Clio Wired ─ The Future of the Past in the Digital Age

In these pathbreaking essays, Roy Rosenzweig charts the impact of new media on teaching, researching, preserving, presenting, and understanding history. Negotiating between the "cyberenthusiasts" who champion technological breakthroughs and the "digital skeptics" who fear the end of traditional humanistic scholarship, Rosenzweig re-envisions the practices and professional rites of academic historians while analyzing and advocating for the achievements of amateur historians.

While he addresses the perils of "doing history" online, Rosenzweig eloquently identifies the promises of digital work, detailing innovative strategies for powerful searches in primary and secondary sources, the increased opportunities for dialogue and debate, and, most of all, the unprecedented access afforded by the Internet. Rosenzweig draws attention to the opening up of the historical record to new voices, the availability of documents and narratives to new audiences, and the attractions of digital technologies for new and diverse practitioners. Though he celebrates digital history's democratizing influences, Rosenzweig also argues that the future of the past in this digital age can only be ensured through the active resistance to efforts by corporations to control access and profit from the Web.

Roy Rosenzweig (1950-2007) was professor of history and founder of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Author of several books, including The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (with David Thelen), and director of digital history projects, such as History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web and the September 11th Digital Archive, he received the Richard W. Lyman Award (presented by the National Humanities Center and the Rockefeller Foundation) for "outstanding achievement in the use of information technology to advance scholarship and teaching in the humanities."