History and the Second Decade of the Web1

framework. Instead, most saw the events in far more personal and local terms: the loss of a friend, the effect on a town or community, the Rethinking History 299 impact on their family or jobs (Kazin 2003). Using similar electronic techniques, researchers are already probing the Syllabus Finder database to investigate a variety of themes, such as the changing role of race and ethnicity in undergraduate education, the growth of distance learning, how course materials on the web differ from offline materials, and how globalization is affecting the teaching of history and international relations. Future enquiries may use an extremely powerful computer science method called ‘regular expressions’, which one can use to search documents for all kinds of text patterns, not just keyword or phrase matches. As with interactivity and interoperability, early efforts at data-mining hint at a future of doing and using history on the web that may have more to do with providing materials and structures for historical research than with the presentation of a finished secondary source such as an electronic book or exhibit website. Done correctly, and taking advantage of the medium’s unparalleled ability to store, scan and interrelate documents, the web may enable new investigative tactics and resources. The 130,000 objects in the September 11 Digital Archive are not like any other 130,000 objects in the Library of Congress; we have acquired them, and can explore them, in ways we are only beginning to consider. Such collections and their associated electronic methods have the potential (an appropriately cautious word at this point) to supplement, though not replace, traditional historical research in physical archives. Finally, thinking about doing history on the web, just like thinking about history in any other medium, should ideally force us to revisit age-old questions about what history is and how we should engage in it. For some years I taught Herodotus and Thucydides to freshmen and perennially enjoyed (and felt professionally reinvigorated by) their sense of the differences between these two progenitors of the idea of history. Purveyor of a mostly tidied, marching chronology that aspired to the truth about what seemed to him (and to most historians since) to be the most devastating events to befall ancient Greece, and with a particular focus on remarkable figures such as Pericles and Alcibiades, Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War captured the hearts and minds of most in my classes. Students readily identified his compelling narrative of warfare and diplomacy as ‘history’. Other students found themselves drawn to Herodotus’ idiosyncratic tangents and more expansive view of ancient culture beyond the battles between the Greeks and the Persians. This minority found Herodotus’ sense of what belonged in the historical record refreshing: the strange rituals of non-Greek cultures, the sentiments of common people in addition to leading figures, competing and contradictory accounts. As Herodotus told his audience, he was saving and recounting it all because in