Forthcoming as chapter one of Doing Digital History by Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig.

Only the brashest among us would set about composing a work of history without reading some comparable historical works first. Writing history requires that you first immerse yourself in the styles, conventions, and methods of historical writing and that you understand the different genres of history books, whether scholarly monograph, popular narrative, textbook, or reference work. The same holds for those who want to create history museum exhibits, make history films, and teach history classes. History website authors, however, have not always followed this simple rule, especially in the World Wide Web's first decade. Before you begin creating online history resources, you need to take a good look around the aggregate of history-related websites that we are calling the History Web. This chapter will get you started, pointing out some highlights to spark your imagination. But like any guidebook, it can only tell you where to begin your own explorations; armchair readers of a Paris Baedeker don't know the city like those who walk along its streets.

When the Web was Young

As historians, we begin with a little history. The first web pages emerged in that faraway era of the early 1990s. Email and the Internet were already becoming well known but the web, which like email uses the Internet's global computer network to share information in commonly agreed-upon ways, had its start among physicists only in 1991. It moved into the mainstream in 1993 when the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released Mosaic, an easy-to-use graphical web browser that ran on most standard computers. Between mid-1993 and mid-1995 the number of servers—the computers that house websites—jumped from 130 to 22,000.

         Even with the user-friendly Mosaic encouraging a major expansion of this new medium, only a few historians ventured out on the web frontier. Many of the pioneers already had some technical interests or background. In November 1994 Morris Pierce, an engineer who had recently earned a history Ph.D., created one of the first departmental websites for the University of Rochester. It "seemed like a natural thing to do," he recalls. George Welling already worked in a department of humanities computing, which the University of Groningen (Netherlands) had created in 1986. In the fall of 1994, Welling developed a course in computer skills for American history students and asked them to construct an American Revolution website. Welling's site, From Revolution to Reconstruction, quickly became one of first popular history websites, although he observes, "it took quite some time before my colleagues accepted this as an academic venture."[1] 

Other History Web pioneers came to the medium out of experience with earlier Internet applications, particularly email. In the late 1980s, Joni Makivirta, a student at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland started an online history discussion list because he noticed lists on other topics and thought a history list would allow him "to get ideas from professional historians around the world" for his master thesis. The participants included George Welling, Thomas Zielke, who later took over the list, Richard Jensen, who went on to found H-Net in 1993, Don Mabry, a Latin American historian at Mississippi State University, and Lynn Nelson, a medievalist at the University of Kansas. In 1991, Mabry—responding to the difficulty of circulating large documents via email—began to make available primary sources and other materials of interest to historians via "anonymous FTP"—a "file transfer protocol" that allows anyone with an Internet connection to download the files to their own computers. Nelson created his own site and then had the idea of linking together the emerging set of history FTP sites into HNSource using Gopher, a hierarchical, menu-driven system for navigating the Internet that was much more popular than the web in the early 1990s. In September 1993, just after Mosaic was released, Nelson made HNSource available through the new web protocols, and it became one of the first if not the very first historical site on the web.[2]

         In the 1980s and early 1990s, the most intense energy in digital history centered not on the possibilities of online networks but rather on fixed-media products like laser disks and CD-ROM. In 1982, the Library of Congress began its Optical Disk Pilot Project, which placed text and images from its massive collections on laser disks and later CD-ROM. With a large amount of material already in digital form, the library could quickly take advantage of the newly emerging web. In 1992, it started to offer its exhibits through FTP sites. Two years later, the library posted its first web-based collection, Selected Civil War Photographs.[3]

Around the time that these early settlers carved out primitive digital history homesteads, the first signs emerged that this new frontier might feature more than noncommercial exchange. In October 1994 Marc Andreessen and some of his colleagues who had developed Mosaic at the government-funded NCSA released the first version of a commercially funded browser they called Netscape. Within months, Mosaic was, as they say, history, and Netscape was king of the World Wide Web. The Netscape era (from 1995 to 1998, after which Microsoft's Internet Explorer began to displace it) saw the History Web come into its own.[4] In mid-1995, when one of us co-wrote the first published guide to the web for historians in the American Historical Association's (AHA) Perspectives, it announced, "the explosion in Web sites has brought with it an explosion in materials relevant to historians."[5] Earlier that year, the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) had helped the venerable AHA launch its website; by that summer forty-five history departments had posted home pages.

         The online presence of the AHA and the Library of Congress provided an official imprimatur to the History Web. But in those early years, amateurs, not professional historical organizations, provided the crucial energy for much of its growth. Starting in 1995, for example, Larry Stevens, a telephone company worker from Newark, Ohio, established a series of websites on Ohio in the Civil War. The sites combined his two hobbies of history and computers, and, he explained, he "decided to carve a niche into the net before the big boys, aka Ohio Historical Society, Ohio State University, etc., entered the field." Like Stevens, many early web history enthusiasts had some technical background. In 1994, Nicolas Pioch, a computer science instructor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris, launched the Web Museum, which soon became an online archive of several thousand works of art. Political commitments—from Marxism to libertarianism—also motivated early web historians.[6]

         Since the mid-1990s, the History Web has spun its threads with astonishing speed. We thought that we would impress readers in 1995 by telling them that a search on "FDR" brought up forty-nine "hits" in a commonly used search engine. In 2004, the same search yields 640,000 hits. In the fall of 1996, we did some additional history searches with what we thought were even more remarkable results—200 hits for the Civil War General George B. McClellan and 300 for the Socialist Eugene V. Debs. Eight years later, those same searches would overwhelm the web researcher with 97,000 and 18,000 hits. Even by 1996 the "walking city" that was the History Web a year earlier had become a sprawling megalopolis that no one person could fully explore. Yahoo counted 873 U.S. history websites in an incomplete census that fall. But seven years later, an even less complete tally returned almost ten times as many American history websites. These results reveal a deep and wide fascination with history among the web-browsing public.

Mapping the History Web

         Despite the enormity of Yahoo's current history web directory, a cursory glance reveals its incompleteness. For example, it only lists 218 of the more than1,200 history department web pages. Just thirteen online courses and syllabi make their way into the Yahoo directory; yet probably more than 15,000 history syllabi are publicly available on the web. Yahoo catalogs 888 Civil War websites, whereas the United States Civil War Center has 8,000 links in its directory.[7] Of late, Yahoo's web directory is becoming something of a historical artifact. In the first five years of the web Yahoo was one of the dominant websites because it added the librarian's touch of classification and order to a confusing hodgepodge of sites. Now Google's rapid search of the raw mass of disorganized, heterogeneous web pages has replaced, by a tremendous margin, Yahoo's tidy directory as the leading referrer of web visitors. The brute force of computer algorithms has proven far more useful than any human cataloging.

         But neither the human-created directories nor the machine-based search engine capture all of the History Web. Much of the web has moved into databases (the "deep web") that search engines have trouble accessing because they require some input from the visitor—a word or phrase—to call up their contents. Google searches on "George McClellan" don't turn up the 500 references, including letters, photos, speeches, and sheet music, within the 8-million-item American Memory collections at the Library of Congress. In addition, only paying customers can access vast precincts of the History Web, especially those containing secondary sources and even major collections of primary sources. The most careful Google searcher will not locate the 170 references to McClellan in scholarly articles provided online through JSTOR, a subscription database gated off from the public web. And while MIT leads the charge for "open courseware," many universities keep their syllabi locked behind the doors of commercial programs like WebCT and Blackboard, thus making their educational materials unavailable to the broader world.[8]

       The History Web has become so sprawling that some history websites concentrate solely on steering perplexed ramblers through the thicket. The World-Wide Web Virtual Library's History Index, begun by Lynn Nelson in 1993, has evolved into a network of two hundred different gateways and more than 10,000 links with volunteers taking responsibility for developing lists on particular topics (e.g., historical journals or ancient Greece). Others have developed more specialized gateways focusing on particular topics (e.g., librarian Ken Middleton's American Women's History: A Research Guide) or audiences (e.g., retired teacher Dennis Boals's History/Social Studies for K-12 Teachers). Many of the gateways have struggled with the problems of keeping up with the proliferating numbers of sites and sorting the wheat from the chaff. Six of the nine gateways to U.S. history listed on the Virtual Library's History Index are dead or out of date, perhaps reflecting the Sisyphean task taken on by their editors. In response, some sites have emerged that emphasize qualitative filtering such as our own History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course Online and World History Matters, or Best of History Web Sites organized by Thomas Daccord, a high school history teacher.[9]

         Comprehensive and clear categorization of the History Web has proven elusive. Yahoo and many other directories take the most conventional approach, dividing listings by region, topic, and time period. Such divisions make clear that the History Web's composition, in part, follows obvious patterns of economic and political dominance. For example, Yahoo counts 1,352 sites in British history but only 7 on Uganda. Popular history preferences clearly take precedence over professional concerns. Yahoo lists almost 3,000 genealogy sites and 900 on the Civil War but lacks separate categories for cultural, social, and intellectual history, three of the largest areas of interest among members of the AHA. After having placed most history websites in geographic, topical, or temporal categories, Yahoo's cataloguers—many of them trained as librarians—then throw up their hands at the eclecticism of the History Web and dump the remains under a catchall heading of "Additional History Categories," which includes everything from "Archives and Bibliographies" to "Shopping and Services."

         The History Web is both more and less than a good historical library. It has spotty coverage in some areas that have well developed historical literatures. But it provides rich information on topics— African-American heritage tours and popular appropriations of historical figures like FDR among them—that most libraries don't touch upon.

         If conventional library categories are inadequate for mapping the History Web, are there other ways of classifying things that provide further insight? One obvious division involves the types of authors. Because the web allows everyone to be a publisher at a remarkably low cost, amateurs and enthusiasts have a much more prominent place online than they do in print. Not only has the web called into existence a new group of grassroots historians but those non-academic authors have acquired a much more public voice than they had before. Nevertheless, Larry Stevens's fear about the "big guys" muscling in has proven prescient. Although the number of amateur sites remains larger than those coming from professional historians or historical organizations (museums, libraries, archives), the weight of web traffic has swung in more established directions. The sites ranked as most popular by Yahoo generally come from universities, government agencies (e.g., the Library of Congress or the National Park Service), or corporations (e.g., The History Channel).

         The entry of large corporations into the History Web creates two further distinctions—between commercial and noncommercial sites and between gated sites and open access. So far, the presence of commercial history websites within the public web has been less prominent than many assumed in the era of the Internet gold rush that began shortly after Netscape's stock price went through the roof. Discovery Communications sunk more than $10 million into a site that prominently featured history. Today, it presents only historical material closely related to its cable programs. Even the original content that it expensively created in 1996 has disappeared.[10]

         After the dot-com boom fizzled, the companies presenting history online were primarily those selling history as adjuncts of more traditional "bricks and mortar" businesses. Most prominent are the History Channel website (an affiliate of the cable television outlet) and HistoryNet, which is owned by Primedia, the publisher of a stable of such popular history magazines as Civil War Times as well as the owner of About.com, which provides online guides to a variety of subjects, including history. Both sites reflect the advantages and disadvantages of most popular history—solid writing and production values, but a tendency to avoid controversy or strong interpretations and to focus on topics like war, technology, and entertainment—not surprising, since these sites largely support businesses (cable TV, videos, magazines) that emphasize these topics.

The greater corporate presence on the History Web is behind closed doors—the "gates" erected by vendors who sell resources to libraries, especially university libraries, who then dispense them to their customers. Global information conglomerates like ProQuest and the Thomson Corporation have developed vast online databases of newspapers, documents, and books that they license to libraries for large fees and are, hence, available only to the patrons of those libraries able to afford the stiff price.

         From the perspective of someone who is thinking about creating their own website, probably the most helpful way to classify history websites is by the types of materials they provide and the functions and audiences they serve. The past decade has seen the emergence of five main genres of history websites that follow pre-existing patterns and categories: archives (containing primary sources); exhibits, films, scholarship, and essays (that is, secondary sources); teaching (directed at students and teachers); discussion (focused on online dialogue); and organizational (providing information about a historical group). Yet these categories are often loosely followed and frequently blurred. Almost every exhibit site has primary source documents, as do many teaching sites. Few archival sites totally eschew historical interpretation. And a large number of sites seem to defiantly reject the categorizations neatly laid out above. This is particularly true of topical sites that are intent on covering every possible base on a given topic rather than trying to provide a certain kind of resource or serve a specific audience.

         If categorizing sites is so difficult, why bother? Partly, because it gives us some paths through the sometimes puzzling History Web. But, more important, it forces the incipient History Web creator to think about genres themselves, what Phil Agre calls the "expectable form that materials in a given medium might take." Genres imply, in Agre's words, "a particular sort of audience and a particular sort of activity" and are "the meeting-point between the process of producing media materials and the process of using them." To pay attention to genre is to think about how what you are doing relates to the audience you are hoping to reach—something less necessary "in the old days, when media were few and their uses evolved slowly," or when they evolved in an ad hoc, organic way.[11] The newness of the web requires historians to be much more deliberate about what we are doing and why we are doing it. Moreover, thinking about genres focuses your attention on possible models. You may well aspire to break through categories and surpass what has been done previously—ambitions we applaud—but first you need to be familiar with what has been done before and why it was done that way.

Archival Websites

         Professional archivists complain that many archival websites are not archives at all because they lack "provenance," that is, a clear history of the custody of a coherent body of materials since their original creation.[12] Instead, their creators have assembled them from diverse sources. But even archivists would consider most (but not all) of the one hundred collections in the Library of Congress's American Memory website (a central component of its National Digital Library Program) "true" archives. Whatever you call them, taken together these sites are one of the History Web's greatest achievements and one of its most popular destinations.

       In the early 1990s, the library distributed optical disks of major collections to test sites around the country, and discovered to its surprise that K-12 teachers and students eagerly embraced the digital gifts.[13] In 1994, the library began moving the collections to the web. Less than a decade and more than $60 million later, American Memory had more than 8 million posted items. The collections cover every period of American history and almost every type of historical document in the library's collections—including books and other printed texts, manuscripts, sheet music, maps, motion pictures, photographs and prints, and sound recordings.

         American Memory succeeds because it exploits two intrinsic advantages of the online format: accessibility and searchability (despite a cumbersome interface). Using the online version of the Washington papers, the historian Peter R. Henriques undercut the claims of those who insist on Washington's religiosity by showing not only that Washington never referred to "Jesus" or "Christ" in his personal correspondence but also that his references to death were invariably "gloomy and pessimistic" with no evidence of "Christian images of judgment, redemption through the sacrifice of Christ, and eternal life for the faithful."[14] Historians around the globe, not just those with physical access to the Library of Congress, may now conduct such investigations, and with a rapidity impossible when searching meant months of manual turning pages.

         The early success of American Memory and other pioneering web archives sent hundreds of other libraries and archives to work on getting their own collections online. In 1997, for example, the Bibliothèque nationale de France began the Gallica project to put online multimedia documents from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. Dozens of similar web projects have given the History Web a global reach: PictureAustralia presents 600,000 images from 21 cultural agencies; the Digital Imaging Project of South Africa offers the text of 38 anti-apartheid periodicals, the International Dunhuang Project serves up 20,000 digitized images of Silk Road artifacts; and the Nagasaki University Library displays more than 5,000 hand-tinted photographs from the second half of the nineteenth century.[15]

Beyond its own collections, the Library of Congress played an important early role in spreading digital archives in the United States. With a $2 million grant from the midwestern telephone company Ameritech (now SBC), the Library of Congress sponsored a competition from 1996 through 1999 to enable libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives to create digital collections of primary resources. Twenty-two funded collections on such topics as Chicago Anarchists, the Chinese in California, the Northern Great Plains, and the Florida Everglades now reside within American Memory.

         Soon other funding sources as well as the sweat equity of individuals brought dozens of other major collections online. The Academic Affairs Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—with support from Ameritech, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the university itself—created Documenting the American South, which includes six digitization projects drawn primarily from the library's Southern Collections, including massive collections of first-person narratives and Southern literature.As with the Library of Congress, greatly expanded access to primary sources has proven to be the most significant contribution of Documenting the American South. Although the library conceived the project as a service to Southern studies scholars at the University of North Carolina and other colleges and universities, three-quarters of the users have turned out to be non-academics.[16]

       While American Memory and Documenting the American South have found a worthy mission in giving general and student audiences access to materials previously limited to the scholarly community, other archival projects have focused more squarely on scholars, particularly since special collections, archives, and major research libraries have been at the forefront of some of the most important and largest digitization projects. For example, the Digital Library Production Service at the University of Michigan defines K-12 and community colleges as "low priority" audiences and instead focuses on research universities and their graduate schools. Making of America, which the library developed in collaboration with Cornell University with funding from the Mellon Foundation, provides a digital library of printed materials published between 1850 and 1876. The University of Michigan portion of the collection alone encompasses more than 11,000 volumes and more than 3 million pages. Like scholars using American Memory, those taking advantage of Making of America for their studies can find information previously available in principle but not necessarily in practice due to the hindrance of flipping through reams of paper. Historian Steven M. Gelber reports that he located "a treasure trove of data in a matter of a couple of days" for his research on the origins of hobbies.[17]

The ability of digital searching to turn up previously hidden riches applies particularly to records that contain large amounts of detailed information with no easy way to find any specific piece of data. Genealogists, for example, have spent days and weeks pouring over censuses and similar records seeking information on family members. Putting those records into digital form means not only saving the trek to distant archives but also the chance to locate specific names with a quick word search. In April 2001, the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation placed online a computer database of the passenger arrival records of more than 22 million immigrants who entered through the Port of New York and Ellis Island between 1892 and 1924.Web surfers immediately clogged the site, which was soon the number one destination from the Lycos search engine. In its first year of operation, the site received almost 2 million visitors. Similarly, volunteers working for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints digitized the records of the 55 million people listed in the 1880 United States Census and the 1881 Canadian Census and made them available for free at the church's FamilySearch Internet Genealogy Service, which averages 3.4 million page views per day.[18] Genealogy has long been a grassroots pursuit, but now it has become a cooperative effort whose results are shared among an international community.

         The fever to bring the primary sources of the past online that began in the mid-1990s has infected many people—especially scholars and teachers, but also students and amateur enthusiasts—who did not think about documents in the same way as librarians and archivists. Their passion generally focuses on a particular historical topic. They want to make documents related to that topic available online—even if those documents don't necessarily have a shared "provenance" and an organic relationship among the materials in the manner of a traditional archive. Instead, they create their own virtual collections, often mixing published and unpublished materials in ways that "official" archives eschew.

         One of the first and still one of the most impressive of this new genre of "invented archives" is Valley of the Shadow.Like most of the early work coming out of the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in Humanities (IATH), Valley of the Shadow had its origins in a scholarly project. In 1991, Edward Ayers, a leading Southern historian, began work on a book that would compare the experience of two communities on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line during the Civil War, Augusta County in central Virginia and Franklin County in southern Pennsylvania. In 1992 Ayers and literary critic Jerome McGann, who created a massive site about the Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, became the institute's first two fellows. With the aid of a large team of collaborators and a number of grants, Ayers began digitizing the collections that would underlie his book. Initially, they planned to put the projects on stand-alone computers or local networks, but when they saw Mosaic in the fall of 1993 they knew "everything had changed for our digital projects."[19]

         Valley of the Shadow has since developed into a massive compendium of documents about the two communities before, during, and after the Civil War, including tens of thousands of newspaper articles, 1,400 letters and diaries, full census records from 1860, 45 Geographic Information Systems (GIS) maps, and more than 700 photographs and images. The site offers at least an implicit interpretation rather that taking the hands-off approach of most archivists, and this blurring between archive and historical argument perhaps makes Valley of the Shadow and sites like it closer to an edited collection of documents than a traditional archive.

         Jim Zwick, another early pioneer in "inventing" an online archive, brought an even more distinctive authorial voice to his efforts. In early 1995, as a Syracuse University graduate student, he began digitizing and posting a few documents on anti-imperialism, the subject of his dissertation. Like most historians, Zwick had assembled his own personal collection of sources, and he realized that these materials he had gathered for scholarly research could be made public through the web. Over time, Zwick's efforts have expanded well beyond anti-imperialism to encompass 10,500 pages of historical documents he personally digitized.[20]

       Zwick's Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898-1935illustrates not only what a single scholar can accomplish with energy, passion, and a good scanner, but also how "invented archives" can shape popular historical understanding. Zwick combines the scholar's passion for his subject with a commitment to the cause espoused by his historical subjects and that perspective has shaped his assiduous digitizing of documents, such as his remarkable collection of more than fifty anti-imperialist responses to Rudyard Kipling's poetic apologia for imperialism, "The White Man's Burden." As a result, the researcher who types the title of Kipling's poem into Google gets Zwick's compendia of critiques as the first hit rather than a site organized by a Kipling acolyte. Similarly, despite the current popular antipathy to Marxism, the first hit on a Google search on "Marx" or "Marxist" is the Marxists Internet Archive, a site that seeks "to show the value of Marxism."[21]

       Ayers and Zwick approached the web as scholars. They created sites that grew out of their own research interests. But they quickly encountered the large student audience, eager to touch some pieces of the past, even if only virtually. This should tell us something about the latent interests and curiosity of a vast Internet audience and the potential good service that can be done as online historians.

         Many others started directly with pedagogical purposes in mind. In 1995 Doug Lindner, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School, began to post some background materials for students enrolled in his course on famous trials.[22] Lindner's Famous Trials website gradually grew to thousands of documents (maps, trial transcripts, chronologies, appeals, newspaper accounts, etc.) on thirty-five trials, from Socrates in 399 b.c.e. to O. J. Simpson in 1995. The audience has also blossomed, now including high school, college, and law school students around the world. Despite the impressive scope of the site, Lindner disavows any intention to offer a traditional archive. Such an archive would run counter to his "basic goal of providing a clear, concise, and reasonably balanced understanding of the trials." He responds to critics with a sentence that summarizes the advantages of low-cost self-publishing on the web: "I'm not getting paid a penny for this—I put up the trials that I, with all of my idiosyncrasies, find interesting or compelling in some way." An even larger but still homegrown and self-financed teaching archive is Paul Halsall's Internet History Sourcebooks Project, which presents hundreds of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts for teaching organized into a family of sites, including the Internet Medieval Sourcebook, the Internet Modern History Sourcebook, and the Internet Ancient History Sourcebook.[23]

      Most grassroots web archivists lack Zwick, Lindner, and Halsall's dedication, but generally start with a similar teaching need or historical passion. Peter Bakewell and two colleagues at Emory University have posted a modest selection of primary sources on Colonial Latin America to "provide expanded access to limited documentary resources" for students in their courses. Eyler Robert Coates, Sr., a self-employed investor and consultant, wanted to publish a volume called Quotations from Chairman Jefferson that he saw as "freedom's alternative to 'Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung'" and began assembling quotations on more than two thousand handwritten cards. Then he learned to use a computer and in December 1995 launched Thomas Jefferson on Politics and Government: Quotations from the Writings of Thomas Jefferson, which became one of the best known and most visited Jefferson sites on the web, ranked number six by Google among sites related to the third president. Stefan Landsberger's online archive of hundreds of Chinese Propaganda Posters grew out of his doctoral dissertation and his desire to share his own passionate collecting. In 1995 Software consultant Omar Khan started Harappa: The Indus Valley and the Raj in India and Pakistan to because it was the "cheapest way" to bring his "hobby" to "the widest possible audience." It has turned into a major scholarly and teaching resource for those interested in South Asia. [24]

         Not all of the work of energetic, grassroots web archivists has remained noncommercial. In 1972, businessman John Adler, a history buff since his college days at Dartmouth, acquired a full-run of Harper's Weekly (1857-1916) for $10,000. Adler decided that indexing the popular illustrated weekly would make a nice retirement project. Ultimately, his efforts turned into a commercial web-based archive, HarpWeek. Despite the high price (purchasers pay $9,900 for a five-year segment), Adler has only recouped about 40 percent of the $10 million he has invested in the project.[25]

       Other for-profit projects, especially from large information companies like Canada's Thomson Corporation and Michigan-based ProQuest, have made even more massive investments in digitizing the past. For example, Thomson, a "global e-information and solutions company" with close to $8 billion in annual revenues, offers Eighteenth Century Collections Online, which includes "every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain" in the eighteenth century—33 million text-searchable pages and nearly 150,000 titles. Thomson Gale, a subsidiary of the Thompson Corporation, calls it "the most ambitious single digitization project ever undertaken" and boasts, "we own the 18th century." Those who want their own share must pay handsomely. A university with 18,000 students can spend more than half a million dollars to acquire the full collection—a hefty price, albeit less than the cost of acquiring the original books.[26]

         ProQuest, formerly the camera company Bell & Howell, goes head-to-head with Thomson in the fight to own the past. The half-billion-dollar corporation has launched a Digital Vault Initiative to convert more than 5.5 billion pages into "the world's largest digital archival collection of printed works." Already, its ProQuest Historical Newspapers offers almost 8 million online pages containing the full runs of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, and Washington Post. [27]

         Massive corporate funding gives the commercial digitizers a key advantage over the public-sector institutions like the Library of Congress and grassroots archivists like Zwick. They can easily bear the upfront costs of converting paper into marketable bits. Moreover, in addition to the costs of scanning and indexing, the copyright ownership of most of the intellectual products of the twentieth century means that only an entity that can sell access to the past can also afford to purchase the rights to it. Under the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (see chapter seven) almost everything published after 1923 remains covered by copyright in the United States until at least 2018. As a result, only companies with gated archives like ProQuest can offer the London or New York Times (and other newspapers) for most of the twentieth century. Not until the twenty-second century will most of the history of the twentieth century find its way into free online archives.

Exhibits, Films, Scholarship, and Essays

The web offers a vast new canvas on which historians can depict and interpret the past, as we have formerly done in scholarly monographs, popular histories, museum exhibits, documentary films, high school classrooms, or family gatherings. Hundreds of thousands of secondary sources have materialized on the web in its short history. Yet while the medium is new, the interpretations are not. Most digital interpretive historical materials simply translate analog materials like museum exhibits, scholarly articles, and popular essays to the new medium. The much smaller corpus of born-digital historical sites more often originate from the computers of amateur rather than professional historians and offer few historiographic innovations. But while such digital history—whether created for the web or not—rarely departs from historiographic conventions, it vastly expands the traditionally limited audience for historical presentations and sometimes offers features not possible in print.

       Online museum exhibits, for example, transcend the barriers of time (most exhibits are temporary installations), distance (museum visitors must be area residents or tourists), and space (gallery space is a scarce resource) that have often frustrated museum curators. Physical exhibits also translate naturally to the web because of their combination of text and images. After a $20 million gift allowed the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery to acquire Gilbert Stuart's 1796 portrait of George Washington, the museum sent the famous portrait on an eight-city tour. But even that ambitious nationwide tour left most people unable to see the exhibit. Through the web, anyone with a computer can visit the full exhibit, although not share the experience of seeing the original painting. Even Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, which the Smithsonian American Art Museum closed in August 1996, continues to have a virtual life. Virtual exhibits also overcome the space limitations of their analog counterparts. The online version of the New Jersey Historical Society's exhibit What Exit? New Jersey and Its Turnpike includes many full-length documents that the physical exhibit represented only through brief excerpts.[28]

Some online exhibits have incorporated additional features that physical exhibits cannot offer, or at least not as well. The San Francisco Exploratorium's Remembering Nagasaki (on exhibit in the museum in 1995) combines a straightforward presentation of twenty-five photographs taken by Yosuke Yamahata with an invitation (unconventional a decade ago) to site visitors to "share their recollections of learning about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" and "their ideas and opinions . . . and about the nuclear age in general." The curators then posted 150 of the responses on the website, where they offer a public memory space about the nuclear age. As one of the curators later commented, "the extraordinary discussion that developed during the months that this exhibit was on-line far exceeded any of our expectations of community dialog." Writing in the still early days of the web, he concluded, "this new tool of the Web provide[s] museums with a new way of interacting with its public."[29]

Although most online exhibits have not fulfilled this promise, some web exhibits on resonant or emotional subjects have evoked strong responses from online visitors. Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America features little more than a Flash movie narrated by the man who collected these disturbing images. But hundreds of visitors to the site have offered deep and heartfelt responses.[30] The online version of the Smithsonian's September 11: Bearing Witness to History has led more than 6,000 people to contribute personal reminiscences about their experiences on that date. Bearing Witness has also attracted more traffic and kept visitors on the site longer than any other Smithsonian website.[31] (Chapter six explores in greater detail ways of turning sites into receivers, as well as exhibiters, of historical recollections and materials.)

      Personal reflections on websites such as Bearing Witness and Without Sanctuary testify to the web's ability to permit and promote "interactivity." Some exhibits have allowed visitors to interact with artifacts from the past. The Getty Research Institute's exhibit Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen enables you to turn the crank of an 1870 choreutoscope (a magic lantern slide device) or watch a dancing skeleton displayed by it. Many other exhibits make use of Apple's QuickTime VR technology or Macromedia Flash to allow visitors to virtually rotate historical objects they might not be able to touch (e.g., African masks, antique motorcycles) or explore places that are difficult to reach or that no longer exist (from the Chetro Ketl Great Kiva to Julia Child's kitchen). Others engage visitors by having them solve historical puzzles or click or rollover images for more information on an artifact. The Smithsonian's The Star-Spangled Banner: The Flag that Inspired the National Anthem asks visitors to explore a group of primary sources to "solve mysteries" such as "why the flag was altered" and "who made the flag." Rolling your mouse over the evidence reveals hidden clues that help you in solving the mystery. Then, you can compare your answer to what a Smithsonian historian says about the same primary sources.[32]

       Done poorly, of course, such interactivity can border on mere gimmickry. But done well (as at the Smithsonian), these additional web features can engage users in interrogating historical evidence closely. Increasingly, major history museums such as the Smithsonian have turned their website design over to professional firms like Second Story, which gives their exhibits a much more professional feel than most history websites.< Smaller museums and historic sites generally have the homemade look of less well-off relations.

        Whereas most online exhibits have relatively directly translated gallery installations, some originate in a digital form. One of the earliest and most impressive examples is The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory, mounted in 1996 by the Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University under the leadership of the historian Carl Smith. It mixes extensive archival materials (maps, photographs, lithographs, letters, newspapers, and pamphlets) with interpretive essays by Smith, making the site into a combination archive, museum exhibit, and historical narrative. Some virtual exhibits have involved even more wide-ranging collaborations. For example, Voices of the Colorado Plateau brings together eight libraries and museums to present oral histories and historic photographs documenting life in the Four Corners region.[33]

At its most venturesome, the web therefore undercuts the most basic features of museums (their location in specific places, their possession or borrowing of specific objects, and the fixity and "sacredness" of those objects) and museum going (the tendency to share the experience with others). Whether or not online visitors find this virtuality as appealing as an actual museum visit remains an open question, one still asked—with skepticism—by numerous museum curators.

In spite of the web's ability to incorporate film footage, producers of historical documentaries have been even less inclined than curators to use the web to do something fundamentally new. Almost every major historical film has its companion site, but these web pages generally just advertise or supplement the video. Their connection to projects with extensive resources, including large advertising and marketing budgets, gives these websites some of the best production values on the History Web. American Experience, the PBS series that has broadcast more than 150 programs in U.S. history since 1988, offers sixty websites covering such diverse program topics as Abraham and Mary Lincoln, Coney Island, and Marcus Garvey. The sites generally offer timelines, images, primary sources, program transcripts, and teaching materials as well as "special features" such as games, interviews done for the programs, online forums with historians, and QuickTime VR explorations of historical places.

Not surprisingly, websites that supplement films and videos tend to be shaped by the interpretive stance of the original production. Historian Donald Ritchie observes that the website for the PBS series The American President reflects the focus on the character and personality of the presidents that characterized the television production. "Students using the site," he notes, "will find as much or more information about presidents' homes, spouses, and children as about their dealings with the cabinet, the Congress, and the courts." Similarly, Western historian John Mack Faragher complains that the companion website to the documentary The Oregon Trail does "little to suggest new historical perspectives on the trail experience—the history of gender roles, epidemic disease, or environmental impact"— and primarily promotes the film and related products.[34]

Historical scholarship translated into the online environment has been even less daring in format than museum or film efforts—a reflection of the formal conservatism of most scholars, the power of conventions in scholarly writing, and the heavily textual nature of most scholarship. Although vast quantities of scholarly work appear online, the format of that scholarship is overwhelmingly traditional. Indeed, in some cases online work is merely an electronic reproduction of an existing print format, with some of the major advantages of the digital form, such as searchability, tacked on. This conventionality has not, however, limited interest in these websites. JSTOR, which presents page images of the full runs of more than forty historical journals (with the exception of the most recent issues), attracts 8,500 visitors per day to its history publications despite the highly specialized content and the hefty licensing fee libraries must pay. Project Muse, which offers the current and recent issues of almost forty historical journals in searchable text, and the History Cooperative, which offers eleven journals, similarly attract substantial readership.[35] Quicker access than a trip to the library and the ability to search the journals by any word rather than flashy multimedia or interactivity attracts these users.

       Most major online history journals open themselves only to paying customers, but some scholarly historical publications have created open-access, electronic-only journals. Not surprisingly given their focus, the Journal of Multimedia History and the Journal of the Association for History and Computing have taken this e-route, as have more than 400 other history journals. Common-Place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life seeks to transcend the narrow confines of the conventional historical publication by being "a bit friendlier than a scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular magazine." Common-Place also seeks to exploit the web's potential to bring "people together to discuss ideas," although it has only had modest success in providing the space for online discussion. History News Network (HNN), a more avowedly popular publication that combines history and journalism, has been more successful in sparking conversation and debate on the web. In the first six months of 2003, readers posted more than 6,000 comments.[36]

Another hybrid approach combines the article with its underlying cache of historical documents and artifacts. Virtually every scholar who writes an article or book assembles an archive of sorts. Previously they could not readily share that archive given the expense of print publications. But web-based versions of journals have begun to offer supplements of primary sources. For example, Robert Darnton's 1999 presidential address to the American Historical Association on news and the media in eighteenth-century Paris, the first article with an electronic supplement published by the American Historical Review, includes a map of Paris, links to police reports, illustrations, and even songs.[37]

The emerging experiments in electronic book publication such as the Gutenberg-e project sponsored by the American Historical Association and Columbia University Press, and the American Council of Learned Societies History e-book project, have also followed this practice. For example, Michael Katten's e-book Colonial Lists/Indian Power: Identity Formation in Nineteenth-Century Telugu-Speaking India includes photographs, sketches, maps, petitions, manuscripts, videos, statues, and palm leaf verses. The e-book version of Joshua Brown's Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America, which the University of California Press published in hardcover, includes more than 180 illustrations including four slideshows comprising twenty-sixty images—much more visual evidence than could be encompassed in the print edition.[38]

       Scholars have made only very tentative steps toward employing the digital medium to break free from the scholarly forms of the book, article, and conference paper, to reconsider such basic matters as the form of narrative, the role of illustrations and multimedia, and the writer's authority. In 1999 American Quarterly published four online articles on such topics as films and the Spanish American War and photographs as legal evidence that looked very different from the standard journal fare. The most unconventional was Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz's "Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger," which includes descriptions of their 143 dreams about the actor (now governor), totaling more than 23,000 words of text, brief comments on at least eighteen of his films and detailed essays on two, fifteen magazine covers of Schwarzenegger, and dozens of 1995 emails between Krasniewicz and Blitz discussing love, life, and Arnold. Krasniewicz and Blitz embraced hypertext because the usual scholarly forms did not seem to meet the needs of their subject and their analysis. "We needed a medium, a forum," they write, "that would allow us to incorporate not just the more formal components of investigative research, but also the kinds of discoveries and reflections that are more traditionally relegated to the margins of qualitative research." For Krasniewicz and Blitz, hypertext doesn't merely do a better job of representing the fullness of their work on Schwarzenegger; it is the only way of representing it.[39]

       Two online articles from the American Historical Review hew more closely to conventionality while still pressing the scholarly boundaries. Philip J. Ethington's "Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge" combines a massive historical archive with a theoretical discussion of issues of historical certainty. William G. Thomas III and Edward Ayers offer their hypertext article "The Difference Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities" using digital media and a highly structured presentation "to give readers full access to a scholarly argument, the historiography about it, and the evidence for it."[40]

       An even more experimental form that has begun to attract some academic historians is the "weblog" or "blog." Jorn Barger, the proprietor of the Robot Wisdom Weblog, first coined the term in December 1997. Originally, weblogs (in Borger's definition) were simply web pages "where a weblogger . . . 'logs' all the other webpages she finds interesting." But quickly weblogs became something closer to personal journals, particularly popular among twenty-somethings working in dot-coms. Starting in 1999 weblogs spread rapidly across the Net, fueled, in particular, by the availability of easy-to-use software packages like Blogger that simplified the task of creating and maintaining a weblog.[41]

       In the next few years, some historians began joining in. By 2004, HNN, which sponsors eight blogs of its own, could list another twenty-three history blogs, most of them coming from academics of one sort or another. Taken as a group, the history blogs appear more about historians than history, especially about historians' takes on life and politics. Thus, HNN editor Rick Shenkman's own blog, Potus, compares Bill Clinton's memoirs to other presidential memoirs and ruminates on how Ronald Reagan should be ranked as a president. The Invisible Adjunct chronicled a year in the life of a young history Ph.D. teaching without any employment security. Josh Greenberg's Epistemographer offers reflections on life, leisure, teaching, and his progress on his dissertation. But some history bloggers stick more closely to scholarship itself. In PaleoJudaica.com, James R. Davila, a Lecturer in Early Jewish Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, "chronicle[s] and comment[s] on current developments (mainly as recorded in Internet sources) in the academic field of ancient Judaism and its historical and literary context." He mixes together commentaries on the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.[42] It may be that history weblogs will succeed where scholarly journals have failed so far and will be the basis of a new form of historical writing that challenges existing forms like the journal article. At the very least the format represents a way to break down long-standing barriers separating academics and the public, text and image, research notes and finished narratives, and past and present.

Web-based commercial history writing has generally not taken such an experimental approach and has moved from print to screen with few changes. The online articles at HistoryNet: Where History Lives on the Web—the offshoot of such popular history magazines as Civil War Times and Aviation History—are actually less interesting than the print originals. The web versions display mostly text and eschew the lavish illustrations of the print magazines—presumably to avoid the expense of picture permissions.[43]

Enthusiasts and amateurs have put the greatest energy into posting new forms of secondary literature online. Unlike the professional scholars and commercial popularizers, these amateurs traditionally have not had access to the print medium. They do not see the web as merely a new way to disseminate what has long been offered in print. Rather, it represents in many cases their first opportunity to be published. Thus, the web features a new genre of popular history writing that previously only had limited representation on library shelves—the passionate commentaries of people with a deep personal, but not professional, commitment to a historical topic. As Will Thomas notes in his survey of Civil War websites, most "are not the product of universities or libraries" but rather "the work of dedicated individuals without financial reward or scholarly credit." These individuals generally display an unswerving commitment to a particular point of view rather than the detachment to which most professional historians aspire. Sites devoted to such Civil War military leaders as Patrick R. Cleburne, James Longstreet, and George B. McClellan come from what Thomas and his colleague Alice Carter describe as "fans" and "partisans."[44]

The historical "fanzine"—sites created by people who are devoted to a particular topic (e.g., jazz aficionado Scott Alexander's wide-ranging Red Hot Jazz Archive)—has become a major feature of the History Web. Many such sites originate out of a particular passion; others come from a strong personal connection. For example, descendants of veterans have developed many Civil War and World War II sites. Historical fanzines find an outlet on the web because the authors lack the professional credentials to find a commercial or scholarly publisher or they have a historical enthusiasm that is too narrow to merit publication. Still others emerge out of a strong connection to a particular locality. Kevin Roe's Brainerd, Kansas: Time Place, and Memory on the Web tells the story of a community that is now virtually abandoned but even in its heyday had only 500 people, hardly the basis of a successful commercial market. But the site has found a small, but engaged, audience among a few dozen former town residents and their relatives, who have created a virtual historical society for a community that has largely disappeared.[45]

Professional historians appreciate the ways that such enthusiasts have brought large quantities of primary sources online. Thomas praises entomologist Thomas Fasulo's "vast archive on the Battle of Olustee" with its official records and letters from participants.But historians often view the interpretations offered at such sites with more skepticism. Thomas notes that many Civil War websites "broadcast old prejudices, ancient theories, and long-disproved arguments about the Civil War" such as the "idea that the Civil War was fought not over slavery but over economic differences having to do with the tariff."[46] The amateurs may have leapt ahead of the professionals in using the web as a vehicle for original publication, but their interpretations often look backward rather than forward. The amateurs could learn some historiographic lessons from the professionals while in turn teaching those who practice history as a vocation to think beyond traditional forms of publication.

Teaching and Learning

       Scholarly, public, and popular historians who have gone online have repeatedly confirmed the Library of Congress's early discovery that the web reaches unprecedented numbers of K-12 students and teachers. As a result, a very large percentage of websites, regardless of their primary focus, have incorporated teaching materials and advice. Although traditionally archives and libraries have eschewed a direct teaching function, on the web they have often embraced it. American Memory's Learning Page offers many resources for teachers, including lesson plans, tips on searching the collections, and links to other websites. The National Archive and Record Administration's Digital Classroom offers a similar array of resources. Online lesson plans have become so ubiquitous that no one has yet cataloged them.[47]

       Many museum sites offer extensive teaching resources. The Smithsonian's online version of the exhibit The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden includes lesson plans, advice on using the site with students, and an annotated bibliography. Linked to the virtual exhibition George Catlin and His Indian mounted by the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Renwick Gallery) is an extensive "Catlin Classroom" organized around Campfire Stories with George Catlin: An Encounter with Two Cultures. It includes four multimedia exhibitions featuring artworks by Catlin; a searchable database of Catlin's writings and hundreds of his artworks; fourteen lesson plans; and an online discussion board. The openness of the web to multiple audiences has even led some scholarly journals to think about teaching, a subject rarely broached within their covers. For example, the Journal of American History has created a site called Teaching the JAH, which focuses on an article from each issue and offers teaching suggestions and related primary sources.

         While teaching enters at some level into many archival, museum, and even scholarly websites, a large number of sites put teaching and learning front and center. The most ubiquitous and numerous of these are syllabi—surely the most common history websites. Perhaps 30,000 history syllabi are posted on the web, with about half of those gated behind passwords through university sites and commercial courseware like WebCT and Blackboard. But even just the publicly available syllabi provide a remarkable snapshot of the state of history teaching: How are courses conceptualized and structured? What books are being assigned? They also sadly reflect on the limited design skills of most historians, a topic that we consider in chapter three.[48]

         Most online syllabi reduce logistic hassles common to college courses, such as needing to continually hand out lost assignments. Some, however, aim much higher. The online syllabus for Stanley Schultz's University of Wisconsin telecourse on the United States since the Civil War includes lecture notes, biographical sketches, exams and review sheets, a photographic gallery, and a directory of history websites. Our GMU colleague Michael O'Malley has mounted a number of online syllabi that are notable for their clear interfaces and creative design. His most elaborate effort supplements an inventive course, "Magic, Illusion, and Detection in Turn-of-the-Century America." The website not only provides a syllabus and an extensive collection of primary sources (including books, posters, images, and early movies) but also a mystery about turn-of-the-century identity that students are asked to solve. Along the way, it expresses an original historical thesis in non-narrative, multimedia terms.[49]

         Course websites are almost always individual efforts. As a result, they reflect a personal vision, even one that is embodied only in the structure of course assignments, owing to limited design skills and time constraints. Particularly energetic and creative instructors like O'Malley, however, transcend these obstacles. The most extensive teaching sites generally reflect the efforts of a group or institution and external funding support from an agency like NEH, which has supported a number of online teaching projects.

       Some of these large-scale projects have developed portals or resource centers for teachers in particular areas. For example, historians Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar at Binghamton University have, with support from NEH, created Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1775–2000. The site contains more than forty mini-monographs designed to be used in teaching; each one poses an interpretive question and offers a set of primary documents related to that question. Similarly, Teacher Serve at the National Humanities Center offers extensive online materials for teaching about religion and the environment in American history.[50]

       Still other projects strive to offer resource centers for even broader swaths of history. History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, developed by CHNM in collaboration with the American Social History Project (ASHP) at the CUNY Graduate Center, presents a range of materials for teachers of U.S. history, including 1,000 primary documents in text, image, and audio; an annotated guide to more than 800 websites; model teaching assignments; sample syllabi; and moderated discussions about teaching with leading scholars. A companion site, World History Matters, makes available some similar materials across an even broader canvas. Both sites also seek to give students the skills and tools needed to analyze the enormous number of primary sources that have become available online. As Randy Bass has pointed out, the web has put the "novice in the archive," but it has not taught him or her what to do there. Thus, History Matters and World History Matters provide guides and interactive exercises showing students how "expert learners" make sense of primary source evidence like films, music, maps, and traveler's accounts and to demonstrate how historical insights are formed.[51]

       Most teaching websites offer resources (especially primary sources) and advice (for teachers on how to teach, for students on how to work with evidence). What has been talked about endlessly but has been much harder to achieve is interactive learning exercises. A significant challenge with computer feedback is the difficulty of portraying the subtlety and ambiguity of real history through the either/or, yes/no choices encouraged by the binary nature of digital logic. One approach that two innovative sites offer is to provide exercises—in both cases mysteries—that have no right answer and where the learning comes through the exploration. ASHP's The Lost Museum, centered around a three-dimensional recreation of P. T. Barnum's American Museum as well as a searchable archive of primary documents and a set of teaching activities and background essays, asks students to solve the mystery of who burned down the museum in 1865—a mystery with no answer but one that requires an exploration of antebellum life and culture to offer a plausible solution. Who Killed William Robinson? Race Justice and Settling the Land similarly presents students with problem of solving the murder of William Robinson, a Black American who was killed on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia in 1868.[52]

Discussion and Organizational Sites

       Email appeared on the Internet almost twenty years before the web, and it remains the most important channel of online historical communication and debate. H-Net, established in 1993, dominates the world of online historical discussion with more than 150 lists on everything from African expressive culture to utopian studies. Another very early Internet form—the newsgroup—also remains an arena for popular discussion of the past with fourteen history groups available through Usenet discussion forums.[53] Although the web, like email and newsgroups, is fundamentally a communication medium, it has not yet proven to be a primary location for historical discussion. Most successful have been commercial websites that provide spaces for people with shared interests or experiences to engage in online debate and conversation. For example, the History Channel has active discussion boards on wars, religion, and sports that have attracted thousands of comments.

       The liveliest of those discussion groups are those like the one on the Vietnam War in which participants share reminiscences and experiences. Similarly, SeniorNet has found a large following for online discussions of World War II about veterans and those who lived through the war on the home front. While the goal in SeniorNet is more recreational and therapeutic than historical, some other sites have focused more directly on using the Internet to collect the past. For example, our own Echo project and a number of other websites supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation have gathered online reminiscences on such diverse topics as women in science and engineering, the New York City blackouts of the 1960s and 1970s, the information theorist Claude Shannon, and electric cars. (Chapter six discusses these and similar sites in more detail.)

       Now that the web has displaced the library and perhaps the phone book as the first place most people go to find information, it has become necessary for every historical organization to stake out a home on the web so that people can find them and learn about their activities. Every major and minor historical organization, whether professional or popular—from the American Historical Association to the Wisconsin Historical Society to the Third Regiment Infantry, Maryland Volunteers (a group of reenactors)—has its website. More than 1,200 college and university history departments use the web to inform current and prospective students about faculty, course offerings, and other resources.[54]

       Historical societies, historic sites, and historic houses which want to attract visitors find the web the perfect way to let those visitors know about hours and directions. Some historic place and museum sites go considerably beyond such barebones information. The extensive Monticello website not only tells you how to plan your visit; it also provides detailed narratives about Thomas Jefferson and his house as well as virtual reality panoramas of all the house's public rooms, teaching resources, and research materials on controversial subjects like Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings. The National Park Service's Links to the Past, which connects web surfers to the two hundred NPS history locations as well as a wealth of other resources, attracts heavy web traffic. [55]

       The slipperiness of these web history categories seems to be one of the web's characteristics; its heterogeneity almost inevitably blurs genres. Many archive sites offer historical interpretations and some museum sites provide teaching materials in addition to archives . Still, most of these sites fit predominantly in one category or another. At the same time the web has also given birth to a set of sites that aspire to provide everything or almost everything on a particular topic—primary sources, interpretive commentary, teaching materials, and discussion. Such a topical approach does not have obvious counterparts in the analog world where historical work is more clearly defined by relatively discrete audiences—researchers, scholars, students, or museumgoers, for example.

       Some of the most impressive history sites on the web are massive topical sites, which provide a kind of one-stop shopping on a particular historical topic—sites such as University of Virginia American literature professor Stephen Railton's Mark Twain and His Times, and Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture, or DoHistory, an exploration of the diary of the eighteenth-century midwife Martha Ballard and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Pulitzer-Prize-winning study of it.[56] Yet topical sites are also among the weakest history websites because they sometimes lack focus and wind up being a hodge-podge of materials centered on a particular theme. Often, it makes more sense to try to excel at one thing—at providing access to a rich archive, offering an intriguing interpretive exhibit, or supplying effective classroom tools or resources—rather than straining to cover areas and reach audiences that go beyond your talents or resources.

         Even such a quick tour of the History Web thus reveals its potential and its problems. For those who are seeking to get themselves started online, it also suggests two basic steps that you should take before you put pixel to screen. First, become familiar with what has already been done. The ten-year record of the History Web has provided an abundant corpus of sites that you can explore in detail and get ideas and inspirations—about content, about design, about infrastructure—for your own efforts. To be sure, our hurried excursion has no doubt emphasized well-known and conventional sites at the expense of the quirky and out-of-the-way corners of the History Web. But we have done so in the conviction that a thorough knowledge of standard practices is the starting point for building unconventional history websites that combine a personal voice and inventive design with unusual primary sources and startling new historical interpretations.

       Second, think hard about the "genre" of site you are creating. Is this meant to be an archive of primary sources, a presentation of a historical interpretation (whether done visually or in text), a resource for teaching, a place for discussion, an advertisement for a historical organization, or a combination of some or all of the above? To ask such questions forces you to think about your audience—the community of people you want to reach—as well as your most basic goals in making history online. Before you begin the more practical steps in the journey outlined in the next seven chapters (planning your project, developing an infrastructure, digitizing your documents, designing your site, building an audience, collecting sources and stories, preserving your bytes), you need to know why you are taking that journey, who you hope will join you, and where you hope to go.
Notes