useful websites In recent years the internet has come into its own as a research tool. This brief bibliography presents some internet sites which may help the interested reader to pursue some of the issues raised by the entries themselves.
A number of good internet sites contain news on current events as well as background articles. These include sites maintained by the large media organizations such as http://www.cnn.com and http://www.pbs.org. These sites are fairly comprehensive. Although their reporting reflects a US perspective, this is less pronounced than for sites such as http://www.abc.com. Other, non-US news sites are also worth consulting, such as http://www.cbc.ca.
By far the best sites that I could find are http://www.economist.com and http://www.bbc.co.uk. The economist website is a subscription-based website, but it has a truly excellent collection of in-depth articles written since 1997. The best site that I could find, however, was the website of the BBC. The wealth and variety of news and background information to be found here is truly astonishing.
For those interested in personalities, there are a growing number of reference sources available online. The World Biographical Index on http://www.biblio.tu-bs.de/acwww25u/wbi_en/ does not provide any biographical entries as such, but can point to further books, articles and other material on two million people worldwide. The
Australian Dictionary of Biography is a tremendous resource for those interested in Australian history, but unfortunately its website, http://adb.anu.edu.au, only provides information on how to purchase a hard copy. The
Dictionary of Canadian Biography is now available on CD Rom (published 2000), but this contains entries up to 1920 only. Progress on more recent biographies is being made, and information on this is available on http://www.dcb-dbc.com. The 18,000 biographies contained in the
American National Biography is fully online, but access to most entries is by subscription only. Shorter biographies on US personalities are available for free on http://www.arlingtoncemetary.com. A joy to use is the
Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on http://www.dnzb.govt.nz, whose 3,000 entries are completely freely available on the net. Finally, the most remarkable reference project will be published in its electronic version in 2004, the (British)
New Dictionary of National Biography with its 50,000 entries.
Useful sites of general historical and political interest are also the Core Collection from Oxford Reference Online on http://www.oxfordreference.com (subscription), and the excellent http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk.
An intriguing place to do some background research is The World Factbook, http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.htm. This is published by the US intelligence service, the CIA. It has two slight shortcomings. It is updated once a year, so it is not completely up to date. Moreover, it is, not surprisingly, written specifically with the US reader in mind (we learn, for instance, that Italy is slightly larger than Arizona). It is, however, complete. The site is particularly useful both for large countries for which succinct summaries are hard to come by and for the tiniest of countries for which any information is difficult to obtain.
A number of regional websites may be of interest. To remedy an information deficit about perhaps the least-reported on continent, Africa, there are two sites worth consulting. http://www.allAfrica.com contains all the latest news from any of the African states. It allows you to search for news from individual countries, as well as topics and issues with a regional impact. http://www.africana.com is a US website mostly dedicated to African and African American popular culture. It does contain, however, informative and easy-to-use articles on historical personalities and events. http://www.newsasia contains a wide array of internet links, sorted by country. This is useful if you are interested in detail, but there is no global search facility as such. An excellent site that covers much detailed news about the otherwise little-reported republics between Afghanistan and Russia is http://www.eurasianet.org. A good news service on Latin America is http://www.latinnews.com, although it does not contain an extensive search facility. A better facility for research, with good links and comprehensive coverage, is http://www.southamericadaily.com.
Finally, a very useful site for research is http://electionresources.org. This contains many links to official election statistics around the world. Not all of these present results in English, but a remarkable number do.
