The Spartacus Educational website provides a series of free history encyclopaedias. Entries usually include a narrative, illustrations and primary sources. The text within each entry is linked to other relevant pages in the encyclopaedia. In this way it is possible to research individual people and events in great detail. The sources are also hyper-linked so the student is able to find out about the writer, artist, newspaper and organization that produced the material.
Charles Dickens
The First World War
Assassination of JFK
Spanish Civil War
American Civil War
Gandhi
In September, 1997, Spartacus Educational founder and managing director John Simkin became the first educational publisher in Britain to establish a website that was willing to provide teachers and students with free educational materials.
According to a survey carried out by the Fischer Trust, Spartacus Educational is one of the top three websites used by history teachers and students in Britain (the other two are BBC History and the Public Record Office’s Learning Curve). The Spartacus Educational website currently gets up to 7 million page impressions a month and 3 million unique visitors.
As well as running the Spartacus Educational website John Simkin has also produced material for the Electronic Telegraph, the European Virtual School and the Guardian's educational website, Learn. He was also a member of the European History E-Learning Project (E-Help), a project to encourage and improve use of ICT and the internet in classrooms across the continent.
During the last few months he has published six e-books, Charles Dickens: A Biography (October, 2012), First World War Encyclopedia (October, 2012), Assassination of John F. Kennedy Encyclopedia (November, 2012), Gandhi: A Biography (December, 2012), The Spanish Civil War (December, 2012) and The American Civil War (December, 2012). He also contributed an article to the recently published book, Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching and Learning in History (December, 2012).
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Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya joined the International Workingmen's Association, and became friends with its leader, Karl Marx. After the fall of Napoléon III in 1870 the couple returned to France. Anna participated in the Paris Commune of 1871. She was active in organising the food supply of the besieged city of Paris and co-founded and wrote for the journal La Sociale. Anna also collaborated closely with other revolutionaries in the conflict who favoured women's rights, including Louise Michel, Victoire Léodile Béra, Nathalie Lemel, Adèle Paulina Mekarska and Elisaveta Dimitrieva. Together they founded the Women's Union, which fought for equal wages for women, female suffrage, measures against domestic violence and the closing of the legal brothels in the city. Anna held strong views on drinking alcohol and urged that "drunkards who have lost all self-respect should be arrested". She also tried to get smoking banned in concerts.
Cathy Porter, the author of Fathers and Daughters: Russian Women in Revolution (1976), has argued: "Anna's ideas about the new society were in many ways Utopian... Her chief concern was that the Commune should uphold moral standards, and she was outraged by the excessive drunkenness and brutality of many of the communards. She was convinced that the raising of family allowances would eliminate prostitution, and wanted to see all prostitutes detained and then trained as nurses."
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUS-Korvin-Krukovskaya.htm
Élisée Reclus was not a supporter of the campaign to obtain the vote: "To vote is to abdicate. To name one or several masters for a short or long period means renouncing one’s own sovereignty. Whether he becomes absolute monarch, constitutional prince or a simple elected representative bearing a small portion of royalty, the candidate you raise to the throne or the chair will be your superior. You name men who are above laws, since they write them and their mission is to make you obey. To vote means being a dupe. It means believing that at the ringing of a bell men like you will suddenly acquire the virtue of knowing and understanding everything. Your elected representatives having to legislate on everything, from matches to warships, from the pruning of trees to the extermination of red or black villages, it seems to you that their intelligence grows thanks to the immensity of the task."
According to Samuel Stephenson, while living in Switzerland: "Reclus plunged into the writing of a 19-volume geographical work covering the whole world, entitled Nouvelle géographie universelle. It was finally completed and published in 1894. As an interesting side-note, Reclus is purported to have initiated the "Anti-marriage movement" from his residence in Geneva in 1882. After the publication of the Nouvelle géographie universelle, Reclus moved to Brussels, Belgium where he took up a job as professor of comparative geography at the New University of Brussels. Reclus also engaged in lecture tours, attending the Edinburgh Summer Meetings of 1893 and 1895, among others."