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Researching American History on the Internet:
A Brief, Critical Guide for Students and Faculty
by
Wayne Willis
Mentor, Historical and Cultural Studies
March, 2000
I. Introduction: Seeing the Sites
Although its potential has just begun to be tapped, the Internet is rapidly becoming a valuable medium for historical learning at the college level. There are already thousands of web sites devoted to historical topics and this number grows daily. However, we are not yet faced with "an embarrassment of riches." Many of these sites were designed to provide the general public, or elementary and high school students, with a combination of basic information and interesting images that is quite worthwhile, but lacks the depth of the scholarly books and articles that are ordinarily used in college study. Other sites were created by and for hobbyists with, for instance, a nostalgic attraction to the popular culture of the 1950s, or as personal tributes to favorite historical figures. These sites often contain a lot of information, but in a presentation that is marred by sentimentality and hero worship. There are also sites put up by people who are simply crackpots, often driven to spread their intense political or social biases through distorted historical interpretations based on inaccurate (or even falsified) evidence. The good news is that there are some web sites that can serve as excellent learning resources for undergraduate and graduate students of history. Typically, these sites were created by university professors and research centers to give students and professional historians ready access to a rich set of primary source materials (e.g., public documents, letters, diaries and other personal narratives, newspaper articles, pictures, songs) that pertain to a specialized topic. In some cases, the "authors" of the site analyze and interpret these materials themselves, so using the site is rather like reading a traditional academic article, except that the evidence on which the article is based is much more fully displayed. In other cases, the site is essentially an organized archive of original sources, perhaps with some tips on how to use the archive to pursue one's own research interest. Many sites combine the interpretive and archival approaches in various ways.
For adult college students engaged in individualized learning contracts, these intellectually meaty sites are especially valuable resources. It has been very hard for adult students with jobs and family and community responsibilities to do primary research projects, because their schedules do not allow them to spend many hours in libraries or other places where primary materials are located. Students living outside urban centers are usually further handicapped by the absence of large research libraries within convenient distance. Thanks to the Internet and its site creators, the adult student now has home access to many historical research sources that were not available in the past to traditional students at the most elite universities! What's more, an ESC student and mentor can explore these materials together on the mentor's office computer. This is progress that even I, an old Luddite, can recognize.
It is vital to realize that no historical topic can be well investigated using the Internet alone. Due to copyright restrictions and other factors, most modern scholarly books and articles are still available only in print and have to be acquired the old fashioned way, through libraries and book stores. What the Internet presently does best is to give us access to the primary sources that are the raw materials of original historical research. In short, the Internet supplements the library, but has not replaced it.
The sections that follow will provide brief descriptions and web addresses for a selection of American history sites that are, in my judgment, among the best that the Internet currently has to offer. I reviewed all of them, and a great many more that I have not included, during February and March, 2000. This is mainly a guide to sites that enable the user to delve pretty deeply into a topic and to work with primary source material. A much larger listing can be found in Dennis A. Trinkle and Scott A. Merriman, The History Highway 2000 (M. E. Sharpe, Inc.), the most thoughtful, comprehensive guide to sites in all fields of history. (However, many of the sites recommended in this book are better as places to go for short, graphically appealing overviews of their subjects, rather than to do college or graduate level research.) Trinkle and Merriman plan to keep their listings current by posting additions periodically on their own web site: http://www.theaahc.org/historyhighway/hh2000.htm
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