Nice Reference Site(s)

Wolf

This is gapminder.org, an interactive database of statistics and data from around the world in many major social categories. The graphs allow you to plot say life expectancy versus income per person from the year 1800 on.
 
MrP

MrP

Banned
Fans of France's Great War army, you'll like this. Although if not fluent in French, you'll need a dictionary! ;)
 

Doctor What

Political Resources

This will look a bit ugly cause I'm just cutting and pasting a bunch of links I found but here goes:

Politics 1: Bills itself as "The Most Comprehensive Online Guide to American Politics", a statement which may very well be accurate. Includes a list of every single American political party, from the Democrats and Republicans to the big third parties like the Libertarians and the Greens to tiny fringe parties (including what looks like a half dozen Socialist Parties, the American Nazi party, and the Pot Party) and links to their websites, a complete listing of every declared and potential 2004 presidential candidate, and links to lots of other useful political sites. Far more comprehensive list of links than anything that could be written here. A first rate site.

Politics 1 Guide to American Political Parties: Direct link to the political parties page.

PollingReport.com: Comprehensive compilation of dozens of public opinion poll results from nearly every legitimate polling organization on every major issue.

http://www.washingtonpost.com: While the New York Times is bigger, the Post is THE source for inside-the-beltway news. Registration is free.

http://www.whitehouse.gov: White House home page. Keep in mind all American government agencies except the military use .gov, not .com (the military uses .mil) for their official home pages. Typing in [government agency].com can produce some interesting results, especially if someone is reading over your shoulder.

http://www.senate.gov: Homepage of the United States Senate. Includes a listing of all current senators, their home states and their party affiliations. Also includes links to every senator's individual homepage, and contact information so constituents can e-mail, write, or call them (actually their offices, but most Congressmen at least read all their mail).

http://www.house.gov: Homepage of the Congress of the United States.

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/: Homepage of the Supreme Court of the United States. A rather barren and poorly done site, actually, but it does have a feature for searching for cases currently in the docket.

http://www.loc.gov: Homepage of the Library of Congress. A fantastically useful collection of information on all subjects, including government. Includes two hundred years of records of Congressional proceedings (very useful for debates that hinge on interpretations of laws or Constitutional amendments). Also includes copies of the United States Constitution and other important documents.

http://thomas.loc.gov/: Records the activities of both houses of Congress, including the online version of the Congressional Record. Very useful for finding out the status of a particular bill. A service of the Library of Congress.

http://www.archives.gov: The National Archives, in College Park, MD. For when you just HAVE to win an argument--there's a copy of practically every piece of paper that ever crossed a bureaucrat's desk anywhere in the Federal government since 1787 here. Most of it is offline, but there's some material online. If you have history research to do that involves the U.S. government, this is the place to go

http://www.realchange.org

Essential; has the skeleton closet of just about every major American politician of recent years.

http://www.opensecrets.org

Contains info concerning campaign finance


http://www.un.org

The United Nations homepage. Your one stop shop for every document on every topic you can damn well think of


http://www.fair.org

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Exposing the lies and twisting of the truth that occurs in the mainstream media


Global Security.org and the Federation of American Scientists are excellent resources for defence, security, and intelligence-related information, especially with regard to the United States.

The Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee are good sources for their respective positions on policy, and are usually good for providing criticism of the other party's positions, as well.

An excellent resource for American historical documents is The Federalist, which is a conservative, federalist website. Also an interesting source of information is the U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, and the U.S. Government Manual -- 2002/2003.

The official website of the British Monarchy provides mostly information about the Royal Family and its constitutional role in the United Kingdom, but is a good source for historical information, and provides links to pages on the British Government and the Commonwealth of Nations.


http://www.findlaw.org

You need the text of a specific Supreme Court case? How about a lower court ruling, which are harder to find online? Find it here


Site with information on just about thousands of dead and former politicians in America (excellent category selections)

http://www.politicalgraveyard.com/
 

The Almanac

I hope I've found the appropriate area of the board for this...

This is just a quick post to let everyone here know that the link to The History of Things That Never Were, my website devoted to fictional timelines on the Internet (which is listed in the Web Guide under "AH Books and Authors"), should be updated to the following URL:

http://www.mts.net/~arphaxad/history.html

I emailed Ian about this back in December, but that page hasn't been updated...

The URL currently listed (using the escape.ca domain) had been redirecting to the current address, but this is no longer occurring, so people clicking on the link from this site (or any bookmarks with the previous URL) will now receive an error message instead. :/

I want all of the AH enthusiasts here to still be able to reach my site without a problem...

Thanks in advance (to whomever) for taking care of this matter for me.

I hope that all of you continue to enjoy my site in general. :)
 

Doctor What

War Resources

First World War

28th North-West Battalion Headquarters

Automated Geneoalogy This project involves searching the 1901 indexed census at automatedgenealogy for info on the soldiers on the memorial site (also the Archive ww1 site) and providing a link from the 1901 census to the two sites listed.

Canada and the Great War

Canadian Air Aces and Heroes: WWI, WWII, and Korea

Canadian Great War Project

Canadian War Brides of the First World War

First World War.com - A multimedia history of World War One

For King and Empire - Canada's Soldiers in The Great War

The World War I Document Archive (insanely huge number of links)


Second World War

1944 The Battle of Normandy - The Memory

6 Group Bomber Command

Coy 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion

The Camp X Historical Society was established in recognition of the courageous men and women who served in the British Security Coordination (BSC), Special Operations Executive (SOE), and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) - those men and women who were trained in subversive warfare and covert techniques, those who fought behind enemy lines, who lived in the shadows, or who served at Camp X. The Society, established in November 1998, is a registered not-for-profit (charitable) Historical Society within the Province of Ontario, Canada. The Society’s primary mandate is conducting research for the purpose of documenting the Camp’s history, the conservation of artifacts, and community education.

Canada in WWII (Juno Beach Centre)

Canadian War Brides

Canadian War Industry during the Second World War - On this website you will find images of black and white photographs taken during the Second World War by the Wartime Information Board, whose photographic operations were later transferred to the National Film Board. This series spans seven years, from 1939 to 1945, and documents the roles of Canadian civilians in the Second World War industrial effort.

CBC Archives - 1939-1945: A Soldier's War


Chindits Special Burma Force 1942-1944 - The Chindits were the largest of the allied Special Forces of the 2nd World War. They were formed and lead by Major General Orde Wingate DSO. The Chindits operated deep behind enemy lines in North Burma in the War against Japan. For many months they lived in and fought the enemy in the jungles of Japanese occupied Burma, totally relying on airdrops for their supplies. There were two Chindits expeditions into Burma, the first in February 1943 Operation Longcloth, consisted of a force of 3,000 men who marched over 1,000 miles during the campaign. The second expedition, Operation Thursday, in March 1944 was on a much larger scale. It was the second largest airborne invasion of the war and consisted of a force of 20,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers with air support provided by the 1st Air Commando USAAF.

D-Day and Normandy Battle

Fleet Air Arm Archive 1939-1945

Nurses in World War II

The WRENS (Women's Royal Naval Service) Worldwide: A Celebration of Their Lives, Then and Now

Through a Lens: Dieppe in Photographs and Film
This website contains photographic and film footage of Dieppe selected from the holdings of Library and Archives Canada. It features a timeline of the events leading up to the raid on Dieppe, 2 newsreels produced by the Nazi regime, 6 newsreels produced by the Canadian Film and Photo Unit, an image gallery, as well as Educational Resources for students at the intermediate and secondary level. The newsreels are accompanied by French and English transcripts.

American Merchant Marine at War


Other

Royal Navy Heritage World - A main Portal on the Royal and Commonwealth Navies

Dear Sweetheart - Letters Home from a Soldier

Canadian War Poster Collection

Canadian Posters from the First World War (Archives of Ontario)

War Artists From the First World War (Archives of Ontario)

War Diaries of the First World War - This database contains the digitised War Diaries of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) units. From the start of the First World War, CEF units were required to maintain a daily account of their “Actions in the Field.” This log was called a War Diary. The War Diaries are not personal diaries, rather they are a historical record of a unit’s administration, operations and activities during the First World War.

Heroes Remember
Veterans Affairs Canada has recorded almost 1,600 hours of video and audio conversations with approximately 75 veterans of the First World War and another 675 Second World War and Korea veterans. These interviews offer rare and personal memories of those individuals who lived the experience, first-hand. Each interview has a story attached and makes up a bigger picture.
 

Doctor What

Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security

The Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security (PHP, the former Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact), provides new scholarly perspectives on contemporary international history by collecting, publishing, and interpreting formerly secret governmental documents.

In response to the declassification of NATO records and the growing availability of documents from archives in Eastern and Central Europe, PHP as a cooperative undertaking of more than twenty partner institutes brings together leading Cold War historians, archivists, and government officials. The findings are presented to the specialist academic community at conferences and published both in print and on the PHP website.

Since its establishment in 1999, the project has collected thousands of pages of material on security-related issues of the Cold War, published a large number of online documentaries and publications on central issues such as mutual threat perceptions and alliance management, and organized several major international conferences on war planning, intelligence, and intra-bloc tensions.

The thrust of PHP research interest is in the recent historical origins and development of current security issues and institutions on the basis of newly available documentary evidence.

The main issues of research interest in the coming years are:

The European Security Model
NATO Enlargement and Its Out-of-Area Problem
Regional Security in Asia, Latin America, and Africa
Threat Perceptions, Strategic Doctrines, Military Plans
Peacekeeping and Nongovernmental Organizations as New Security Factors during and after the Cold War
Click to expand...

http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch/index.cfm
 

Doctor What

Maybe not quite alternate history but given how some of us have tried our hands on science fiction or are thinking about it, I think some of these might be useful.


Jeff Russell's STARSHIP DIMENSIONS. A page with a large collection of starship models done at different scales, very useful when you want to make comparisons between different universes.

Atomic Rockets. Excellent page, full of extremely valuable information for those who dare to use hard sci-fi in their writing.

SFWA's Tips on Writing. Tips of the writing trade.

TV Tropes. Well--d'uh! ;)

Writing Military Science Fiction. The information in this page can bring a great deal of military common sense into your works, so if you are trying to portray a semi-competent military and have doubts, check this out.

Technovelgy.com. A glossary of many science fiction inventions.

Wolf's Shipyard. A page that is somewhat similar to Jeff Russell's site, but also includes a large proportion of fan-designed ships for different universes that go from the downright silly to the awesome.

Planet Designer. In case you really want to be detailed, give this planet design simulator a try.

World Builder Projects. A list of sites that may be helpful in developing worlds.

The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Cliches. Like TV Tropes, only in a list format that makes it easier and quicker to read. Still funny to read.

Starship Schematics Database. A website of canon and fanmade starship schematics for Star Trek, B5, Battlestar Galactica and Space Cruiser Yamato. For those who love making fanmade schematics.

Science Fiction\Space Technology:Tools for Learning. A basic education site that deals with providing beginners an idea of spacecraft systems.

Edgar Governo, Historian of Things That Never Were. A website linking a large number of SF timelines. However, some links don't work anymore, or are totally speculative.

The Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy. A tongue-in-cheek dictionary of certain tropes in scifi.

World Building Resources. A list of general websites to build up the setting.

Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Another website on sf/f writing, was recommended by SciFi Weekly. A quick, easy to read course on writing scifi.
 

Doctor What

Medieval and Renaissance name archive

This collection of articles on medieval and renaissance names is intended to help historical re-creators to choose authentic names. These articles were gathered from various places, and some of them appear elsewhere. In all cases, the copyright on each article belongs to its authors.
Click to expand...

Nice database. It even covers various non-European cultures and has all kinds of neat articles like Ship Names from 1480-01 or inn and tavern names.
 
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