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{{Workgroup|group=History}}
{{Workgroup|group=History}}
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The [[History]] Workgroup creates and improves articles related to history, historiography, and the history discipline.  Authors and editors interested in all areas of history are welcomed in this group.  If you wish to be an author in this field, please add yourself to [[:Category:History Authors]] by adding <nowiki>[[</nowiki>Category:History Authors<nowiki>]]</nowiki> to your user page.  You free to start right in improving our articles.  If you meet the requirements to be a Citizendium Editor for this workgroup, please follow the directions found [[Special:RequestAccount | here]].


==[[CZ:History Workgroup/Style Guide|Style Guide]]==
If you are writing in the History Workgroup, please contribute to the [[CZ:History Workgroup/Style Guide|style guide for history articles]].  Please also follow our agreed style.  Thanks.


The purpose of this [[History]] Workgroup is to focus and coordinate efforts to create and improve articles related to history.  Authors and Editors interested in all areas of the subject are welcome in this group. If you wish to be an author in this field, please add yourself to [[:Category:History Authors]], introduce yourself on the History Workgroup Forum (linked below) and start improving our articles.  If you meet the requirements to be a Citizendium Editor for this workgroup, please follow the directions found [http://www.citizendium.org/cfa.html here] to become an editor, and then add yourself to Category:History Editors.
==Core articles==
{{Core-articles-note}} ''Click [[CZ:Core Articles/History|here]] to edit this transcluded list.''
{{CZ:Core Articles/History}}


Those who are unsure about committing to the Citizendium project as a whole should read our [[CZ:History Workgroup/Recruitment Letter|call to action.]]
==Articles==
 
{{subtopics-note}}
==High priority articles==
{{r|History}}
{{:History/Related Articles}}


==Priority Articles==
In the list of articles below, the existence of an ''approved version'' is indicated by ''italics''.
In the list of articles below, the existence of an ''approved version'' is indicated by ''italics''.


If you want to import one of these articles from Wikipedia, please read [[CZ:How to convert Wikipedia articles to Citizendium articles]] first. In particular, please do not import WP articles unless you plan on beginning work on them "within the hour" as the article says.
==Importing content==
If you want to import one of these articles from Wikipedia, please read [[CZ:How to convert Wikipedia articles to Citizendium articles]] first. In particular, please do not import WP articles unless you plan on beginning work on them "within the hour" as the article says. <!--But see also, our history group discussion on Wikipedia.-->


===Main subject areas===
===Main subject areas===


[[Civilization]] | [[History]] | [[History of the world]] | [[History of Science]] | [[History of Biology]] | [[Paradigm]]
[[History]] | [[Social history]] | [[History of economic thought]] | [[History of pre-classical economic thought]] | [[Political history]] | [[History of Science]] | [[History of Technology]] | [[Military history]] | [[Women's history]] | [[World history]] | [[Leaders]] |


===Prehistory to Middle Ages===
===Prehistory to Middle Ages===


[[Ancient Egypt]] | [[Ancient Greece]] | [[Ancient Rome]] | [[History of China]] | [[Archaeology]] | [[Aztec]] | [[Black Death]] | [[Bronze Age]] | [[Byzantine Empire]] | [[Crusades]] | [[East-West Schism]] | [[Holy Roman Empire]] | [[Indus Valley Civilization]] | [[Iron Age]] | [[Maya civilization]] | [[Macedon]] | [[Middle Ages]] | [[Ottoman Empire]] | [[Prehistory]] | [[Stone Age]] | [[Sumer]] | [[Viking]]
[[Ancient Egypt]] | [[Ancient Greece]] | [[Ancient Rome]] | [[Byzantine Empire]] | [[Caliphate]] | [[Crusades]] | [[Papacy|The Papacy]] | [[Holy Roman Empire]] | [[Middle Ages]] | [[Ottoman Empire]] | [[Assyrians]] | [[Babylonians]] | [[Early Islam]] |


===Renaissance to Industrial Age===
===Renaissance to Industrial Age===


[[Age of Enlightenment]] | [[American Civil War]] | [[American Revolutionary War]] | [[Balkan Wars]] | [[British Empire]] | [[Cold War]] | [[English Civil War]] | [[European colonization of the Americas]] | [[French Revolution]] | [[Great Depression]] | [[History of South Africa in the apartheid era]] | [[The Holocaust]] | [[Industrial Revolution]] | [[Napoleonic Wars]] | [[Protestant Reformation]] | [[Renaissance]] | [[Russian Civil War]] | [[Russian Revolution of 1917]] | [[Scientific Revolution]] | [[Scramble for Africa]] | [[Space exploration]] | [[Spanish Civil War]] | [[Vietnam War]] | [[World War I]] | [[World War II]]
[[Renaissance]] | [[The Enlightenment]] | [[French Revolution]] |  
 
[[Napoleon]] | [[England, Civil War]] | [[Industrial Revolution]] | [[Reformation]] | [[Scientific Revolution]] |  
=== Politicians and leaders ===
[[Akbar]] | [[Alexander the Great]] | [[Attila the Hun]] | [[Augustus]] | [[Pope Benedict XVI]] | [[Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel]] | [[Otto von Bismarck]] | [[Simón Bolívar]] | [[Julius Caesar]] | [[Charlemagne]] | [[Winston Churchill]] | [[Cleopatra VII of Egypt]] | [[Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria]] | [[Charles de Gaulle]] | [[Hammurabi]] | [[Hannibal]] | [[Indira Gandhi]] | [[Hirohito]] | [[Adolf Hitler]] | [[Pope John Paul II]] | [[Genghis Khan]] | [[Vladimir Lenin]] | [[Mao Zedong]] | [[Benito Mussolini]] | [[Napoleon I of France]] | [[Kwame Nkrumah]] | [[Peter I of Russia]] | [[Qin Shi Huang]] | [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] | [[Saladin]] | [[Shaka]] | [[Sitting Bull]] | [[Joseph Stalin]] | [[Josip Broz Tito]] | [[Timur]] | [[Leon Trotsky]] | [[Harry S. Truman]] | [[Victoria of the United Kingdom]] | [[George Washington]] | [[Wilhelm II of Germany]] | [[B. P. Koirala of Nepal]]
 
=== Revolutionaries and activists ===
[[Mahatma Gandhi]] | [[Che Guevara]] | [[Joan of Arc]] | [[Martin Luther King, Jr.]] | [[Mother Teresa]]
 
=== Explorers ===
[[Roald Amundsen]] | [[Jacques Cartier]] | [[Christopher Columbus]] | [[Hernán Cortés]] | [[Francis Drake]] | [[Vasco da Gama]] | [[John Franklin]] | [[Edmund Hillary]] | [[Ferdinand Magellan]] | [[Marco Polo]] | [[Zheng He]]
==Naming convention: need a decision==
Editor Benjamin Lowe asks whether '''Massachusetts: History''' should be changed to '''History of Massachusetts''' . That's a policy issue--what do people think?  It's a policy issue for many articles: France: History, Japan: History etc.  The Massachusetts: History format naturally leads to MAssachusetts: Economy/Education/Government etc, with the stress on the state. Richard Jensen. [[User:Richard Jensen|Richard Jensen]] 15:44, 9 April 2007 (CDT)
 
Here was Larry Sanger's response in a move the other day "17:52, 7 April 2007 Larry Sanger (Talk | contribs) North Carolina: History moved to [[History of North Carolina]] (Better to invite a free-standing article without a colon)".  That seems to imply his preference. [[User:Matt Mahlmann|Matt Mahlmann]] 17:31, 9 April 2007 (CDT)
::the goal is to help people find articles. When we have thousands of articles that start History of ... then it's hard to find things. When we have 10 articles that start Massachusetts: History or Massachusetts:Government or Massachusetts: Economy then searching is much easier.  I assume people are interested in Massachusetts (rather than in history generally). [[User:Richard Jensen|Richard Jensen]] 17:38, 9 April 2007 (CDT)
 
I don't mean always to have my way, but omitting colons used in this way is a good policy.  Presumably, we won't be finding articles via alphabetical lists.  I rarely do this, and I doubt others do either.  The main way to find articles is (1) the search form, and (2) via links from other articles.
 
The difficulty with this use of colons in titles is that they subtly enshrine and "hard-code" a certain relationship between the part to the left of the colon and the part to the right.  Why should it be "North Carolina: History"?  Why not "History: North Carolina"?  And why not "History of the South: North Carolina"?  Etc.  Besides, if we use colons in this way here, people will start using them in many other places, when there won't be any clearly understood rules about when to use them and how.  Will we have "Aristotle: Metaphysics" or "Metaphysics: Aristotelian"?  (Reference point: [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/])  It seems we can easily sidestep such potentially difficult problems by omitting the colon. --[[User:Larry Sanger|Larry Sanger]] 18:02, 9 April 2007 (CDT)
::We can avoid colons but we can't ignore the problem of standardizing subarticles for geographical regions. It makes more sense to have the main search word first, then secondary search words. thus I recommend: Utah, Utah--History, Utah--Economy, Utah--Geography. (and not: Utah, History of Utah, Economy of Utah, Geography of Utah).  That way the search engines (our and outsiders) will put all the Utah articles together. [[User:Richard Jensen|Richard Jensen]] 18:28, 9 April 2007 (CDT)
 
I essentially agree with Richard Jensen in this discussion.  I'm no fan of the colon, but the state (or other geographical unit) should come first, followed by history.  They can be separated with a colon, an m-dash, a comma, or something else (we need to figure out what and stick with it), but I think "History of X" is cumbersome and puts the cart before the horse.--[[User:Ben Alpers|Ben Alpers]] 21:05, 10 April 2007 (CDT)
 
Well, if the goal is to help people find the articles, then I think that it is more likely that they will be searching ''History of Massachusetts'' and not ''Massachusetts: History'' - I certainly would do that. --[[User:José Leonardo Andrade|José Leonardo Andrade]] 10:13, 23 April 2007 (CDT)
:::I think people are interested primarily in ''Massachusetts''. People will lose out if they try "History of the state of Massachusetts" or "History of Massachusetts Bay Colony" or "History of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts."  But I suggest the scheme is mostly for the benefit of editors so WE can keep track of all the Massachusetts-spinoff articles (on politics, economy, society, environment, etc). [[User:Richard Jensen|Richard Jensen]] 15:50, 23 April 2007 (CDT)
 
I didn't notice this debate (still) going on here until now.  This really isn't an issue for the History Workgroup, per se, to decide, because it is a perfectly generalizable issue.
 
I don't think that any naming schemes (in the main namespace) should be made simply for our own benefit.  The question is what is going to be most inviting and useful for our users; and "History of Massachusetts" is a lot more inviting to me, anyway, than "Massachusetts--History" or whatever you'd like the convention to be.
 
Richard wrote: "That way the search engines (our and outsiders) will put all the Utah articles together."  I don't see how this is the case.  Search engines, ours and others, for the most part don't care about alphabetization, nor should they, in my opinion.  Let human beings make meaningful groupings; don't make ugly titles so that machines can do it better more efficiently.
 
Also: "It makes more sense to have the main search word first, then secondary search words. thus I recommend: Utah, Utah--History, Utah--Economy, Utah--Geography."  But these aren't search terms, they are titles.  As such, it's actually very important that they be inviting and immediately comprehensible.  "History of Utah" is more inviting and immediately comprehensible (to the user of a search engine) than "Utah--History".
 
There's also the argument I made above, in the paragraph starting, "The difficulty with this use of colons in titles is that they subtly enshrine..."  That's important to me.  It's bound to cause trouble.
 
Just a friendly hint--this isn't a paper encyclopedia. --[[User:Larry Sanger|Larry Sanger]] 17:45, 23 April 2007 (CDT)
 
::Yes it does matter how to search. We want a simple system that any user can quickly master. If users want information on a state they will search on the state. It is highly unlikely that users will want information on generic history, where any place will do.  We need some way for users and editors to see what is available on a georgraphical unit. (This issue comes up in other ways as well, but let's start with geography.)  It's not true, I suggest, that "history of xyz" helps anyone. The user will NOT know whether to search on
#"History of Colonial Massachusetts"
#"History of Massachusetts before 1776"
#"History of Witches in Massachusetts"
#"Social History of Colonial Massachusetts"
#"Economic History of Massachusetts"
#"Farming in Massachusetts History"
#"History of Massachusetts Bay"
#"History of Puritan Massachusetts"
The bottom line is that the most useful keyword should always come first in a title. [[User:Richard Jensen|Richard Jensen]] 18:10, 23 April 2007 (CDT)
 
: It's hard to anticipate how people will type queries, but since they're not optically looking through a print index, the "order" of such entries matters only on index pages (and there we can sort using DEFAULT:SORT of the article checklist's "abc" entry. If it's for the editors that we want all History articles sorted by keyword first, you could use the article checklist to do that. [[User:Russell Potter|Russell Potter]] 04:19, 24 April 2007 (CDT)
 
::How people type in queries is irrelevant, the search engine will match various word orders. Also any search engine worth it's salt will match plurals and other tenses. As Larry said, we should title in a way that is logical to normal English usage. We don't have to copy the style used in Library catalogues of reversing word orders and adding colons and commas.
 
::In plain English, we can put the words either way round without loosing the relation ship between the words. There are two ways to indicate possession. Either the word 'of' or the use 's. E.g. "History of Citizendium" and "Citizendium's History". Using this method of writing, the ambiguity of the relationship that a colon leaves is cleared up.
 
::Again, I have to second Larry, this discussion should be beyond the history workgroup. It applies to the entire site. I notice the Biology workgroup has settled into using parenthesis e.g. [[Cell (biology)]] to disambiguate their articles. I think we should move this topic to the general forums for wider input and consensus. [[User:Derek Harkness|Derek Harkness]] 07:12, 24 April 2007 (CDT)
 
::I think reliance on super search engines (which we do not yet have)  is a poor solution. There are too many hits. What happens when we have 10,000 articles that start with "History of XYZ"? answer: editors will get lost easily and start new articles when we already have an article that largely cover the subject (this has already happened to me on CZ!). We want to tell users: "The best way to search CZ is as follows...." (and we can say start with the geographical unit, like "Massachusetts," then the topic like "witches." (note that asking google about Massachusetts witches gives 558,000 hits; asking for Connecticut witches gives 352,000 hits).  We can then ask our search engine to give priority to our own naming convention. (who's writing this search engine?) Conclusion: One standard approach decided upon early will reduce confusion for readers and editors.    [[User:Richard Jensen|Richard Jensen]] 05:21, 24 April 2007 (CDT)
 
:::We do already have a search engine. It's far form super, but it's what we have and we don't have the resources to do anything other than minor changes to it. So we can't decide a convention then produce a search engine around that; rather we must work with the search engine we have and base our decision on it's current behavior.
 
:::But, our search engine is of low significance. Where our pages are going to be found the in the 558,000 and 352,000 hits that google throws up. Many people are going to search google then come to our site, not come to our site then search.


:::Lastly, we want to tell Users that the "The best way to search CZ is the way your already do." Nobody wants to learn how to use our site. It should be intuitive. If we have to teach people how to use our site then we have made a mistake. [[User:Derek Harkness|Derek Harkness]] 07:12, 24 April 2007 (CDT)
===National history===
::::we should plan for 10,000 articles in a year and eventually 100,000 articles. That means a simple search may turn up 100 unstratified hits inside CZ--that is too many to be useful to a student in a hurry.  If our search engine is week then we ought to build into the system a logical order.  How do users now search-- no one knows, and to pretend to match this imaginary process is a recipe for confusion. The way classification works is that it organizes material in an orderly way (think of biology, or indeed Roget's thesaurus.) I've prepared a dozen book indexes. The worst ones were computer generated (I used automated Kew Word in Context in my ''Historians's Guide to Statistics,'' 1971), and the best ones required some thought and design. [[User:Richard Jensen|Richard Jensen]] 07:24, 24 April 2007 (CDT)
::Some numbers: Wiki now had 1.8 million articles in English. When you try something like "Massachusetts Bay history" you get over 2000 hits inside Wiki, which is going to baffle users. I suspect when confronted with lots of hits people take just the top 10 or 20 (that is google's formula anyway).  That means they miss 99% of the available information. The solution is to structure the information so users can find their way around. [[User:Richard Jensen|Richard Jensen]] 07:39, 24 April 2007 (CDT)


I see, so this is mainly about the convenience of searchers?  Well, as any computer scientist can tell you, placing words in a certain order is not going to make a whole lot of difference--unless you straightjacket the search engine by telling it, "Deliver the results in alphabetical order."  Document search isn't exactly a "solved problem," but it there is a lot known about it.  Search results can be delivered according to various useful heuristics (whether the word occurs in the title, number of times a word occurs in the article, whether the word occurs among the first N characters, etc.), and those heuristics are usually more useful than anything you might produce by alphabetical order.
[[China, history]] | [[History of England]] | [[France, history]] | [[Germany, history]] | [[India, history]] | [[Italy, history]] | [[Japan, history]] | [[Poland, history]] | [[Russia, history]] | [[U.S., history]] | [[History of Ireland]] | [[Australia, history]]


One ''particularly'' useful heuristic, by the way, is the ability to deliver at ''the top'' of a list articles that have all the search words in the exact order in which they appear in the search.  Well, most people are going to search for "history of Massachusetts", not "Massachusetts, History", and you'd like to present them with exactly what they searched on, if possible.  You can try this right now: when I search for "history of Massachusetts" right now, the first result is "Massachusetts, History"--which takes one extra beat of processing before I realize, "Oh, that's what I'm looking for, they've just used the old-fashioned paper encyclopedia method of titling articles; how quaint."
===Notable Historians===
====British Historians====
{{r|Bede}}
{{r|Edward Gibbon}}
{{r|R H Tawney}}
{{r|Winston Churchill}}


It's the job of programmers to take ordinary English pages and then deliver the desired results near the top of a search.  Trying to second-guess them by titling articles in a certain way will not help them very much, unless you redesign the way the search engine works--which we aren't going to do. --[[User:Larry Sanger|Larry Sanger]] 09:53, 24 April 2007 (CDT)
====French Historians====
{{r|Marc Bloch}}
{{r|Fernand Braudel}}
{{r|Lucien Febvre}}
====German Historians====


I wholeheartedly agree with Larry here -- we have search paradigms, and the ability to tweak them, and therefore do not need to follow the old print-based notions of tables of contents and indexes. But in order to ensure a clear, uniform look across articles and topics, the sooner we have an uanmbigious guideline for naming conventions, the better. One thought: might we have a mainpage link to such editorial policy documents? I know we have some out there, but my intuitive guesses as to where they are linked seem to be wrong. [[User:Russell Potter|Russell Potter]] 10:32, 24 April 2007 (CDT)
====Ancient Greek Historians====
{{r|Herodotus}}
{{r|Thucydides}}
{{r|Xenophon}}
====Israeli Historians====
{{r|Martin Creveld}}
{{r|Michael Oren}}
====Roman Historians====
{{r|Tacitus}}
====U.S. Historians====
{{r|Merle Curti}}
{{r|Frederick Jackson Turner}}
{{r|Charles A. Beard}}
{{r|James Ford Rhodes}}
{{r|Albert J. Beveridge}}
{{r|James Randall}}
{{r|Allen Nevins}}
{{r|Henry Steele Commanger}}
{{r|Benjamin P. Thomas}}
{{r|Richard Hofstadter}}
{{r|Bruce Catton}}
{{r|Albert Thayer Mahan}}
{{r|Samuel Eliot Morison}}
{{r|David M. Potter}}
{{r|Kenneth M. Stampp}}
{{r|Benjamin Quarles}}
{{r|Richard N. Current}}
{{r|Don E. Fehrenbacher}}
{{r|Arthur E. Schlesinger Sr.}}
{{r|Arthur E. Schlesinger Jr.}}
{{r|John Hope Franklin}}
{{r|David Herbert Donald}}
{{r|James M. McPherson}}

Latest revision as of 00:13, 9 February 2024

Workgroups are no longer used for group communications, but they still are used to group articles into fields of interest. Each article is assigned to 1-3 Workgroups via the article's Metadata.

History Workgroup
History article All articles (3,035) To Approve (0) Editors: active (3) / inactive (28)
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Authors: active (518) / inactive (0) 		Workgroup Discussion
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The History Workgroup creates and improves articles related to history, historiography, and the history discipline. Authors and editors interested in all areas of history are welcomed in this group. If you wish to be an author in this field, please add yourself to Category:History Authors by adding [[Category:History Authors]] to your user page. You free to start right in improving our articles. If you meet the requirements to be a Citizendium Editor for this workgroup, please follow the directions found here.

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