History on the Web: Using and Evaluating the Internet

Today’s history students must be able to use the Internet effectively, but they do not necessarily know how to tell good history Web sites from bad ones. In the school or community library all the materials have been "vetted" in some way—either through peer review or by the professor who ordered the books. But students need guidelines to locate and evaluate online materials. Some existing guides teach the uninitiated the basics of how to use a Web browser, set up an e-mail account, and other fundamentals of getting connected—which, of course, is of little or no use to students who have been using the Internet for years! Meanwhile, history students have rushed headlong onto the Internet, readily accessing online materials in the process of writing term or research papers, yet many of them still receive little if any guidance in how to use the Web effectively. So, while instructors continue to grapple with the implications of online research, students exploit the potential of the Internet, sometimes finding and misusing the historical materials they find. In answer to these problems, this brief and inexpensive text will take students and instructors (including professional historians) beyond the initial stages of Internet use by providing them with the tools necessary to use the Internet to conduct sound historical research. Far more than a glorified list of soon-to-be-outdated links, this work details the history of the Internet, the history of history on the Internet, and how to become proficient at finding and evaluating Web sites. The book contains five chapters including: a short history of the Internet and the World Wide Web; a specific primer on finding history sites using the two major search engines; how to evaluate online content; Internet resources such as mailing lists and newsgroups; and a guide to putting materials online for class presentations.