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Web Site Review
Kelly Schrum
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.
The Web reviews are edited by Kelly Schrum; please contact her at kschrum@gmu.edu if you would like to suggest a site for review or write a review. We also welcome comments on our review guidelines, which are available at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/jahguidelines.html.
| The Encyclopedia of Chicago, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/. Published and maintained by the Chicago History Museum, the Newberry Library, and Northwestern University. Reviewed June–Oct. 2006.
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| Brilliantly conceptualized, edited, managed, and produced, the print and online Encyclopedia of Chicago is one of the finest collective works (with 633 listed authors) of North American historical scholarship of our era, a worthy match for another such landmark, The Encyclopedia of New York City (1995), edited by Kenneth T. Jackson. |
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The print version opens with a declaration: "The editors of The Encyclopedia of Chicago began with a commitment to a vision of a metropolitan area whose past, present, and future rest on the principle of interdependence" (Janice L. Reiff, Ann Durkin Keating, and James R. Grossman, eds., The Encyclopedia of Chicago, 2004, p. xxv). Thus, while the Encyclopedia of Chicago focuses on the city of Chicago, it also covers the roughly 225 metropolitan towns and cities that encircle the city out to a radius of about sixty miles from the Loop (Chicago's downtown center). Its actual scope, however, is harder to state than that excellent principle of metropolitanism, because Chicago is a global intersection for people all over the world. |
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Despite the potentially unlimited subject, the Encyclopedia of Chicago is a wide-ranging, highly coherent work, covering such topics as the myriad immigrant populations in great detail. The editors of this work on a "city of neighborhoods" also commissioned detailed entries organized by Chicago's unusual system of seventy-seven "community areas," established by University of Chicago sociologists in the 1920s and widely recognized ever since (it is unusual because few great cities have a clear system). Each community area entry has a thumbnail map clearly indicating its location in the metropolis and supplies a uniformly formatted demographic table covering the years 1930–2000. Such comprehensive coverage shows both how the editors are true successors of the Chicago School of urban sociologists and how they have carefully built on the mountain of prior research produced by that school. |
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Does the online edition offer significant advantages over the print version? The print version runs 1,117 pages; the electronic version cannot be given a similar figure, but, as far as this reviewer could determine, the number and length of the entries are the same. The most important difference is one of availability: the online version is free to the entire world, making it far more available than the print version. Although meticulously hyperlinked, enabling readers to instantly explore related topics, the same cross-reference terms are highlighted in the print version, and turning pages is not a big inconvenience. And, although the online edition has some special navigational features, the basic structure of the electronic edition is limited to the alphabetical schema of the print edition. |
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