Concerning the Internet, Researching Nazi Occultism, and the Online edition of the Liberty Champion

Two semesters ago I was given a history assignment, with the goal of researching a historical event/period using only the internet. The topic my group chose was "WWII" (a very specific and narrow topic). Every group member got to choose their own subcategory. I chose Nazi Occultism.

I'm not sure what the lesson of that online-only assignment was, but it did teach me that there is a lot of crap on the Internet. The number of 10+ year old geocity, earthlink, and homestead sites concerning Nazi Occultism, Historical-Revisionism, Anti-Semitism, Anti-Religionism, Anti-Evolutionism, and a number of other poorly-cited subjects -- many of them defined in the negative -- was astounding.

And the text was always finely paired with an appropriate aesthetic, with many of the early-day web publishers employing such techniques as colored backgrounds, multi-colored text, multiple fonts on the same page, non-working hyperlinks, and lots of animated gifs, often in columns or rows.

While I think our project ended up being a poor excuse for a history presentation, I think it did achieve her other goal: teaching students that if you only have one resource for real research, it should not be the Internet.

On a similar note, let me quickly address some issues I recently found on the Online edition of the Liberty Champion.

Whoever is the site's webmaster is poorly qualified. They do not know how to integrate their stories online without random HTML code showing up. The stories that don't have HTML paragraph breaks have no paragraph breaks. And don't forget the spelling errors; I found the following ones by searching under headlines alone: (Ashville is Asheville; Fadford is Radford; elecrtic is electric, etc).

For such errors a website is the most forgiving format, as it can be edited at any time -- Even The Washington Post sometimes has errors, but they are always corrected within an hour or so. If the text online is the exact same as the print copy's, most of the Liberty Champion staff need to reexamine their career goals.