~ Early Web Links ~

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.

NavWeaps, created by Tony DiGiulian, is a comprehensive reference covering naval weapons of the world from 1880 to the present, including guns, torpedoes, missiles, mines, and anti-submarine systems. The site also hosts orders of battle for major 20th-century naval engagements, technical analyses of ships and their armaments, and articles from the International Naval Research Organization.

Created by Edith Oughton, this site paints a vivid picture of life in the English village of Simister during the 1920s and 1930s, covering everyday characters, local trades, farms, and community events. Featuring sections on school days, Whitsun parades, pub life, and farm life, it preserves a slice of rural Lancashire history through personal storytelling and period imagery.

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 Fanac Fan History Project is a massive preservation archive dedicated to the history of science fiction fandom, housing thousands of fanzines, convention photos, recordings, and the comprehensive Fancyclopedia reference work. Run by a team of dedicated volunteers including Joe Siclari and Edie Stern, it serves as the definitive online repository for SF fan history spanning decades of Worldcons, APAs, and amateur publishing.

John Moore's meticulously researched history of Hele Bay, a small village near Ilfracombe in north Devon, traces human settlement from the Palaeolithic era through to modern times, complete with old photographs, maps, and references. Winner of the Barnstaple and District Civic Society Heritage Conservation Award in 2004, this site covers everything from Iron Age hillforts and Roman remains to smuggling, lime burning, and World Wars.

A detailed research site dedicated to Blanche Parry, chief gentlewoman to Queen Elizabeth I, created by historian Ruth E. Richardson. Visitors will find biographical research, articles on Herefordshire churches and abbeys, Welsh ancestry tracing, and investigations into topics like Iron Age hillforts, medieval drama, and even who killed Richard III.

The Internet Medieval Sourcebook, edited by Paul Halsall at Fordham University's Center for Medieval Studies, is a massive curated collection of primary source texts covering the entire medieval period, from the fall of Rome through the Renaissance and Reformation. Researchers and educators will find full-text sources, saints' lives, law texts, maps, and topically organized sections on everything from the Crusades and Byzantine studies to medieval Jewish life and gender history.

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.

Calculating Empires is a sweeping large-scale research visualization by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler tracing how technology and power have co-evolved since 1500, spanning topics from computation and surveillance to colonialism and military systems. The interactive map invites deep exploration of the interconnected genealogies of technical and social structures across five centuries, making it a remarkable scholarly artifact for anyone interested in the history of technology and empire.