Military History on the Web
Staff -- Library Journal, 04/01/1997
In the past three years, the WorldWide Web has exploded with information on the history of warfare.Diaries and letters (some never before published), officialgovernment documents, maps, photographs, sound recordings,artwork, time lines, bibliographies, and statistics abound.
However, coverage is uneven. While the web offers much information on all U.S.-related wars, pagesregarding the Civil War and World War II are most bountiful. Thetwo megasites reviewed below are gateways to a broad array ofuseful information. The alternate sites either focus on specificwars or are presented by specific branches of military service.
Such sites offer specificopportunities for veterans, teachers, and historians. While theweb provides materials previously limited to large researchinstitutions, web sources vary in reliability, and this newmedium is stronger on data than analysis.
| WEB OF THE MONTH: MILITARY HISTORY The initial menu is broken down into four parts: an illustrated time line, with buttons for accessing warfare by historical period, specific wars, or by conventional time periods (ancient, medieval, etc.); a list of sites under the various time periods; a list by broad subjects (aviation, weapons, etc.); and a list by specific wars. The same useful menu system is deployed for each category. For example, the menu for Vietnam breaks down web sites into General Resources, Art and Literature, Biography, Memorials, and more. Many pages dealing with a particular war also link to listserv and Usenet discussion groups or to relevant newsletters and organizations. Keyword searching is available from the site's main page. Pros/Cons: This user-friendly site offers a broad set of links to world and U.S. historical materials dealing with war. There are fewer links to lesser-known wars (e.g., The War of 1812). Bottom Line: This is the easiest and richest military history gateway site to search and navigate, for both curious students and serious historians. |
Date Visited: 2/27/97
Developer/Provider: On-Line Commerce, Inc.
E-Hawk (the Electronic Headquarters for the
Acquisitionof War Knowledge) combines three related web pages:
MIL-HIST offers excellent accessto numerous publications, maps, photographs, and miscellaneousgraphics concerning U.S. military history. The three-year-oldsite is updated regularly.
Its opening page, while somewhatcrowded, offers a choice among links to other sites, an OnlineLibrary, Graphics, Online Discussion, and more. Choosing generalsites from 'Links' to other military history web pagesproduces short but well-evaluated descriptions of over 60 websites. The Online Library includes primary sources, secondarysources, reference materials, articles, book reviews, andbibliographies. Choosing any category leads to a menu broken downby time period. The site also helpfully lists and describeslistservs and Usenet groups concerning the history of warfare.
Pros/Cons: Thissite offers much information, plus many good abstracts of linkedsites. However, some sections are thin, and there is no searchengine.
Bottom Line:E-Hawk is a source of many useful links for students, teachers,and researchers, though the Military History site above (whichcovers much of the same ground) is easier to navigate.
CENTER OF MILITARY HISTORY (CMH)
Date Visited: 2/28/97
Developer/Provider: U.S. Army
Offering access to an increasingnumber of books, pamphlets, and reports published by the CMH,including The Whirlwind War (i.e., the Gulf War), and links to anumber of powerful electronic texts, this web site is less agateway than a provider of original documents.
Choosing the category 'Booksand Documents' yields access to extensive bibliographies ofmajor wars since the American Revolution; a link to a siteincluding over 150 documents emanating from World War II;chronologies of many wars; as well as a number of officialreports and documents dating from the Korean War through DesertStorm.
The FAQ section offers quickreference help for those wishing to know such things as thenumber of casualties in each war, the origin of the 21-gunsalute, and where official army records can be found. This siteis well constructed and easy to use, with frames offeringalternate ways to link to three major categories: Books andDocuments, the Army Museum System, and Finding Aids. A searchengine permits key word searching of all items.
The other services also offerofficial web
sites; the
Pros/Cons: Thissite offers unique access to recent military history publicationsand good access to army history. However, it has far fewer linksthan the gateway sites listed above.
Bottom Line: Thisis an essential resource for official Army information and Armyhistory, useful both to students/researchers and to veterans.
ALTERNATE SITES
The institute, adepartment of the Army War College, offers a connection to theCarlisle Barracks Total Library System, the most important singlerepository of historical data on the Army. These include severalsearchable databases, such as hard-to-find bibliographic guidesto Army unit histories, photographs dealing with the Normandyinvasion, and a description of the manuscript holdings of theinstitute. This site, while strong on bibliography, lacks thefull-text items on the CMH site noted above.
This site is essentially a
hypertext version of the United StatesInformation Agency booklet, An Outline of
American History, withlinks to numerous primary source documents and original
essays.These items were scanned or written by students of ProfessorGeorge
Welling, a historian at the University of Groningen(Netherlands). The site,
which offers access to a large corpus ofhistorical documents, is especially
useful for teachers andsecondary school students. Also useful is the
This site, begun at the University of
Tennessee and maintained bylibrarians George Hoemann and Mary Myers, is perhaps
the bestsingle site on the Civil War. It features links to well over 300sites,
providing access to time lines, photographs, diaries,official documents, and
more. Other notable sites are the
World War I: Trenches on the Web
In addition toproviding access to documents, maps, time lines, poetry, andmore, this site boasts an excellent search engine. It also usesnew technology well; in the 'media room,' one maylisten to the songs of the war such as'Keep the Home FiresBurning.' From the 'experimental' 'VRML(Virtual Reality Modeling Language) Hall,' weapons can beviewed in 3-D, and the images can be manipulated by the user.Finally, Trenches on the Web provides links to other useful sitessuch as
Created andmaintained by computer scientist John Davis, this site focuses onthe daily events of the war, as well as first-person accounts.Also, it provides links to photographs, documents, speeches, andrelated World War II sites. The extensive chronology, initially aproduct of the author's ongoing daily Internet column linkedto this site, is complete for April 1944 through September 1945,with events since August 1941 being added. This chronologyhelpfully includes events on the home front as well asbattlefield. Also, Davis has gathered many first-person accounts,not readily available elsewhere, that make up an evolving oralhistory of the war.
Developed by Hal Barker, a
photojournalist/writer, this site is agateway for information on what some have
termed the'forgotten war.' This site includes access to a numberof eyewitness
accounts of the Korean War, as well as an enormousamount of facts and figures,
FAQs, photographs, maps, and relatedgeneral sites. Also, it has some special
features including asearchable'KIA/MIA' (killed- or missing-in-action)database,
containing the names and profile of over 33,000soldiers; reproductions of
newspaper articles; and information onveterans' memorials.
Vietnam: Yesterday and Today
Created by Sandra M. Wittman, professor of
Library Services atOakton Community College (Skokie, IL), this is an
excellentgateway to Vietnam information. It links to documents,
articles,photographs, and diaries, as well as to most of the key webprojects
available on the Internet, including such a database ofcasualty names, an oral
history, and folklore project, plus sitesconcerning veterans' memorials.
