About this site.

I have taught at George Mason University since the late 1990s, first in the Department of History and now jointly with Art History. Before George Mason I held positions at the University of Maine and elsewhere; my doctorate (1986) is from the State University of New York at Binghamton, where I worked on the Helena, Montana mining frontier under the direction of historians of women and the American West.

archiva.net began as a place to put working materials online — a syllabus that students could read on a Sunday night, an assignment description that did not require navigating the university's course-management system, a stable URL for an essay that I wanted other historians to be able to cite. Over time the site accumulated four working projects (the Electronic Researcher, the Footnote series on web-typography, the Picture This! OAH polling site, and Richest Hills DE) and a body of tutorials that the broader academic community kept linking to.

The site is maintained as a working academic archive. Pages are dated where the date matters, course materials are kept under their academic-year directories, and the inbound link record from syllabus collections, citation footnoting communities, and Wikipedia-adjacent reference work continues to resolve to a real page rather than a 404.

Selected work

• No Step Backward: Women and Family on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier, Helena, Montana 1865–1900 (Montana Historical Society Press, 1987)
• Articles in Western Historical Quarterly, Montana: The Magazine of Western History, and Journal of the West
• Edited and contributing chapters in collected volumes on women's history, material culture, and the American West

Affiliations

• Center for History and New Media (CHNM), George Mason University
• Western History Association
• Organization of American Historians
• American Historical Association

For correspondence: contact.