This might be the earliest (extant) website I ever made. It was for a now long-defunct online undergraduate humanities journal that I started while in college, around the time I was just learning about how to write HTML.
Agora didn’t last long, but it has the distinction (I think) of being the first to publish the scholarly work of my fellow Texan historian and digital humanist Andrew Torget. Only after we were out of graduate school, many years later, did Andrew and I put together that our paths had crossed as undergrads in the hypertext pages of Agora, where I helped to edit his article on the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas for the Winter 2000 issue, both of which are still preserved in the Internet Archive. Amazingly, despite being history majors on campus at the same time, we never had a class together or met in person as undergraduates.
Many years after we realized and remembered that connection, Andrew invited me to speak about Sweet Taste of Liberty at UNT. And it was then that we realized a further small-world connection: Robertson County, the focus of his long-ago paper, was also the county where Henrietta Wood and other enslaved people were forced to work by Mississippi planter Gerard Brandon during and immediately after the Civil War. In following Wood’s story to Texas, I had ended up looking, unawares, at some of the same agents and Bureau sources Andrew had mined decades before, though on FamilySearch instead of on the microfilm reels I think he probably used.
I guess the Wayback Machine is aptly named, because finding that Agora snapshot takes me way back.
