HistoricalTextArchive.com Contains articles about great wars & more.

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Historical Text Archive: Electronic History Resources, online since 1990

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History of the HTA

Things happen historically, not logically. To understand how the HTA was started, you have to understand my involvement with electronic mail. I got involved in computer telecomuncations for history because my elder son studied in Marburg, Germany in 1988-1989, and I learned to use electronic mail so that we could communicate on a regular basis without cost. We used BITNET because that was the e-mail system open to me at Mississippi State University and to him at Phillips University. I also joined some discussion lists, including HISTORY@FINHUTC, which had been organized by a student in Finland,

Joni Makivirta (pictured at left). I didn't know that Joni was a student and I didn't care. I had found a way to communicate daily with others interested in history. Yes, there was silliness on the list. I worked around it or tried to get the list back on track when it deviated too much. The discussions varied. The members varied in circumstance; some were students; some were historians; and some from other professions. There was Jim Cocks, computer technician at the University of Louisville, Skip Knox at Boise State, Haines Brown of Central Connecticut State University, Charles Dell, at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, Michael McCarthy, an undergraduate at Marshall University, Christopher Currie of the Institure for Historical Research, and George Welling of the University of Groningen. There was an underlying current among the professors that the list could be more than it was. Mark Olsen of the University of Chicago eloquently expressed that concern. I tried to address some of those concerns in a May, 1989 message. That elicited specific calls for reform. I thought about ways to make computer telecommunications more useful, but my commitments to publishing on the Latin American drug trade kept me too busy. It was Richard Jensen, then of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who made the difference. He had been trying in the first half of 1989 to get me to organize what we were calling Clionet. As I said at the time, I was too busy to take the challenge. Eventually Jensen would create H-NET .

In 1989, I also became concerned by the inability of historians to move large files by e-mail; or, at least, for some historians to do so. In response to some discussion on HISTORY@FINHUTC (I don't remember the exact nature of it), in December, 1989 I had sent a file on French socialism via e-mail. That caused some stir among some of the participants. I was criticized severely by some of them. Although I offered what I thought was an effective defense and I had support from others, the criticism was deserved. Some people had quotas on their accounts and my mailing burst them. Others were not interested in receiving what I had sent. The solution was to store the files where a person could get them when desired. So I learned about File Transfer Protocol. Late in 1990 I wrote an article for Perspectives of the American Historical Association. When it appeared early in 1991, professional historians came onto the 'Net in droves. I officially created an FTP site (RA) in February, 1991. I was able to get some help. I also tried to get others to do the same thing because I realized that one site could not store everything . Lynn