High-tech history

Victor Bailey, director of the Hall Center for the Humanities, and Henry Fortunato, project director of KansasHistoryOnline, soon will launch a new Web site aimed at delivering high-quality content about Kansas history. Doug Koch/University Relations

New Web site will launch in conjunction with Kansas territorial sesquicentennial

Just in time for the sesquicentennial of the Kansas Territory and the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the pilot version of a dynamic
new Web site focused on Kansas history will launch the week of May 25.

Called KansasHistoryOnline and accessible at www.kansashistoryonline.org, the project was conceived and developed by many of the same people who created This Week in KU History, which went live in November 2002 and is located at www.kuhistory.com.

As with This Week in KU History, KansasHistoryOnline combines scholarly methodology with magazine-style journalism to provide site visitors with highly readable content that reflects academic standards. KansasHistoryOnline is a project of the Hall Center for the Humanities and the Kansas State Historical Society.

“The pilot version is simply a demonstration of what we intend will someday be a much larger site,” said Victor Bailey, director of the Hall Center. “But even this initial sample contains a degree of sophistication, design quality and technological excellence that most state Web site histories do not possess. We’re confident that KansasHistoryOnline can become a major contribution to the evolving practice of e-history, and in the process, KU can become a leader in this field.”

Although the site’s creators are high on Kansas history, they warn that KansasHistoryOnline isn’t a celebration. Instead, it’s an objective, often wry interpretation of the state’s past, “warts and all.”

The site’s project director and editor-in-chief, Henry Fortunato, is managing a team of Ph.D. candidates and other contributors who are writing the core content for the site. Most images come from the state historical society. An advisory board composed of leading historians from KU, Wichita State University and the Kansas State Historical Society counsel on potential subject matter and review completed articles before they go online.