About History Commons

History Commons was an open-content investigative journalism project. Volunteers researched and documented public events — drawing on news reports, government documents, court records, and other primary sources — and organized them into chronological timelines covering subjects such as the September 11 attacks, civil liberties, the Iraq war, and domestic terrorism.

Each entry, called an event, summarizes something that happened on a particular date and cites the sources it draws from. Events are tagged with the people and organizations involved and grouped into the investigative projects they belong to, so a single event can appear across several timelines. The result is a cross-referenced record that can be read forward as a narrative or searched for a specific person, organization, or moment.

This site

The original History Commons website is no longer online. This site is a preserved, read-only edition of that work, rebuilt so the timelines and events remain available for reading and research. It is a restoration of material that was published publicly, not a live project: entries are no longer being added or edited, and the community features of the original site (accounts, submissions, comments) are not active here.

Because the restoration is built from what could be recovered, it does not include every page the original site once had. Some links between events may point to material that wasn’t preserved; where that happens you’ll see a short notice rather than the missing page.

Using and reusing the content

The content was published by its contributors under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, and that license carries over to this archive. You’re welcome to quote and build on it for non-commercial purposes with attribution, sharing any derivative work under the same terms.

Get in touch

Spotted an error, a broken link, or have a question about the archive? Send us a message and it will reach the maintainers.