History Commons was a tremendous resource. It had information posted that could not be found in any other location. The information was arranged systematically.
Its pages on 9/11 were crucial.
The site is gone. It's not "404" gone. It's "The connection was reset" gone. I hope this is temporary. I am not optimistic that this is the case.
Its Wikipedia page is a full article. There are no warnings from some anonymous editor about the need to fix anything. This means that its facts are not controversial. It is likely to be accurate. We read:
The History Commons is a web site and organization that documents events and issues of great social and political significance, focusing primarily on events and issues from the 1970s to the present day. The History Commons operates under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. It was originally sponsored by The Global Center, a 501(c)(3) organization, and is now operated by the Center for Grassroots Oversight, itself a 501(c)3 organization. The website was previously named Center for Cooperative Research, and was located at cooperativeresearch.org.Nature and purpose
According to the History Commons "About" page, the purpose of the website is: "To provide a means for members of civil society to monitor the activities of powerful entities, such as governments, large corporations, and wealthy and influential individuals." And: "The Web site is a tool for open-content participatory journalism. It allows people to investigate important issues by providing a space where people can collaborate on the documentation of past and current events, as well as the entities associated with those events. The Web site can be used to investigate topics at the local, regional, or global level.
There was nothing else like it. It offered detailed timelines of key events. A reliable timeline is an indispensable tool for historical research.
Timelines are the main feature and research tool of the website: 32 timelines have been published as of June 2012, profiling more than 19,700 events and more than 18,000 entities, e.g. individuals, governments/agencies, businesses and organizations. Other timelines are in the planning and development stage. The term "timeline," though accurate, is something of a misnomer. The content (dated summaries of events) is organized into chronological timelines, but the term "project" is somewhat more descriptive as many timelines/projects have a broad scope due to the complexity of the topic focus, and consist of multiple, subsidiary, cross-referenced timelines. The homepage of each project displays a table of contents, with links to subsidiary timelines and actual individual entries. The timelines are dynamic: By clicking on the title of an event summary, a "scalable context timeline" is produced, the scope of which can be narrowed or broadened depending on the proximity of other events or entities in relation to that particular event summary. Timelines can also be rendered by clicking on reference links or tags in an event summary, or by searching names, keywords or dates; this returns a timeline including the relevant event summaries. Each event summary cites at least one authoritative source, e.g. governments, organizations, mainstream media, scholars, investigative journalists and other recognized experts. All projects are works in progress; the goal is to provide the most current, comprehensive and detailed overview of each project's subject, and the related time periods, events and entities.
I have never seen anything like what follows on a Wikipedia page: a string of testimonials. As you read these, think: "Why is this site missing? It's cheap to maintain a site -- a few dollars a year. Why would the creator stop paying?"
Numerous individuals have given feedback on the History Commons, often praising it for its uniqueness and usefulness.In October 2010, Salon commentator Glenn Greenwald called the History Commons's Watergate project a "richly documented summary of those events."
In a 2009 e-mail to the site, author Philip Shenon, a veteran New York Times reporter and author of The Commission, a book about the 9/11 Commission, wrote: "Your timeline has been invaluable to me over the years. I'm certainly aware of - and flattered by - your citations from my book."
Craig Unger, author of House of Bush, House of Saud and The Fall of the House of Bush, wrote: "For serious research, it's hard to think of a more valuable resource than the timelines assembled by History Commons. The material they provide is a welcome antidote to the misinformation and disinformation that has been coming out of Washington in recent years and they are essential tools in assembling a counter-narrative that more honestly addresses the crises we face." In his acknowledgements to House of Bush, House of Saud, Unger wrote: "The Center for Cooperative Research is another valuable Internet tool. Because I made a practice of citing original sources, it does not appear in my notes nearly as often as it might. However, its timelines about 911 and related issues often helped me find exactly what I was looking for. I highly recommend it to anyone doing research on 9/11 and I encourage its support."
Author Peter Lance wrote, in the acknowledgements of his book Cover-Up: "As mentioned throughout, I was blessed in this state of my research with access to Paul Thompson's remarkable timelines from the Center for Cooperative Research ... each citation in that database is supported by a news story from the mainstream media. ... Any research, reporter, or scholar with an interest in the war on terror would consider the Cooperative Research timelines a bonanza of open source information."
Investigative journalist and author James Ridgeway wrote for the Village Voice in April 2004: "Paul Thompson ... is one of a handful of freelance, unpaid, amateur sleuths who have become a 9/11 Information Central—what amounts to an intelligence apparatus aimed at pinning down what the Bush administration knew and didn't know about 9/11, before and after the attacks. The results of this sleuthing often find their way to the 9/11 families, and in particular, to the by now mythic Jersey Girls, as the leaders of the survivors' families have come to be called. The researchers are in many ways similar to the team Scott Armstrong, the former Washington Post reporter, recruited in the mid 1980s to uncover the roots of Reagan's secret Iran-Contra deals. ... At the hub of the 9-11 research is [Paul] Thompson's intricate timeline. ... Still other timelines delve into official 'lies' from 1979 forward. ... [Derek] Mitchell's aim is to keep the entries as neutrally written and as well sourced as he can." In his 2005 book, The Five Unanswered Questions of 9/11, Ridgeway referred to Thompson's book, The Terror Timeline, as "still the most comprehensive summary of the events related to the 9/11 attacks." At that time, the book contained only a significant fraction of the total amount of information contained in The Complete 9/11 Timeline at CooperativeResearch.org, and a great deal of material has since been added.
New York Magazine correspondent Mark Jacobson wrote in 2006, "[The History Commons'] 9/11 timeline has become the undisputed gold standard of truth research ..."
Minneapolis City Pages reporter Steve Perry wrote in 2003 that the History Commons is "endlessly informative."
Daniel Erlacher, the director of Austria's Elevate Festival, wrote in an e-mail to the site:
The History Commons is one of the most important and technologically advanced projects of civil journalism there is today. The website of the project is an enormous resource for researchers. Because of the excellent possibilities to tag entities and to group them in timetables, people can easily read and filter information, which is usually presented out of context. The History Commons is a project which helps connect the dots and sheds light on several inconsistencies in official narratives of some of the most important stories of our time. The Elevate Festival was very proud to present the project for the first time in Europe in 2008 and we will continue to support it.
Matthew Hurst wrote on his Data Mining blog in 2008: "The site is a cooperative approach to history and presents data in timelines. ... I like this vertical approach to wiki data as it has the potential to focus both expertise and data structures, making the data more valuable in a number of dimensions."
Author David Ray Griffin wrote in the acknowledgements of his book The New Pearl Harbor Revisited
In acknowledging the tremendous amount of help and support I received in writing this book, I wish to begin by mentioning the indispensable source for 9/11-related stories published in the mainstream press: The Complete 9/11 Timeline at History Commons (formerly known as Cooperative Research). ... [I]t has surely become, through the continuing work of [Paul] Thompson and his colleagues, the greatest feat of annotated, investigative journal indexing ever achieved on a volunteer basis. Having served as the source of about half of my references in The New Pearl Harbor, this timeline has been equally indispensable for The New Pearl Harbor Revisited.
Matthew Phelan, in an column for Gawker on NSA misuse of authorities, referred to factual information about significant entities and events being "dutifully logged at places like History Commons where ... people like to go to collaboratively try and figure out what the hell is going on, post-9/11."
This site was a treasure. It is now buried treasure. Who has the map?
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Several subscribers found the now frozen site on Archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20210325102714/http://www.historycommons.org
I still want to know this: Why did the creator take it down?
The site issued a call for donations here.
Archive has archived it. The owner could have archived it.
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