~ Early Web Links ~

A digitized presentation of 'The History of Costume' by Braun and Schneider, a landmark 19th-century German publication featuring 500 historical costume illustrations spanning antiquity through the Victorian era. Hosted by SIUE and compiled by C. Otis Sweezey, the site offers both a graphic index and text index, making it a valuable reference for costume designers, theater students, and fashion historians.

FANAC Inc. is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and archiving the history of science fiction fandom, maintaining a vast digital archive of fanzines, convention materials, and fan art spanning decades. The site offers information about the organization's mission, contributor credits, submission guidelines for scans, and newsletters tracking the ongoing archival effort.

Gene Slover's US Navy Pages is a comprehensive archive dedicated to preserving US naval history, covering battleships, aircraft carriers, destroyers, submarines, and ordnance documents including rare technical manuals and ordnance pamphlets. Maintained in honor of the late Gene Slover, the site features sailors' stories, Medal of Honor tributes, historical footage, and detailed gunnery range tables spanning decades of American naval warfare.

A detailed genealogical and historical resource focused on New York State's role in the Civil War, part of the NYGenWeb Project. Visitors can explore Medal of Honor recipients, G.A.R. obituaries from old newspapers, soldier rosters, prison diaries, and headstone photos contributed by researchers across the state.

The Newberry Library's Atlas of Historical County Boundaries Project offers comprehensive maps, chronologies, and data covering every Pennsylvania county's historical boundaries, names, and organizational changes from the state's earliest counties through the year 2000. Researchers can explore interactive maps, download GIS shapefiles, KMZ files for Google Earth, and printer-friendly PDFs detailing all 67 counties including extinct and proposed counties.

Karen Larsdatter has assembled an extensive collection of curated links exploring the material culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, covering clothing, tools, occupations, animals, eating utensils, and more. The site connects visitors to museum images, artifact descriptions, and book recommendations that illuminate how medieval people actually lived and worked.

A preserved snapshot of Justin Hall's original 1994 homepage, one of the earliest personal websites ever published, served from a PowerBook laptop in a Swarthmore College dorm room. This piece of living web history captures the raw excitement of early hypertext publishing, complete with original link recommendations and commentary that predates the modern web.

The Digital Library on American Slavery, hosted at UNC Greensboro, is a centralized scholarly database compiling tens of thousands of primary source documents related to enslavement in the American South, including bills of sale, runaway slave notices, legislative petitions, and trans-Atlantic slave trade records. With over 200,000 named individuals searchable by name, keyword, and state, it serves as an indispensable research tool for historians, genealogists, and anyone studying the history of American slavery.

The Internet Crime Archives at mayhem.net is a reference collection dedicated to serial killers, covering psychological profiles, criminal methodologies, and detailed information on notorious cases like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Charles Manson. Visitors are greeted with an overview of serial killer behavior drawn from criminology and FBI profiling, then directed to a 'Serial Killer Hit List' of documented cases.

Jos Kingston's detailed historical study of life in Elizabethan-era Norton, Sheffield, covers occupation, social class, poverty, and parish records spanning 1560 to 1650. Downloadable baptism, marriage, and burial records make this a valuable resource for family historians and local historians researching the period.