Content
This website does not just cover the 1920s, but rather covers the entire 20th century. The website is divided by decade, which is further divided by year. For each decade, there is a brief overview of each year and significant events, along with showcases or toys, cars, homes, fashion, and homes of the decade, with visuals to go with them. For each year, there are descriptions of notable events that occurred, along with new technology, fashion, and popular culture. The descriptions of the events are not incredibly detailed and serve more as a summary. There are around 10 events per year, with them covering the whole world and not being limited to a single area or country.
Creator
The creator of the site is Stephen Pearson. He says that this website is a passion project of his, and he now runs the website with his daughter. He fully admits that neither of them are historians or any sort of professionals in this field, however he feels that the years of work and dedication to this site should demonstrate the reliability of the site.
Search Methods
This website is incredibly easy to navigate. The entire site can be navigated through clicking on its headers, which change and get more specific the further into the website is gone. Throughout the text of the website, there are hyperlinks to other sections of the site, which make going to other places in the site even easier. There is also a search function in the website, which functions exactly as it would be expected to. All of this makes it basically impossible to get lost on this site, and makes it fairly straightforward to find specific information.
Trustworthiness
Unfortunately, this is were the site really falls flat. That is, the website does not give any specific citations for its information. Instead, they simply state what kinds of resources they used, such as history textbooks, catalogs and magazines from the time, university websites, government websites, and primary source lists. They also state that they use 2 to 3 sources for everything to confirm their information. This all sounds very nice, but they never state anywhere on the site what all of these sources are. This is a big problem. Without having specific citations, there will always exist this doubt that the information presented here is not accurate. All they needed to do was provide examples of the textbooks and sites that they used, and all of a sudden their credibility would shoot right up.
Usefulness
The lack of proper citations does definitely hold this website back from being incredibly useful. Since does do not exist, information on the site cannot be taken for granted. However, the other aspects of the site are still very strong. While the information does not go too in depth, and there really is not any form of analysis taking place, this website can still be used as a starting point to get a general sense of what was happening during a time. The website being very user-friendly and easy to navigate helps with this end. It is easy to find things on this site, however this site should not be the end of anyone’s search, but rather more of a starting point.
Nicholas Buonocore is a student at Ramapo College who toke the Discovering Digital History course in the Spring 2021 semester. He was a junior at Ramapo studying history while taking this course.
