A Reference Work for World History
78,400+ encyclopedia entries · 60,200+ primary-source documents · 312 civilizations · 4,200 years of recorded history
Origin & Scope
HistoryKB was founded in 2017 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by a team of former university historians and ed-tech engineers who were tired of watching strong students lose marks because the citations they could find online did not hold up to a professor's scrutiny. The first version was a private reading list shared between three graduate students; the public site opened in 2019.
Today the work is carried by an editorial team of 41 credentialed historians, archaeologists, and classicists — including six former university department chairs — and by 12 full-time software engineers who maintain the editorial systems, the comparative timeline engine, and the citation exporter. We host 78,400+ encyclopedia entries and 60,200+ indexed primary-source documents as of January 2026, covering 4,200 years of recorded history across 312 civilizations, regions, and polities — from the Olmec to the Ottoman reforms. The work is cited in 740+ secondary and post-secondary course syllabi across 28 countries, and was named by Smithsonian Magazine as "the most citation-friendly history reference online" in its March 2024 issue.
Methodology
Every entry on HistoryKB passes through the same three-stage pipeline. The rule is simple: if a claim cannot be tied to at least three primary or peer-reviewed sources, it does not enter the corpus.
Chapter I
An entry begins with a working draft assembled from primary sources — treaties, letters, inscriptions, court records, archaeological reports — alongside the relevant peer-reviewed scholarship. Drafts are assigned to editors with documented expertise in the period, region, and language family in question.
Chapter II
Each factual claim is tied inline to its source, and the citation set is compared against at least two other independent sources before the entry can advance. Inline footnotes show the reader exactly which sentence rests on which document, not just which paragraph.
Chapter III
A second credentialed reviewer — never the original author — assigns a confidence rating and signs the entry. Disputed or contested claims are labeled as such in the body of the article, not buried in a footnote, so the reader is never asked to take a contested reading on the author's authority.
Editorial Standards
HistoryKB presents sourced mainstream scholarship. Where historians genuinely disagree — on the scale of the demographic collapse after 1492, on the causes of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, on the chronology of the Indus Valley script — we say so plainly in the body of the entry and link to the competing peer-reviewed readings. We do not adjudicate the dispute for the reader. We do, however, refuse to publish a "balanced" framing that elevates a fringe position into a manufactured symmetry with the established record; contested claims are labeled as contested.
No claim is presented without a source. Every entry is cross-referenced against at least three primary or peer-reviewed sources, and the inline footnotes are not optional — they are the entry. Entries are written by trained editors and verified by credentialed reviewers; we do not assert, and never will, that every word is written by a PhD. The boundary between editor and reviewer is disclosed because hiding it would cost the reader the ability to weigh what they are reading.
AI-assisted drafting tools are used for repetitive tasks — boilerplate transliteration cleanup, index normalization, citation formatting — and every AI-edited passage is reviewed by a human editor before publication. AI-generated text is never presented as authoritative without human review, and is never the sole author of a claim about a contested historical event.
Editorial Board
The leadership tier of the editorial board. The full roster — with affiliations, specialties, and verification domains — is linked below.
No. 01
Editor-in-Chief · Late Antiquity & Early Medieval Europe
Former chair of the Department of History at Boston University. Specialist in the religious and political transitions of the 4th through 9th centuries, with a secondary field in manuscript culture. Joined HistoryKB in 2018.
No. 02
Senior Editor · Classical Greece & the Hellenistic World
Former chair of the Department of Classics at the University of Edinburgh. Twenty-eight years working on Athenian epigraphy and the institutional history of the Greek polis. Reviews all entries touching the archaic and classical periods.
No. 03
Senior Editor · South Asia & the Indian Ocean World
Former chair of the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Specialist in Chola-period statecraft and Indian Ocean trade networks. Joined HistoryKB in 2020 and leads the South Asia verification desk.
No. 04
Senior Editor · Scandinavia & the North Atlantic, 800–1700
Former chair of the Department of Archaeology at Uppsala University. Working archaeologist with a focus on Viking-Age and medieval Norse sites. Reviews entries touching Scandinavian runic inscriptions and the North Atlantic colonies.
No. 05
Senior Editor · West & Central Africa, pre-1900
Former chair of the Department of History at the University of Cape Town. Specialist in the political economy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the documentary record of pre-colonial West African polities.
No. 06
Senior Editor · Mesoamerica & the Andes
Former chair of the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. Archaeologist working on the political organization of the Aztec and Inca empires. Reviews all entries touching pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and the central Andes.
Continue
See the full 41-person board with institutional affiliations, period and regional specialties, language competencies, and the verification domains each editor signs off on.
Meet the Editors