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Web Site Review
Roy Rosenzweig
Contributing Editor
The Journal of American History, in collaboration with the Web site History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web http://historymatters.gmu.edu/, publishes regular reviews of Web sites. The reviews appear both in the printed journal (and its online companion at http://www.historycooperative.org/) and at History Matters. History Matters provides an annotated guide to more than one thousand Web sites for teaching U.S. history. The goal is to offer a gateway to the best Web sites and to summarize their strengths and weaknesses with particular attention to their utility for teachers.
For the past five years, the Web reviews have been edited by Roy Rosenzweig. Starting in 2007, Kelly Schrum will take over as contributing editor. She is research associate professor at George Mason University and director of educational projects at the Center for History & New Media. Please contact her at kschrum@gmu.edu if you would like to suggest a site for review or write a review. She also welcomes comments on the review guidelines, which are available at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/jahguidelines.html.
| The New Georgia Encyclopedia,http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Home.jsp. A project of the Georgia Humanities Council in partnership with the Office of the Governor, the University of Georgia Press, the University System of Georgia/GALILEO, and the Georgia Department of Technical and Adult Education. Reviewed Feb. 10–May 30, 2006.
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| The New Georgia Encyclopedia is a World Wide Web–based reference work. There is no printed version, and it is probably a harbinger of many such works that will migrate from the printed page to the Web page in the future. The Encyclopedia can be understood, in part, as an attempt to marry the traditional strengths of a basic reference work to the multiple potential advantages of the Internet. While not (yet) a perfect product, it succeeds admirably in that goal. |
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A reference work such as this, Web-based or not, should first be authoritative, accurate, and reasonably comprehensive. I started with a list of about twenty items to look up, ranging from big topics (slavery) to small ones (the Atlanta Crackers baseball team), from people (Margaret Mitchell) to places (Albany), from early in the state's history (the Salzburgers) to recent events (the 1996 Olympic Games). The site offers three ways to search: through a set of broad categories (for example, "Religion," "Folklife") listed at the left margin, which are then broken down into successively smaller categories; through an alphabetical listing of articles, accessed through the "Index"; and through a simple search engine. The categorical arrangement works very well for browsing. For example, clicking successively on "History and Archeology," "Antebellum Era," and "People" produces a long list of entries on major and minor figures from that period. For a particular topic, entering a term in the search engine box produces a list of suggestions of articles and matching terms that appear somewhere in the text of articles. Thus, the term "Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949)" appears on the list as one begins to type her first or last name. If the user clicks on one of the suggested keywords, a list of articles with the word appears; in each article, the keyword is highlighted in yellow. |
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Most of the items on my sample list were easy to find, either in separate entries or as part of other entries, and the articles were accurate and appropriately informative. In one case ("Atlanta Crackers") the article is promised for the future, but it is not yet available. There were, however, numerous related articles, including one, I was delighted to see, on Bob Montag, a good-hit, no-field slugger I watched in the 1950s. In two cases, "spirituals" and "Cherokee Indians," I was surprised that neither had its own entry, although for the former there were entries for the "Sea Island Singers" and several individual performers, and for the latter there were entries for "Cherokee Removal" and individual Cherokee leaders. Granted, neither spirituals nor Cherokees are tied uniquely to Georgia, but neither are blues or gospel music, both of which have fine essays, or the Creek Indians, the subject of a separate overview by Claudio Saunt. |
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