History Commons Groups

May 24, 2012

The History Commons Needs Your Support


Historycommons.org (fka cooperativeresearch.org) is a unique and useful web-based tool for documenting facts that are suppressed or spun in Establishment narratives, for researching complex events and sometimes murky relationships between entities and events, and for educating the public (thus increasing transparency and facilitating accountability). The principal feature is the ‘timeline’, which is composed of written entries based on events and facts from mainstream or otherwise credible sources. These facts and events may or may not be well-known; often important details, which may have been buried in a document release, court filing, congressional testimony, the end notes of a government publication, or in a mainstream news report, can be discovered by skimming or searching a timeline. Also, the significance of certain facts, events and relationships generally becomes clearer in the contexts provided by the entry and through association with other entries; the timelines also reveal the bigger picture. Members of the public are welcome to contribute information or edits to historycommons.org, but, unlike Wikipedia, each new entry or edit undergoes at least two levels of editorial review, to help ensure accuracy and stylistic consistency.

The History Commons has received praise from a number of respected independent journalists, such as Glenn Greenwald, Craig Unger, Philip Shenon, James Ridgeway and Peter Lance.

If you’re unfamiliar with historycommons.org, or are mainly familiar with the Complete 9/11 Timeline that it has primarily become known for, please explore the site. In the last several years, the 9/11 coverage has been improved and expanded, and the site has grown to include more than 30 timelines covering a diverse range of topics, including health care, climate change, elections, foreign interventions and civil liberties: http://www.historycommons.org/timelines.jsp. Many more have been proposed: http://www.iraqtimeline.com/hctopics/index.html.

This website, first as cooperativeresearch.org, and then as historycommons.org, has existed continuously since 2002, but it is now in dire need of financial assistance; if funding does not significantly increase, the site may go offline by the end of this summer. The History Commons does not accept advertising and has never received funding from government, corporations or foundations. It has relied on the support of the grassroots, and needs to in order to remain independent. More information, including links for donating, is available here: https://hcgroups.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/fundraising-alert-2/

If you can’t offer financial support but do believe in the work the History Commons is doing, you can still help by letting others know about historycommons.org. And if you’d like to contribute research, writing or editing on any timeline topic, that would be welcomed. Also, any feedback or ideas you have would also be appreciated.

Erik Larson aka paxvector
Volunteer History Commons admin, editor, contributor

Advertisements

6 Comments »

  1. Reblogged this on NonviolentConflict.

    Comment by nonviolentconflict — May 25, 2012 @ 9:47 am | Reply

  2. Do you plan on archiving the information from HC and putting it on free-hosted site or saving the information if you close your doors?

    Comment by tjponline — May 26, 2012 @ 2:32 am | Reply

  3. TJP, I haven’t answered you until now because I’m not sure. I don’t think we’re going to go belly-up just yet, but as far as financial stability beyond the next couple of months, or archiving HC material, I can’t say with any authority. I am in the process of finding out. Stay tuned.

    Comment by Max — May 26, 2012 @ 3:38 pm | Reply

  4. Thank you. It would just about wreck me to see all that information just vanish. HC cannot close its doors unless it saves that vast info it has taken so long to gather up.

    Comment by tjponline — May 27, 2012 @ 10:15 pm | Reply

  5. If someone could get back to me, you can reach me at thejournalistprospect@hotmail.com – if you need someone to back up the site’s information, I would be glad to in case the site should go under.

    Comment by tjponline — May 31, 2012 @ 11:04 am | Reply

  6. TJP, I didn’t see your comments until now. Let’s talk about archiving/backing up this data. mtuck AT historycommons DOT org.

    Comment by Max — June 11, 2012 @ 10:37 pm | Reply


RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Blog at WordPress.com.

%d bloggers like this:
https://hcgroups.wordpress.com/2012/05/24/the-history-commons-needs-your-support/
hcgroups.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-43
96305
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:XISYWKQJSCWR6PSP6DJVRF632XNCMBZJ
<urn:uuid:14ca370a-bae8-40a8-9b9c-5c91c45f93a3>
2019-10-19T15:59:57Z
192.0.78.13
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:GDFTN2H4VUZAQWKODGC7H2JIGA77PBF6
<urn:uuid:07c793ab-ff2c-4ff0-8ae1-c4975aaadeb7>
https://hcgroups.wordpress.com/2012/05/24/the-history-commons-needs-your-support/
response
<urn:uuid:f828c3f5-a21a-451e-a110-ea4f29c966ba>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-43
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-65.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.16 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/