Browse Website Reviews
A curated guide to the best online content, large and small, in world history through website reviews from the perspective of a world history teacher.
1500s landscape drawing showing a bridge over a river looking on into a harbor

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.
Logo and name for the International Dunhuang Project

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.
A woman dressed in a kimono and hair in Japanese style sits in a room playing a shamisen. A tray with a tea set and a tobacco tray are placed next to her, and a screen is placed at her back.

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.
Detail of "The Priest Saigyo" a painting of an older man in a flowing black robe underneath Japanese text

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

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.
Detail: Black and white photograph of two girls in dresses standing in front of a tree

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.
1907 photograph of Peck Piano Company workers

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.
Detail of a photograph showing two children sitting on the wing of a crashed German fighter plane.

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.
Detail of the header for The Illustrated London News showing the word "News" over part of the London skyline

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.
1914 cartoon reading "Bound for Berlin: The Great War Game" encircling a German soldier with a frightened look

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.

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