~ Early Web Links ~

Published by Peter Damerow and Jürgen Renn of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, this page presents an electronic representation of Galileo's complete handwritten notes on motion and mechanics spanning roughly 30 years of his career. The project digitizes approximately 200 loose manuscript sheets tracing the transition from Aristotelian to classical physics, making them accessible as a collaborative research environment for historians of science.

Castles on the Web is a comprehensive directory and resource dedicated to castles from around the world, featuring thousands of user-submitted photos, castle tours, a glossary of medieval terms, heraldry, myths and legends, and even a castle-of-the-day feature. With sections covering accommodations in real castles, books, medieval studies, and pages designed for kids, this site serves as a thorough hub for castle enthusiasts of all ages.

HyperHistory is an ambitious online reference navigating 3,000 years of world history through interactive timelines, maps, and synchronized chronologies of civilizations, people, and events. Covering everything from ancient cultures and the Middle Ages to modern figures like Einstein, it serves as a rich educational tool for students, researchers, and history enthusiasts alike.

Cyndi Ingle's companion blog to the legendary CyndisList.com, a free categorized index of genealogical resources on the Internet that has been running since 1996. Here she shares tips, advice, personal reflections, and updates about the main directory, making it a must-visit for anyone tracing family history online.

EffigiesAndBrasses.com is a vast image database cataloguing over 6,400 medieval monumental tombs, including effigies, brasses, incised slabs, and half-reliefs from 23 European countries spanning the 12th to 15th centuries. With nearly 3,500 monuments indexed and organized by searchable tags and sources, this is an exceptional reference for researchers and enthusiasts of medieval history, heraldry, and funerary art.

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.

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.

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.

ORBIS is an interactive geospatial network model of the ancient Roman world, built by Stanford scholars Walter Scheidel and Elijah Meeks, allowing users to calculate travel routes across the Roman Empire by road, river, and sea. Visitors can explore travel times, costs, and distances between hundreds of Roman sites using historically grounded transportation modes, making it an extraordinary research tool for historians and classical scholars.

A deeply researched cultural history of the American folksong 'Follow the Drinking Gourd,' tracing its origins, its role in Underground Railroad mythology, and its evolution through the Civil Rights and folk revival movements. The site critically examines the song's authenticity, covers roughly 200 recordings and dozens of publications, and includes a teachers' guide, timeline, gazetteer, and bibliographic appendices.