The History Commons contains summaries of 11,719 events, which are published on the website in the format of dynamic timelines. These timelines can be filtered by investigative project, topic, or entity (e.g., a person, organization, or corporation). You can even generate a “scalable context” timeline for any event in the History Commons database simply by clicking the date of the timeline entry. You can search for events by using the search box at the top right-hand corner, or by browsing through the list of projects.

The History Commons website is an experiment in open-content civic journalism. It provides a space for people to conduct grassroots-level investigations on any issue, providing the public with a useful tool to conduct oversight of government and private sector entities. It is collaborative and thus allows individuals to build upon the work of others. Each investigation is organized as a “project,” which is made up of at least one timeline. You can contribute to a project by adding new events to the timeline associated with that project. All submissions are peer-reviewed by other users before being published. If you would like to participate in this effort, you will first need to create a user account. Once you have done that, you can begin adding events to any timeline.

The History Commons is a product of public collaboration created for public consumption. You are free to reuse, republish, and make derivative works from the textual content of the History Commons for non-commercial purposes (see terms for details). All timelines are exportable into XML so the data can be used in other applications.