Ancient Web: HistoryOfWar Built a Military Encyclopedia by Hand

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

HistoryOfWar.org looks like what happens when a historian decides that an encyclopedia should have a topic index, then keeps adding topics until the index becomes an occupational hazard.

Visit HistoryOfWar.org

The site calls itself a military-history encyclopedia. On its homepage, it currently reports 7,645 articles, 11,667 pictures, 423 maps, 958 unit histories, and 2,294 book reviews. Those are the site's own running totals, not independently audited numbers, but they convey the ambition.

The collection goes far beyond famous battles. It provides indexes by war, commander, country, military unit, equipment, historical concept, and chronological period. A visitor can begin with the Napoleonic Wars and wind up reading a definition of a naval flag officer, a regiment's service record, or a contemporary military memoir.

The people behind the index

The authors page credits Dr John Rickard as co-author and webmaster. Rickard says he designed and wrote the website and handled much of its material concerning periods before 1700. Fellow writers include Peter Antill, whose background is in strategic studies, and Tristan Dugdale-Pointon.

The project was already producing dated articles in 2006. Rickard's explanation of a Roman century, for instance, carries an August 2006 citation; other entries from that year describe naval terminology, Civil War ships, and historical army organization. The dates make a record of the encyclopedia's gradual construction.

Its primary-document collection includes transcriptions of chapters from Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs. These aren't merely summaries of what Grant thought: readers can examine his words beside modern explanatory articles.

As of October 2026 the homepage remains active, and its Second World War day-by-day project reports more than five thousand individual facts. The site has not frozen in 2006. What survived is its publishing proposition: a huge set of individually addressable documents, stitched together by hyperlinks and an author willing to maintain the structure.

The old Web could support remarkably large specialist reference works without needing to become a general-purpose platform. HistoryOfWar is still demonstrating the method.

Browse the article indexes and the site's authorship notes.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.