HistoryAccess.com has dozens of articles. (Go here for a list.) The following pieces are excerpts from well-known books.

Each of these was chosen for one of several reasons: to show history writing at its most readable (for example, the excerpts from Barbara W. Tuchman and Carl Sandburg), to illustrate how historical scholarship was presented in centuries past (Gibbon), to show that a good writer can generate history prose that kids will love (Enid LaMonte Meadowcroft), because it’s great stuff that’s overlooked (Page Smith).

This grouping lacks diversity. We needed to draw primarily on out-of-copyright material published before the explosion of social history that began in the 1950s and ’60s, bringing a greater range of people into the history field than before, writing about a broader set of subjects than had previously engaged the profession – the history of women, minority groups, working people, etc. Valuable work has resulted but it’s copyrighted. We hope, in time, to broaden this chapter. See here and here for Q-and-A interviews with outstanding social historians (Nell Irvin Painter and Gary B. Nash) and here for a Q-and-A conversation with a graduate student (Mireya Loza) hoping to make a mark in the field. – H.F.