Methodology

What is History Is For Everyone?

History Is For Everyone is a public-good research project dedicated to making America's Revolutionary War heritage accessible, trustworthy, and useful — especially for educators. We believe that the stories of the founding era belong to everyone: not just to the well-funded museums or the towns that already appear on every tourist map, but to every community that played a part in the creation of the country. Our work is teacher-first by design. Every town profile, source citation, and scoring decision is made with classroom use in mind, because teachers are the people who turn historical data into understanding.

The project operates as an open research network. We publish our methodology, our sources, and our scoring rationale so that readers can evaluate our claims for themselves. When we are uncertain, we say so. When our evidence is thin, we label it. When we change a score or revise a narrative, the change is logged publicly. This is not a finished encyclopedia — it is a living, evolving body of work that improves as more people engage with it. If you are a teacher, a local historian, a student, or simply someone who cares about getting the history right, this project exists for you.

Town Selection

A town enters our network when it meets two criteria: documented involvement in the Revolutionary period (roughly 1763 to 1783), and at least one surviving historical resource that a visitor can experience today. "Documented involvement" means we can cite a primary or secondary source placing the town in the context of colonial resistance, military action, political deliberation, or wartime civilian life.

We intentionally include communities beyond the well-known battlefields. Towns where committees of correspondence met, where militia organized, where enslaved people navigated the war's contradictions, where women ran farms and supply lines — these are part of the Revolution too. Our goal is a network, not a greatest-hits list.

Selection is not permanent. If new research undermines a town's documented connection, or if a town's sole historical resource closes permanently, we may remove it from the active network. Any such change would be logged in the changelog.

Link Types

The network aspect of History is for Everyone matters as much as individual profiles. Towns connect to each other through typed links, each representing a historically documented relationship. Links are weighted by significance and always include a brief explanation of the connection.

Current link types include shared events (two towns involved in the same military action or political movement), shared people (historical figures active in both locations), shared themes (parallel experiences like "citizen soldiers" or "maritime resistance"), and shared routes (physical paths like the Boston Post Road or Paul Revere's ride). We may add link types as the network grows.

Source Credibility Tiers

Every source cited in a town profile is assigned a credibility tier. This does not mean lower-tier sources are unreliable — it means we want readers to understand the evidentiary basis for what they're reading. A community blog post and a peer-reviewed journal article both have value, but they carry different epistemic weight.

Sources assigned the label "TODO" are awaiting evaluation. This happens when a source is added during a batch update and has not yet been reviewed. We aim to clear the backlog within two weeks of any data import.

Update Philosophy

Town profiles are living documents. Scores change when new sources are added, when preservation conditions shift, or when our scoring methodology evolves. Every change is logged with a timestamp, a summary, and (where applicable) a public note explaining the reasoning.

We do not aim for consensus — we aim for transparency. If you disagree with a score or a characterization, the sourcing is visible. We label uncertainty explicitly: where evidence is contested, where oral tradition diverges from written record, where our assessment relies on limited data. History is not a finished product, and neither is this project.

Corrections, source suggestions, and factual challenges are welcome. Reach us through the Partner page or by opening an issue on our public repository.