Browse Website Reviews
Discover quality websites on a range of topics and time periods. If a website link is no longer active, consult this guide to website URL paths for tips on locating the original resource.
Burke and Wills – Terra Incognita
Supplementary material is easy to follow and fairly extensive... Information is included on the background to the expedition, its historical context, biographies of those involved, the preparation for and events of the expedition, and its aftermath.
Map Section Image Database
The Walker Collection comprises 135 maps, printed between 1511 and 1774, that cover Asia Minor and surrounding areas including the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Balkans.
Wetmore Print Collection
While the responsibility of providing historical context for these images remains with the instructor, the images themselves will delight and puzzle students—and, if they are properly prepared, will provide good insight into the historical periods in question as well.
Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts
A rich database site that focuses on iconography (pictorial illustrations of a subject) such as this one offers many teaching and learning possibilities for several humanities disciplines, not just art history.
Biblioteca Ambrosiana
The site is visually attractive and well designed, with straightforward navigation. It provides an introduction to the site and a history of the collection; a database search that scans the collection by artist, subject, and other parameters; and bibliographies for the drawings, for the history of the Ambrosiana, and for various exhibitions.
International Dunhuang Project
The IDP, based at the British Library in London, is an international collaborative effort to catalog, conserve, and encourage research of Silk Road artifacts. This website, which currently displays around 20,000 digitized images of these artifacts, is one product of this larger effort.
Japanese Old Photographs in Bakumatsu-Meiji Period
The site will be useful to instructors looking to add visual sources to enliven a discussion of Japanese history at this critical moment in which Japan confronted the threat of Western imperialism and embarked on its own urgent project of modernization.
Japanese Text Initiative
Perhaps the greatest contribution of this site is its search engine, which enables the reader to search multiple texts, in English, for common topics or phrases. This feature makes these literary texts very useful to historians locating references on specific topics.
Australian War Memorial
This website provides extensive information about the history of Australia at war, through primary and secondary material, as well as information about the memorial itself.
Abdul-Hamid II Collection Photography Archive
Teachers and students of the history of children and youth will be particularly taken by the vast array of education-themed photographs, which reveal a strong emphasis placed on schooling by the Ottoman Empire at the time.
Museum of the City of New York: Byron Collection
The Byron photographers took as its subjects all manner of social life in and around New York; the collection includes private subjects (family portraits and home photographs), but the bulk of the collection documents public life and public institutions.
Childhood and Evacuation
Most of the contributions are long and full of detail on humdrum daily routines during the war, which may try the patience of young people today. Yet the website surely achieves its objective of providing a monumental learning resource for future generations.
The Illustrated London News
In sum, the archive has a variety of delights for the historians to search through, and a well-organized website, though no great depth of coverage or supporting material.
Cartoons
This site provides students and teachers alike with a way of enlivening their approach to British political and social history. The website has a huge amount of material available, and it is well organized to help the researcher find cartoons from a particular cartoonist, or on a particular theme.
Hidden Lives Revealed: A Virtual Archive
At its heart is a collection of "Photographs", "Case files", and "Learning materials" from one of the many philanthropic societies dedicated to the care of children in Britain at this period.
Japanese Incarceration Camps Sites
One of the richest sites on this topic is the Denshō Website, which documents the lives of internees through text, photographs, maps, and video interviews with survivors.
Children's Drawings of the Spanish Civil War
In short, this is a potentially interesting collection that gives a child's perspective on the war, but from a teacher's point of view, there is very little help in ways of deploying it in the classroom.
The Adoption History Project
Overall, the Adoption History Project is among the best-designed and most succinctly comprehensive historical websites currently available. It is useful for students and scholars at all levels of academic proficiency
Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition and History (HEARTH)
Materials are arranged into 11 broadly-defined topics; each is introduced with a short essay, an image, and a substantial bibliography of influential texts on that topic, in PDF format. The history of home economics is a relatively young discipline, so these bibliographies provide an especially valuable service.