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Development of the HistoryCommons 2.0 app is well underway and we hope to do a beta release soon. A lot of progress has been made and we are very excited.

BUT ... our funds have dried up. Please donate today what you can so we can continue our work. We are extremely low on funds, and this call for financial support is urgent. If we do not have funds to meet basic operation costs, we will have to shut down the site. The only financial support we receive is from online fundraisers like this one.

With your help, we will ...

  • Continue to make the current site available.
  • Build a new team to develop and market HistoryCommons 2.0. Specifically we are looking for tech entrepreneurs who are passionate about creating a new people-centered crowdsourced model for journalism.
  • Develop new apps and features for the HistoryCommons community, including a mobile HistoryCommons app, an app and plugin for collecting sources and feeding them to HistoryCommons users, an API, and social media plugins and integrations that will make it easy for people to embed HistoryCommons content into other works and share it across multiple platforms.

The History Commons makes it possible for people at the grassroots level to assume a dominant role in public and private sector oversight. By supporting this effort, you are helping civil society end its reliance on the corporate media, which has failed in its presumed role as a government and corporate watchdog. Since June of 2002, more than 20,921 new events have been added to the History Commons. These entries dealt with a variety of topics ranging from NSA domestic spying, global warming, free trade, 9/11, “the war on terrorism,” civil liberties, the Iraq war, the Iran confrontation, and more.

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Find Information

The History Commons contains summaries of 20,921 events, which are published on the website in the format of dynamic timelines. These timelines can be filtered by investigative project, topic, or entity (e.g., a person, organization, or corporation). You can even generate a “scalable context” timeline for any event in the History Commons database simply by clicking the date of the timeline entry. You can search for events by using the search box at the top right-hand corner, or by browsing through the list of projects.

Contribute Information

The History Commons website is an experiment in open-content civic journalism. It provides a space for people to conduct grassroots-level investigations on any issue, providing the public with a useful tool to conduct oversight of government and private sector entities. It is collaborative and thus allows individuals to build upon the work of others. Each investigation is organized as a “project,” which is made up of at least one timeline. You can contribute to a project by adding new events to the timeline associated with that project. All submissions are peer-reviewed by other users before being published. If you would like to participate in this effort, you will first need to create a user account. Once you have done that, you can begin adding events to any timeline.

Share Information

The History Commons is a product of public collaboration created for public consumption. You are free to reuse, republish, and make derivative works from the textual content of the History Commons for non-commercial purposes (see terms for details). All timelines are exportable into XML so the data can be used in other applications.

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Creative Commons License Except where otherwise noted, the textual content of each timeline is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike