Links for Historians
Online History Resources at Chicago
Searching the Web
History Departments
History Sites
Libraries and Archives
Journals
Documents
The following list of links to online resources is intended to serve as a starting point for students and faculty searching for historical information on the internet. The list is selective, and highlights sites which provide further information and links to substantive content. The list includes the complete address (URL) of each site in order to facilitate printing of this list. To suggest changes or additions to the following list, please contact the Department.
Online History Resources at Chicago
For information on historical resources at the Universty of Chicago,please visit the Regenstein Library's Subject Guide to Sources in History, maintained by Social Sciences librarian Frank Conaway.
Searching the Web
"Search engines" are sites which simply catalog other sites on the web, allowing you to either browse subject headings or perform keyword searches. Search engines are probably the most useful starting point for general web browsing or "surfing".
Begin with Yahoo!,one of the most popular search engines which allows you to easily browse through a large catalog of well-organized subject headings including Yahoo!:History. Altavista is the largest and most popular search engine which allows you to perform keyword searches, with varying degrees of complexity.
History Departments
History Departments Around the World, hosted by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, is an excellent online database which includes the addresses (URLs) and links for more than 900 history departments' web pages. The database is searchable by university name and location (U.S. or Non-U.S.). In the near future it will be searchable by city and state as well.
History Sites
As far as history sites are concerned, the best place to start is H-Net: Humanities On-line. H-Net operates primarily as a vast consortium of email discussion lists on an ever-increasing variety of fields in the humanities and social sciences. H-Urban, H-German, H-France, H-Teach, and H-Grad are just a few examples. Each discussion network maintains its own website which may include: logs of the discussions, book reviews, syllabi, course outlines, class handouts, bibliographies, listings of new sources, guides to online resources, and reports on new software, data sets, cd-roms and World Wide Web sites.
Other interesting history-specific sites include the American Historical Association website, with online versions of Perspectives and information about the annual meeting, the detailed and comprehensive list of links at the History Virtual Library at the University of Kansas, the WWW-VL History Central Catalogue at ethe European University Institute, Florence, Italy, the History Channel interactive website, and the History Guide which offers online lectures in ancient and European history.
Libraries and Archives
For American historians, the Library of Congress website is the place to start. The library's National Digital Library Program, also known as "American Memory," began in 1989 and now includes seventeen major Web-based collections. The depth, range, and diversity of these on-line collections dwarf anything else available for American historians on the web, and include multiple media (books, manuscripts, films, and sound recordings), but especially photographs; they contain about 70,000 images in eight different collections, from nineteenth-century daguerreotypes to color photos taken by the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information in the 1930s and 1940s.They also include multiple perspectives--dissidents are well represented in the Woman Suffrage and African American pamphlet collections, whereas such establishment figures as John D. Rockefeller literally have their saying the Nation's Forum sound collections. The Founding Fathers make their appearance in 274 broadsides from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, while hundreds of unfamous Americans tell their stories in their life histories.
Also of interest, the National Archives and Record Administration with a substantial amount of information online, including guides to the collection, ideas on creating a "digital classroom," and an online exhibit hall.
Yahoo! has good lists of foreign libraries and archives which maintain websites. German historians should visit the Bundes archiv, French historians the Bibliotheque nationale de France , and British historians should visit ARCHON,a listing of archival resources online in England. Other archives, both foreign and domestic, can be located by simply typing the name of the archive into one of the search engines listed above.
Journals
Many historical journals are coming online, and the place to begin is the list provided at the Library's electronic journals page with links to, among others, JSTOR, which allows you to search for keywords in an impressive array of olderback-issues (~ 1991) of many journals, including the American HistoricalReview, the Journal of Modern History, and the Journal of American History. The Project MUSE digitizes and makes available by electronic subscription all journals of the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Documents
The largest online text archive is housed at Mississippi State University, where the impressive Historical Text Archive offers a remarkably large collection of documents, speeches, and texts. Additionally, it has amassed an amazing array of hyperlinks to other resources across the Net pertinent to historians, including links to international repositories. The Project Gutenberg is a huge library of electronically stored books, mostly classics, that can be downloaded for free and viewed off-line. More specific sites, such as the Marx-Engels Internet Archive exist as well, and can provide useful information.