About Heritage History

The Heritage History website was developed by a Homeschooling family with professional experience in computers and electronics, and a considerable interest in history. Some background is given as follows:

The Books

From the time our children were very young we began to haunt used bookstores, always intending to build a library of worthy children's books (on the cheap) that they could enjoy when they were older. Although our intention at first was merely to find worthy literature, our interests soon turned to non-fiction and in particular juvenile history and biography. In general we were delighted with the quality of the older books in our collection and found them far more engaging than most contemporary histories. They were neither dumbed-down, as almost all history books written for young people currently are, nor were they intolerably ponderous, as are most contemporary history books written for adults. They were, in fact, so interesting, that we began reading juvenile history ourselves for fun and the experience did much to patch the enormous holes in our own knowledge of history so typical of almost everyone born after the dawn of social studies.

As our children became old enough to read on their own, we began homeschooling and volunteered to teach history in a local homeschool cooperative. At first we made manual copies of some of our favorite books, but found that to be tedious. While searching for online texts of some of these books, we came across the Baldwin Children's Literature Project, and within a month we were Baldwin volunteers, scanning in and formatting several of our favorite books each month. About this time we became aware of the copyright limitations that make books published before 1923 easy to reproduce, so from that point we focused our efforts entirely on public-domain books.

The Web Site

As our collection of online history books grew, we began to formulate the idea of providing an indexing system whereby individual chapters from various history books could be referenced by topic. While a book of fiction is usually read all at once, many non-fiction works might just as well be read on a topic-by-topic basis—this was, in fact, the manner in which we used many books for our own classes. By this time we already had an impressive database of historical books available, but could not implement our ideas without designing our own web-page from scratch.

Almost as soon as we conceived of the idea of doing a web page, we began to struggle with mission creep, a phenomenon that, as engineers, we had encountered many times before. It happens like this: "As long as we're going to all the trouble of doing a web page why not . . ." — We had a great many historical atlases on hand, why not make them available as well. Our boys, brothers, and uncles are very interested in wars and battles, why not scan our battle dictionary into a searchable database. We have a lot of interesting images available, why not provide an indexing system into those as well. What started out as a fairly manageable project quickly became alarmingly ambitious.

We resolved finally to do a thorough job of the civilizations that we had been studying for the past four years, namely Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, England, Scotland, and the British Empire, and include books for all other civilizations, without necessarily completing all the supporting material. Hopefully, over the next few years, we can add more books across all categories, and do a better job of organizing some of the civilizations which are currently somewhat sketchy.

What comes next?

In January 2009 we made our second release of Heritage History. We expended our seletion of Hispanic History and Exploration considerably, and added several other new features. Most significantly, we added a History Store where discount versions of some of our books can be purchased. In addition, we now offer for the first time, Heritage History Compact Libraries, for sale. These CD's contain hundreds of the books and other resources available on the Heritage History website in a readable, easy-to-print format for those who would like to create low-cost "hard-copies" of our books for themselves.

We are continuing to work on new features and anticipate that the Heritage History library will take three to five more years to complete, and will eventually include about 1000 volumes. We are currently working on American History and hope to have this unit, and many other enhancements completed by 2010. In the meantime, there are any number of minor errors, incomplete projects, unfinished pages, and unimplemented ideas that we are planning to work on, but we hope that what we have thus far is useful.

There are many people whom we would like to thank for helping us bring about this web page. Some, such as the Baldwin and Gutenberg Project volunteers, have been directly involved, and others, such as our fellow homeschoolers and teachers have been inspirational and supportive. On a less personal note, we would like to thank the dozens of used bookstore owners, who recognized the value of these books, safeguarded them all these years, and ultimately made them available to us.

Yet it is not the living to whom we owe the greatest debt, either in the matter of this web site or in many of the other things we value most. Too often, those who have gone before us, whose efforts, sacrifices, and ideals have given us a legacy of inestimable value, are forgotten or taken for granted. The real heroes of this web page are those who lived before us—the authors themselves, and the editors, publishers, illustrators, and teachers that they worked with to produce this fine collection of books,—and we would like to acknowledge their tremendous contribution.

The spirit of gratitude for our ancestors is really only the flip side of the spirit of concern we have for our children's future. After all, if we fail to recognize the full worth of all that has been handed down to us, we will ultimately have nothing of lasting value to pass on ourselves.