Many of my writeups describe the people and events
of individual years during the
17th Century,
18th Century, and
19th Century. This
writeup is a central reference to their creation and bibliography/URLology.
One of my earliest writeups was one for the year
1743. I was
intrigued by the number of interesting people who had been born or died
in that year, and felt it was worth writing up. This initial success
was encouraging.
Later, I noded 1755 on a whim. Being the beginning of the Seven
Years' War, I decided to node the whole war, and never looked back.
I knew some eighteenth-century history when this all began, but I have
learned far, far more in the process.
My principal source for all of the nodes has been the vast amount of
information available on the
World Wide Web. Since the only language
I know fluently is
English, the information reflects what can be found
on the Web in that language. I know some German, and have had a limited
amount of success using Web translators to glean information written in
Polish, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.
Because of this, you will notice a marked concentration of European
and North American history in my writeups. I have been able to
find a limited amount of information about people and events for this period
in Asia and South America. Sadly, you will find almost nothing
of Africa besides people who were captured there and sold as slaves.
You will also notice that most writeups for later years are longer and
more complex than the ones for their earlier counterparts. This is
due to two factors:
-
The more recent an event newer the year, the more likely it is that someone
will find it worthwhile to put up on the Web.
-
There are simply more events to report, due to the fact that there are
more people around to cause them.
Initially, I tried to maintain a consistent level of detail between the
nodes. This led to a problem: Some of the writeups for the years
of the
Napoleonic Wars are too long to read at one sitting. I now
realize that such consistency is unrealistic. An event that is remarkable
in the early eighteenth century, but is overwhelmed by other events in
the early nineteenth century, will go unreported.
Research for
every one of these nodes started with a
Google
search for that year.
http://www.google.com.
Google led me to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different websites
offering tidbits of information. They are far too numerous to list here,
but I will list some of the more important ones below. If I think
of others, I will add them.
-
There are many online timelines covering this period. Most are somewhat
local in scope, and I got little information from them.
-
A notable exception is the Encyclopedia Louisiana's Louisiana Timeline
at
http://enlou.com/time/
-
Some bits were also gleaned from timelines at
http://weltchronik.de/main.htm "2000 Jahre Chronik"
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms-writers/tl
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Chron/
-
"Obsidian"'s home page http://web.raex.com/~obsidian/regindex.html
was invaluable for sorting out various regnal chronologies, especially
the Mughal emperors.
-
The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive at
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/
contains the biographies of many mathematicians and physicists.
-
Malaspina University's site http://www.malaspina.com provided an occasional
name but I stopped going there after the third or fourth time all of their
Javascript crashed my browser.
-
Battles of the Great Northern War 1700-1721 at
http://home.golden.net/~ksharman/gnw/GNW.html
- Polish Renaissance Warfare, 1450-1659
http://www.domnasz.freeserve.co.uk/index.htm
http://www.jasinski.co.uk/wojna/index.htm
-
Great Northern War at Acedia Press:
http://www.acediapress.com/nkrieng.htm
-
Land Forces of Britain, the Empire and Commonwealth at
http://www.regiments.org/milhist/
provided much useful information on the chronology and significance
of the many wars and battles during this period.
-
The Catholic Encyclopedia at New Advent
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/
was the source of many bits of information I could not find anywhere
else. However, it takes a certain...viewpoint... that you have to
be aware of while you are reading it.
-
2000 Jahren Chronik Geshichte at
http://www.geschichte.2me.net/main.htm
-
Eric Weisstein's Treasure Trove of Scientific Biography at
http://www.treasure-troves.com
provided the names of many of the scientists in the list.
- British Civil Wars, Commonwealth, and Protectorate 1638-60
http://www.skyhook.co.uk/civwar/
-
Xrefer, a compendium of online resource books at
http://www.xrefer.com
Among the books referenced there are:
-
The Oxford Companion to English Literature, © Margaret Drabble and
Oxford University Press 1995
-
The Oxford Dictionary of Music, © Oxford University Press 1994
-
The Oxford Dictionary of Art
-
Bloomsbury Guide to Art, ed. by Shearer West, © Bloomsbury 1996
Update, December 2002: Xrefer has announced that it will be dropping all of the Oxford dictionaries as of February 2003.
-
And of course, there is no way to avoid the vast amount of information
at Encyclopedia Britannica Online,
http://www.britannica.com