Suitable for history students, this primer is a guide to doing research in order to write a research paper, create a website, or do a PowerPoint presentation. It talks about how to do research on the Internet and how to differentiate between reliable and unreliable historical information on the Web.

"The Information-Literate Historian provides a thorough overview of the research process for historians. Presnell admirably guides students of history through the process of conducting research - all the way from identifying basic research terminologies to discussing various kinds of sources to providing numerous examples of how to locate said sources. The sheer amount of information within this text is impressive, especially given its relatively short length. Presnell's prose is clear and concise, but also accessible to students looking to undertake historical research. The utility of The Information-Literate Historian is such that I would assign it without hesitation to both undergraduate students and first-year graduate students as a reference tool"--

In this previously untold story of African American self-education, Heather Andrea Williams moves across time to examine African Americans' relationship to literacy during slavery, during the Civil War, and in the first decades of freedom. Self-Taught traces the historical antecedents to freedpeople's intense desire to become literate and demonstrates how the visions of enslaved African Americans emerged into plans and action once slavery ended. Enslaved people, Williams contends, placed great value in the practical power of literacy, whether it was to enable them to read the Bible for themselves or to keep informed of the abolition movement and later the progress of the Civil War. Some slaves devised creative and subversive means to acquire literacy, and when slavery ended, they became the first teachers of other freedpeople. Soon overwhelmed by the demands for education, they called on northern missionaries to come to their aid. Williams argues that by teaching, building schools, supporting teachers, resisting violence, and claiming education as a civil right, African Americans transformed the face of education in the South to the great benefit of both black and white southerners.

It’s been almost 30 years since the first edition of Going to the Sources: A Guide to Historical Research and Writing was first published. Newly revised and updated, the sixth edition of this bestselling guide helps students at all levels meet the challenge of writing their first (or their first "real") research paper. Presenting various schools of thought, this useful tool explores the dynamic, nature, and professional history of research papers, and shows readers how to identify, find, and evaluate both primary and secondary sources for their own writing assignments. This new edition addresses the shifting nature of historical study over the last twenty years. Going to the Sources: A Guide to Historical Research and Writing includes: A new section analyzing attempts by authors of historical works to identify and cultivate the appropriate public for their writings, from scholars appealing to a small circle of fellow specialists, to popular authors seeking mass readership A handy style guide for creating footnotes, endnotes, bibliographical entries, as well as a list of commonly used abbreviations Advanced Placement high school and undergraduate college students taking history courses at every level will benefit from the engaging, thoughtful, and down-to-earth advice within this hands-on guide.

Writing History offers a wealth of advice to help students research and write assignments for history classes. Designed for Canadian students in all areas of the discipline, this book includes up-to-date information and examples from the works of cultural, political, and social historians onfinding a research topic, interpreting source materials, performing internet searches, avoiding plagiarism, and more. With an expanded section on using online resources and a new chapter on writing assignments, including research proposals, book reviews, and essay exams, Writing History is an idealsupplement to any history course that requires students to conduct research.

This volume also provides both currently practicing historians and those entering the field a map for understanding the historical landscape of the future: not just to the historiographical debates of the academy but also the boom in commemoration and history outside the academy evident in many countries since the 1990s, which now constitutes the historical culture in each country. Public historians need to understand both contexts, and to negotiate their implications for questions of historical authority and the public historian's work.

From the bestselling author of the acclaimed Chaos and Genius comes a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory. Acclaimed science writer James Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, from the language of Africa’s talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, images, and blogs. Along the way, Gleick profiles key innovators, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and Claude Shannon, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, but how we live. A New York Times Notable Book A Los Angeles Times and Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of the Year Winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

Charting the evolution of practicing digital history Historians have seen their field transformed by the digital age. Research agendas, teaching and learning, scholarly communication, the nature of the archive—all have undergone a sea change that in and of itself constitutes a fascinating digital history. Yet technology's role in the field's development remains a glaring blind spot among digital scholars. Adam Crymble mines private and web archives, social media, and oral histories to show how technology and historians have come together. Using case studies, Crymble merges histories and philosophies of the field, separating issues relevant to historians from activities in the broader digital humanities movement. Key themes include the origin myths of digital historical research; a history of mass digitization of sources; how technology influenced changes in the curriculum; a portrait of the self-learning system that trains historians and the problems with that system; how blogs became a part of outreach and academic writing; and a roadmap for the continuing study of history in the digital era.

In 1896, a Norwegian immigrant and mother of eight children named Helga Estby was behind on taxes and the mortgage when she learned that a mysterious sponsor would pay $10,000 to a woman who walked across America. Hoping to win the wager and save her family’s farm, Helga and her teenaged daughter Clara, armed with little more than a compass, red-pepper spray, a revolver, and Clara’s curling iron, set out on foot from Eastern Washington. Their route would pass through 14 states, but they were not allowed to carry more than five dollars each. As they visited Indian reservations, Western boomtowns, remote ranches and local civic leaders, they confronted snowstorms, hunger, thieves and mountain lions with equal aplomb. Their treacherous and inspirational journey to New York challenged contemporary notions of femininity and captured the public imagination. But their trip had such devastating consequences that the Estby women's achievement was blanketed in silence until, nearly a century later, Linda Lawrence Hunt encountered their extraordinary story.

In these visionary essays, Roy Rosenzweig charts the impact of new media on teaching, researching, preserving, presenting, and understanding history. Negotiating between the "cyberenthusiasts" who champion technological breakthroughs and the "digitalskeptics" who fear the end of traditional humanistic scholarship, Rosenzweig re-envisions academic historians' practices and professional rites while analyzing and advocating for amateur historians' achievements. While he addresses the perils of "doing history" online, Rosenzweig eloquently identifies the promises of digital work, detailing innovative strategies for powerful searches in primary and secondary sources, the increased opportunities for dialogue and debate, and, most of all, the unprecedented access afforded by the Internet. Rosenzweig draws attention to the opening up of the historical record to new voices, the availability of documents and narratives to new audiences, and the attractions of digital technologies for new and diverse practitioners. Though he celebrates digital history's democratizing influences, Rosenzweig also argues that we can only ensure the future of the past in this digital age by actively resisting the efforts of corporations to put up gates and profit from the Web.