The Internet doesn’t sound like a promising place to find good history. Cyberspace is too young and ephemeral to compete with a good research library or a well-stocked bookstore, but on my first visit to the World Wide Web, I stumbled onto a site called “On the Lower East Side: Observations of Life in Lower Manhattan at the Turn of the Century” and unexpectedly found myself transported back a hundred years.

Designed as an on-line “hypertextbook” by professors at St. Mary’s University of Minnesota, “On the Lower East Side” combines contemporary descriptions of New York immigrant life with wonderful photographs and drawings from the period. It wasn’t the photos or even the unfamiliar texts that moved me but a ghostly period map that materialized slowly on my screen after I clicked an icon. At home in Los Angeles I gently touched my finger to the street corner where my grandfather was born a century ago.

In fact there is a great deal of history on the Net, but, as with everything else on-line, finding it can be difficult. The Internet is mostly a collection of private obsessions on public display, and nowhere is this more true than in the public newsgroups and mailing lists where users exchange views on every possible subject. Of the thousands of newsgroups, soc.history is by far the most active history discussion. Recently George Washington’s religious beliefs were the hot topic.

Military affairs, however, tend to dominate the history newsgroups with special emphasis on Germany and World War II. Over at soc.history.war.world-war-ii people were arguing the relative capabilities of the German V-I and V-2 missiles. For the more imaginative, alt.history.what-if deals with questions like “What if Hitler had invested in jet technology?” and “What if Hitler gets into art school?” though my favorite recent thread was the less well-contested “What if Christie Brinkley made out with Boris Yeltsin?”

When you least expect it, moments of true feeling burst through. On soc.history.war.vietnam , for example, after some fairly predictable discussions about land reform, air combat tactics, and Jane Fonda, there was this response to an argument about the origins of the pejorative term REMF , which refers to rear-echelon troops. “I can remember watching from a hill to the south of Bong Son,” someone had typed in, “as the mortars came in on the REMFs at LZ English. And the unknown and unhonored REMFs that pulled a bunch of boonie-rats out of a C-130 that crashed while taking off at English. And what was left of the REMFs when LZ Tom was overrun. . . . I’ll always be proud of being Airborne, of having pounded the bush, but if you were in country, you’re OK.”

Historical discussions are also flourishing on countless