It should not be surprising that organizations with different purposes, scopes, and resources will create websites that present history in vastly different ways. Some of the most popular history websites focus on local history and get their funding through generous donations and grants. Some are for-profit and will feature ads or merchandise sales. Still other are tied to the government and as such are supported at least in part through tax dollars. More money however, is not a substitute for quality research or an interesting topic, and sites that focus on a micro-historical topic can still provide an experience on par with a broader funding base.
This review includes four websites created for very different organizations. As such, each site conveys the study of history to its public in a different way. The first two are well funded projects that have a broad area of history to cover. The History Channel's website is funded as part of a for-profit corporation, and must attempt to cover the full chronology and geography of history. The website for the Smithsonian's American History Museum is funded primarily by the government and covers the known chronology of human civilizations on the American continents. The other two sites feature a substantially narrower scope, and their funding comes from much more ambiguous sources. Do History is an offshoot of a project by historian Laurel Ulrich called The Midwife's Tale. A small credit is given to both the Film Study Center at Harvard University and the Center for History in New Media at George Mason University indicating that most of the funding for this project comes from academia. Finally, the Valley of the Shadow is a website devoted to comparing the stories of two communities during the Civil War. The site indicates that it is at least partially funded by a 200,000 dollar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The subjects of these sites as well as their individual approaches to history education are diverse.
As the online home of a major cable television network, thehistorychannel.com functions primarily as a television viewing guide. The first thing viewers see when opening the site is a banner advertising an upcoming program. Currently the four major programs highlighted on the homepage include Cities of the Underworld, Ancient Discoveries, The Universe, and Gangland. This provides a good preview of how broadly history is covered on the site. But thehistorychannel.com goes beyond its television counterpart, and offers brief, multimedia laden digital exhibits. The exhibits currently are about subjects as diverse as the American presidency and the history of the Star Wars films. The exhibits appear to be based on some of their television programs, but are just in depth enough to keep the average web viewer interested. Additionally, the site features a community section where dedicated users can voice their opinion on the myriad historical subjects featured on the site. It is evident from all of the intricate flash multimedia work, the crisp easy to navigate layout, and the big name advertisements that thehistorychannel.com has substantially more funding to work with than the average history website.
The Smithsonian's American History Museum website is actually quite comparable to the History Channel's online effort. The absence of ads certainly give it a much more scholarly appearance, but it also contains many of the visual bells and whistles one would expect in a well funded educational website. Perhaps the most impressive feature on the NMAH website is the online exhibit section. There are a total of 50 online exhibitions and most are rich with sound, video, and flash. Like the History Channel's exhibits the information and interpretation are not obscured by the multimedia; the imagery serves only to enhance. In place of the television viewing guide, visitors to the NMAH site are given a guide of museum events. Finally, the site's History Explorer section features a unique interactive timeline of the museum's exhibits and programs. Unfortunately it does not appear that this timeline is changed often as many of the the exhibits presented are the same as they were several months ago.
DoHistory.org is a site built around a work of history, and more specifically around a 200 year old diary of an American midwife. The diary however, is just a case study for a larger attempt to teach the public to understand American history through similar surviving primary sources. How visitors use the site depends on their personal interests. DoHistory.org features a list of options under the “If you're interested in...” tab on the upper left of their homepage. For instance, clicking on the genealogy link under this tab will take visitors to a site featuring information how to use their own family's historic documents to extract stories in the same way that Laurel Ulrich used Martha Ballard's diary. There are also links for teachers, primary source researchers, and aspiring documentary filmmakers. The site is historically narrow in focus, but it is of interest to all aspiring amateur historians.
Perhaps the most impressive site is The Valley of the Shadow. The site functions as a research archive for a project that was intended to be produced in published form, but it grew into an online database featuring a host of primary sources. The site covers two counties quite near one another; one in the Union during the Civil War, and one in the Confederacy. Chronologically, the site archives features documents from before, during, and after the war. Each time period features similar archival material, but also some records specifically relevant to the time period. For example, the “war years” section features soldiers' remembrances, and the “aftermath” section features Freedmen's Bureau records. The “How to” section of the site encourages visitors to use the archive more as a library than as a single text. In fact, with the wealth of primary sources compiled here, it is surprising that the site does not have an area where visitors can easily post their own interpretations and research. The current interpretations section contains work done by scholars and students, but does not appear to be open to amateur historians. This site provides a good blueprint for how history can be made available to the slightly more ambitious amateur than those catered to by the History Channel or NMAH websites. The archive involves a bit more work on the part of the visitor and few multimedia extras, but makes up for it in its wealth of data. When viewed side by side, the cultural fabric of these two cities does not seem as diametrically opposed as one might think warring communities may be.
