HistoryWorldis a general-knowledge website, designed for anyone above the age of about twelve with an interest in history. I found the site searching for
dance history, but it includes 400 broad topics with more added all the time. It approaches history as a narrative, making full use of
chronology. This is for the student as well as the researcher.
'What happened next?' is for all of us a fascinating question, and one of direct relevance. At the heart of history there is inevitably a sequence of events. We all know separate bits of history, of different places and times, but it is often extremely hard to relate them to what was happening in other subjects or in other parts of the world. This is one area where the internet has a distinct advantage over the printed word. Links are much more easily made online than in books. Through the medium of
Timelines, linked to extensive background content, and interconnecting
'Tours through Time', HistoryWorld provides the user with the fabric of world history.
If you know the broad subject you want to read about, you should probably go straight to the list of 400 Histories with 6000 selected events (amounting in all to more than a million words). The titles are arranged alphabetically.
You can choose to read any History either in its
Plain Text version (quicker to read, and you can print them out) or in Interactive form. In the
Interactive version of the Histories you can link at a click to
Tours (letting you travel fast through time on interconnecting trails) or to
WhatWhenWhere (telling you what was going on elsewhere at the time you are reading about).
The concept from the start was that
HistoryWorld must be extremely interactive in its presentation and retrieval systems. It was also a central theme that the content must have a precisely focused index of the traditional kind, available to the user on every page, rather than relying on the erratic results of word searches.
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posted by jontyjago at 5:42 AM on May 23, 2008