Expanding our Coverage: The 20th Century

In the nearly 15 years of our existence, our publication has slowly but steadily expanded our coverage of historical time periods. When we launched as Ancient History Encyclopedia in 2009, we primarily focused on Mesopotamia and Classical Antiquity. We then expanded to cover ancient India, China, Africa and the Americas. In the mid-2010s we expanded to include Mediaeval content, then Early Modern, and now we have entered the Modern Age with US History, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

We have now made the decision to expand our coverage to the 20th century, all the way up to the year 1999. We are looking for experts in 20th century history who wish to contribute to the encyclopedia.

Mark Cartwright, our Publishing Director, and one of our staff researcher-writers will soon start work on the Second World War (1939-1945), which is a huge topic of great historical importance. We’ve ordered a large pile of academic history books on the subject and we expect to conduct very extensive research on the subject.

Research is important and our editors generally look at as many different sources as possible to get varied viewpoints and to gain a deeper understanding of where there are current scholarly debates, and which facts are seen as settled. Our writers reflect this information in our articles.

There is another reason for very careful research, which is even more important with recent history, such as World War II. Our readers have all sorts of emotional beliefs and attachments about historical events, people, cultures, and states. We regularly see this in the emails we receive and the comments we read on social media – anything about Greece, Macedon, or Alexander the Great, for example, is bound to generate a crescendo of strong opinions. On events that occurred 2300 years ago!

With the Second World War, we are bracing ourselves for even more opinions, accusations, and debates. Almost everyone has an opinion about the war, and we will be extra careful to follow facts and review the current scholarly consensus. Our Content Director Joshua J. Mark has a post-it note by his desk that says: “It doesn't matter what you get right, just make sure you don't get anything wrong.”?

There will always be people who complain about what we omitted in an article; we’ve been accused of being Anti-French because we only included British inventions in an article about the British Industrial Revolution! Being an encyclopedia, we must condense the information and present it to a general reader. We try to remain as objective and neutral as possible, but information must always be omitted and not everyone will agree with the omissions.

We cannot please everyone, but we can ensure that the information we present is factually correct, at least based on the current scholarly consensus – and if there is no consensus, we can highlight that, too. In a climate where “wokeism” is a hot topic in historical debates, we try to stay clear of sensationalism and stick to the facts, now more than ever.

Article written by Jan van der Crabben , CEO & Founder of World History Encyclopedia.