The Dictionary of Sydney was archived in 2021.
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More than the sum of the parts
Local history, city history, regional history, national history and global history all have different concerns and tend to have varying depths of field -- details which are crucial in one area are not so crucial in another. Because no historian…
I feel the earth move, under my feet
It isn't all facts and figures, or straightforward historical topics, here at the Dictionary of Sydney. We've also invited some very imaginative writers to come up with different viewpoints on the city's history, and they have obliged us. Ground level graffiti…
Building communities
One of most important tasks of the Dictionary is to document the histories of Sydney's many different cultural communities, and we've made a good start. The most recent community articles, on the Maori and the Russians, have just been released, and…
Getting technical
Technical education is all important today, and it's hard to imagine a time when it needed advocates and activists. With the generous help of the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts who sponsored their research for the Dictionary during 2009 and 2010,…
The circus is in town!
One of the most exciting entries in the new batch of material just added to the Dictionary of Sydney is Mark St Leon's richly illustrated essay on Circus in Sydney. The three St Leon brothers, Reg, Cass and Syl, with Mo…
A mandate of mayors
The most recent set of additions to the Dictionary includes biographies of the first 14 mayors of Sydney, written by consulting historian Terri McCormack, and they are certainly an interesting and varied bunch. Sydney was incorporated as a city in 1842,…
The new Dictionary of Sydney goes live
Wonderful Performance of Robert Taylor at Ashton's Circus, Illustrated Sydney News, 9 June 1855 The regular quarterly update to the Dictionary of Sydney has been made public at www.dictionaryofsydney.org today, and there's a lot of new material to have a look…
Growing and changing
Now that the Dictionary is so big and complex, it can be hard to see how it is changing. The raw figures are quite daunting: the Dictionary contains 572 articles totalling nearly 800,000 words, and has information on nearly 5,000…
More than one angle on Hyde Park Barracks
One of the unusual things about the Dictionary of Sydney is that entries are only one of several kinds of historical resources we include. You can find maps, video, audio, timelines, images and combinations of these. We can also include more than…
Bouncing around the Dictionary
What are those bouncing balls on our front page? The Dictionary's bouncing balls -- captured They were designed to provide a visual rendering of the ways in which all the elements of content in the Dictionary of Sydney are connected…