Fontes Historiae
Find the sources. Examine the evidence. Decide for yourself.
Ask about a historical event and go straight to the source: the letter, the charter, the chronicle, not another summary of what someone else wrote about it.
Then examine the evidence, question the interpretation, and debate it with people who have read the footnotes.
Reference desk
Find the document, not the summary
Describe an event or a person and the desk goes looking for the digitized artifact itself: the letter in the sender's own hand, the treaty as signed, the register as kept. Every result says what it is, where it is held, and how far it sits from the event.
Ask the reference deskForum
History is argument
Anyone can open a community for a period, a region, a question, or a single archive, and anyone can answer in it. The most useful thread here will usually be one where two people disagree and both cite something.
Browse communities
The guarantee
A source it did not find is a source it will not name
The desk can only tell you about documents it actually retrieved from a catalog. It has no way to produce a citation from memory, because every reference it writes is reconciled against what came back from the search before you see it, and anything left over is struck out rather than shown. When there is nothing, it says there is nothing. That is the one promise this site is built around, and it is enforced in code rather than asked for in a prompt.
What this site is, and what it refuses to do
Provenance
How close is this to the thing that happened?
A letter written on the day is not the same kind of evidence as a memoir written forty years later, and neither is a textbook paragraph about both. Every artifact the desk returns is placed on that scale and told you plainly, along with who holds the original. A digitized charter is also shown as a charter rather than as a block of text in a box, because what an object physically is happens to be part of what it can tell you.
See it on a real questionTwo doors
Start with a document, or start with an argument
Most people arrive with one of two things: a question they want the record for, or a claim they want to test against someone who has read it. Both work. Reading needs no account; posting and the desk need one, which takes a minute.