Website Wednesday

My first choice for today’s website was the archives of the New York Times which go back to 1851. Many of the articles are free.

For fun, I typed in “Titanic” and brought up a contemporary account. Then I copied the first paragraph and plunked it into the online Flesch-Kincaid reading grade level found here:

http://www.editcentral.com/gwt/com.editcentral.EC/EC.html

and discovered the grade level was first year college.

Curiosity reared its head and I then took two paragraphs from yesterday’s NYT and got grade levels of high school freshman and sophomore (9 and 10.) I was now on a quest.

It was my search for the reading level of Civil War period articles that got me deeper into the site and made me realize either I or it needed some work before I posted it on Website Wednesday. If I finally get the hang of navigating this site smoothly, I’ll post it. At this point however, it seems to have some user-unfriendly features.

So my website recommendation is:

http://www.lib.lsu.edu/soc/anthro.html

This site come from Louisiana State University and it links you to other sites of anthropological, cultural, geographical, historical, archaeological interest - the list seems endless.

My first visit was to the bog people in Juteland, Denmark:

http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/bog/index.html

It was fascinatingly spooky to look at two skulls: one, a part of the skull from 3500 B.C.E. where you could see the trepanation and the other, the full head skull of a 25-year old woman from 8000 B.C.E. It was here that I learned that most of the bog people had met violent deaths.

Back on the main site, I clicked on Bandelier, New Mexico and got taken to website of the Bandelier National Monument Park which contains hundreds of ruins of Anasazi cliff houses. It’s a semi-commercial site with rules and regulations, fees and accommodations. But scroll down to the Desert Directory and start clicking, say on “People of the Desert” - you’ll be reading for hours on that topic alone.

Also, be sure to check out the hyperlinks at the top of the main web page. For example, under Geography Pages you can work your way to old maps of colonial America or come to the climate map for major U.S. cities and plot their climatology since 1961. Under Archaeological Sites you get to see a aerial view of the Temple of Isis in Egypt.

This is an excellent, user-friendly site worth many, many casual or research-driven visits.