Eszter Hargittai recently asked ‘what can you not find online?’ – what is often missing is anything that is more than ten years old (unless it is in ebook form or in a paid-for archive).
One of the interesting exceptions I have come across recently was a A Prison-scene During the Reign of Terror from Harpers. Not a contemporary one from Iraq but one from post-revolutionary France they dug up from the archives of their 150-year-old publication. It is fascinating and chilling to read an eye-witness account of events from more than 200 years ago…
By sheer coincidence I also just found a “historical archive of material on the French Revolution”:http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/ – part of the “Centre for History and New Media”:http://www.chnm.gmu.edu/ – but this does not invalidate my point that historical information can be hard to find online…