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Letter from the Editor

This summer at a dinner with a regular reader of HNN I learned that it is not clear exactly what we include in our newsletters or how the site is organized. Consider this, then, on the eve of the new school year, a quick course in navigating HNN.

HNN is organized into 14 Departments, which can easily be accessed on every page from the menu located on the left-hand column. With a simple click from this menu you can find out the latest Breaking News or view articles concerning News Abroad or News at Home.

Recently, to help streamline the site we reorganized the Departments. We added a Books Department and beefed up the Hot Topics Department, which is now organized by subject, with the most current topics listed at the top of the page. If you want to find out what historians are saying about gay marriage or John Kerry, click on Hot Topics.

The biggest of the Departments is Roundup: Roundup is organized into 5 divisions, which are listed on every page on the upper right-hand column.

In Roundup we feature excerpts from articles published on the Internet from around the world. In our Friday newsletter we list the Top 10 excerpts. But these comprise just a brief sampling of the extensive collection of excerpts we post every week.

Probably the most intimate of our Departments is the one listing HNN Blogs. Here historians express their personal reactions to events in the news and the profession. If you are unsure what a blog is, click here.

The Features Department lists services we provide: guides to pop culture, lists of interviews with historians, great history quotes, highlights from the AHA & OAH conventions, and the like.

Our homepage -- http://HNN.us -- features our published articles by historians. These are listed in our Wednesday newsletter. Most are posted on the site on Monday. These articles are drawn from various Departments on the site depending on the subject matter.

Please keep in mind that we feature a broad range of ideological views.

If you ever have any questions about HNN, please feel free to contact me. We welcome suggestions!

Rick Shenkman
HNN Editor