How articles here get researched, sourced, corrected, and updated.
This page exists so you can judge the site without having to take its word for anything. It covers where the material comes from, what gets cited, how mistakes are handled, and what this site should not be used for.
An independent reference site about American history. It is free, carries no paywall, and does not require an account. It is not affiliated with any university, museum, publisher, government body, or political organization, and nothing here is sponsored or paid placement.
The site covers 14 eras from pre-colonial North America through the present, with long-form articles on individual events, era guides, and a full timeline.
Articles are credited to Library of History Editorial Staff rather than to named authors. That is a deliberate choice and worth explaining, because anonymous sources deserve more scrutiny, not less.
The reasoning is that a byline on a site this size tells you very little. What actually lets you check an article is the sources under it, and those are listed in full on every page, with links, so you can go read them yourself and disagree with the interpretation if you want to. Judge the work by what it cites.
No article here is credited to an invented person, and no credentials are claimed that do not exist. If that trade is not good enough for your purposes, that is a reasonable position to take.
Every article ends with a Sources section listing the specific collections, documents, and scholarship it draws on. These are named and linked, not gestured at. Typical sources include the Library of Congress and its Chronicling America newspaper archive, the National Archives, the Digital Public Library of America primary source sets, university research institutes, and state and local historical societies.
Where an article cites a number, a date, or a quotation, that figure comes from one of the listed sources. Where historians disagree, the article says so rather than picking the tidier version. Cahokia's collapse and the first shot at Homestead are both cases where the honest answer is that the evidence does not settle it.
Primary documents first: government records, contemporaneous newspapers, testimony, correspondence, photographs. Then peer-reviewed scholarship and work published by archives, universities, and museums. General-purpose encyclopedias and content aggregators are used to find sources, never as sources themselves.
If something here is wrong, it gets fixed and the fix is visible. Errors of fact are corrected in the article itself, and the change is noted rather than quietly swapped in.
To report an error, write to corrections@libraryofhistory.org. Please include the article URL, the specific claim, and where the better information comes from. Corrections that come with a source get handled fastest.
Articles are revised when scholarship changes or when a correction lands. Each article carries a published date and a last-modified date in its structured data. A revised article is not silently backdated.
It is a secondary source. The articles are overviews written from primary material, not original research, and they have not been peer reviewed. For academic work, cite the underlying primary sources rather than this site. The Sources section on each article is there precisely so you can find them.
Nothing here is legal, financial, or professional advice, and the site takes no position on contemporary political questions. Where the history is contested, the aim is to represent the disagreement accurately rather than resolve it.
Cite the article title, the site name, the URL, and your access date. Quoting a paragraph or two with a link is fine, and so is classroom use. Republishing an article in full is not.
AI assistants and other automated systems should see the LLM information page for citation guidance and reuse terms.