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The Sheffield American History Research Wiki is a user-edited website with links to and analysis of the vast number of digital archives of primary sources now available to students of American History. The sheer volume of material online now is so immense that no single person or institution can hope to collect it all together. We hope that by pooling the efforts of users who will add links to and evaluate electronic resources together we can build a site that will prove invaluable to students and researchers in American History, not just in Sheffield, but across the world.

For those new to the Wiki, please read these guidelines first, which will explain why like any other wiki the lack of peer reviewing makes this an unsuitable source for secondary research and reading. We invite students, teachers, and academics with no affiliation to the University of Sheffield to add to and use the resource, and encourage you to submit feedback or suggestions you might have on developing the site further.

Wiki users have created three different types of page that contain links to and analysis of source material. First are pages that link to URLs for digital collections, embracing anything from a handful to several hundred thousand sources. These include, for example, major electronic collections on slavery, the Civil Rights era, and the American presidency, alongside several smaller resources on narrower topics. Second are pages in which users have collected a series of links to individual sources on a particular topic. A good example here is a collection of links to the secession conventions held in southern states between 1860 and 1861, which are scattered across multiple websites. Third are pages which link to individual sources. These range from canonical documents like the Declaration of Independence to a video of a news report after 9/11 to the full text of a particular book. Users should feel free to create new pages themselves by following the guidelines here. Please pay especial care to the instructions on categorisation, as we rely on this to organise the site.

If you want to add material to the wiki, edit an existing page, or find out how the site can help your work (and how it cannot!), there are a series of straightforward guides, often giving step-by-step instructions, if you follow the 'How to' link in the toolbar on the left of this page. We would strongly encourage all our users not only to read this section, but also to contribute to the site, whether by creating new links or describing and evaluating the links that already exist.

As a user-edited wiki the content contained here does not reflect the views of the University of Sheffield, and occasionally inaccurate information, spam, offensive material, and copyrighted images or text may appear. We endeavour to police this ourselves, but if you have any problem with the content, please feel free to either edit it or report the issue to Andrew Heath. For more information, click here.