Community History, Active Historians and Activism

Do historians or chemists write better history of chemistry? (1).

This paper was the response to a challenge set me as the senior historian of chemistry (in age) serving on the ACS National Historic Chemical Landmarks Committee. The challenge was to reflect on the history of chemistry in terms of the question posed in the paper’s title. Although there is a “tongue in cheek” quality to the question, it also has its serious side and it challenged me. I have to ...

Exploring the History of Women's Education and Activism in Thailand

While the history of education1 in Thailand has been a productive area of research for numerous authors, particularly in its relationship to nationalism and modernization, it remains only a partial history. For this history has primarily documented the evolution and "progress" of Thai men's education as if it could represent the experiences of Thai women as well. This is indeed not the case. In...

Informatics for Historians: Tools for Medieval Document XML Markup, and their Impact on the History-Sciences

This article is a revised and extended version of [VBG, 07]. We conjecture that the digitalization of historical text documents as a basis of data mining and information retrieval for the purpose of progress in the history sciences is urgently needed. We present a novel, specialist XML tool-suite supporting the working historian in the transcription of original medieval charters into a machine-...

Digital library search preferences amongst historians and genealogists: British History Online user survey

This paper presents the results of a study of 1,439 users of British History Online (BHO). BHO is a digital library of key printed primary and secondary sources for the history of Britain and Ireland, with a principal focus on the period between 1300 and 1800. The collection currently contains 1,250 volumes, and 120,000 web pages of material. During a website rebuild in 2014, the project team a...

The Sociology and History of Professions: A Path That Mid-Century Medical Historians Did Not Take