Colorado Springs)

Reading, Writing, and Researching for History (Bowdoin College)

Writing a History Paper: The Basics (William and Mary College)

How to Write a History Research Paper (Carleton College)

 

Interesting Sites and Document Collections for History:

The Internet Public Library's History page is a vetted set of primary and secondary source materials related to history.  See especially its Historical Documents and Sources section.

The Catholic University of America's Internet Researcher has a Guide to History Resources.

Terry Abraham has compiled his Repositories of Primary Sources at the University of Idaho, "listing of over 5000 websites describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources for the research scholar."

The Sources for General History page at University of Wisconsin - Madison Library is a good set of links to materials for historical research.

Yahoo has compiled a group of valuable links to archived documents.

The Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia is in transition, but a temporary guide to the various parts and phases of this process may be found here.

The University of Michigan has a set of links to primary source materials within its Humanities Text Initiative.

Tufts University's Perseus Project, edited by Gregory Crane, is "an evolving digital library, engineering interactions through time, space, and language. Our primary goal is to bring a wide range of source materials to as large an audience as possible. We anticipate that greater accessibility to the sources for the study of the humanities will strengthen the quality of questions, lead to new avenues of research, and connect more people through the connection of ideas."

The Digital History site from the University of Houston has a range of historical materials.

Brigham Young University has EuroDocs: Online Sources for European History.

See the WWW-Virtual Library - Women's History for a large collection of links to pages on women's place in the past.

Here is a worldwide listing of university History departments from George Mason University.

For a variety of interesting historical information, try The History Channel .

Project Gutenberg is "the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today."  It houses 1000s of searchable full-text online texts, many of them historically valuable.

John Mark Ockerman's The Online Books Page (University of Pennsylvania Library) lists more than 25,000 available online.

 

Some History Blogs:

 

The History News Network (HNN) from George Mason University has an updated blogroll of history-related blogs.

Cliopatria: A Group Blog is housed at the same HNN site.

History Carnival, coordinated by Sharon Howard, is a "monthly showcase of weblog posts about history (and historiography and history teaching)."

Sharon Howard also runs the Early Modern Notes blog.

Zachary M. Schrag is an historian of the 20th-century USA at at George Mason University who studies "the interactions between Americans and their physical surroundings: cities, landscapes, and technology."

Juan Cole's blog Informed Comment has Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion

See HistoryTalk - Not the Same Old Story for Paula Petrik's comments on how history relates to current events.

Digital History Hacks: Methodology for the Infinite Archive is a blog by William J. Turkel

 

American History:

Crossroads at George Washington University is a good starting point for American Studies including historical topics.

The American Memory Project from the Library of Congress

The University of Michigan has its Making of America Project which contains many primary sources on 19th  century social history

The University of Michigan Library Document Center has a categorized list of Federal Government Resources on the Web - Historic Documents.

American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology from the University of Virginia.

Common-Place is an online periodical of early American history.

The Connor Prarie Rural History Project.

The Freedman and Southern Society Project, supported by the University of Maryland.

History Matters is an extensive site from George Mason University aimed at students of history at all levels -- with thousands of primary documents, web links and reviews, essays on researching and writing history, case studies done by historians, examples of student work, and topical forums moderated by prominent historians

There is a vast amount of information available in the Smithsonian Institution website.

The Women and Social Movements project has both primary sources and articles.

The Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture Multimedia Archive from the University of Virginia.

United States Library of Congress home page, with links to several collections of primary documents.

The Valley of the Shadow Project at the University of Virginia studies two communities caught in the American Civil War.

 

For a Civil Rights Timeline Introduction <http://www.usm.edu/crdp/html/cd/intro.htm> for important dates in the US civil rights movements.

Read significant accounts of The History of Jim Crow

Find out more links to the Southern Freedom Movement <http://www.crmvet.org/crmlinks.htm>.

See more resources on Social Policy: Ella Baker As I Knew Her: She Trusted Youth! <http://www.socialpolicy.org/index.php?id=827>

For a large collection of participants in Civil Right movements, see Voices of Civil Rights <http://www.voicesofcivilrights.org/index.html>.

Also visit Audio from The Freedom Archives <http://www.freedomarchives.org/downloads.html>. 

 

World History:

GMU's Center for History and New Media has its World History Sources as a starting point.

Paul Halsall's Internet History Sourcebooks Project is a "collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use." It is among the earliest and still the most comprehensive set of online primary source materials from all time periods and from over the world.

Yale University's Law School has its Avalon Project with many links to Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance documents online.

Ohio State's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies maintains a list of internet resources.

The Newton Library of the University of Oregon has an annotated directory of rich Internet resources on East & Southeast Asia.

Internet East Asian History Sourcebook contains direct links to documents and to other web resources.

Here's a cool site on the French Revolution with documents, images, maps, and songs.