The world’s first comprehensive online quantitative and qualitative encyclopedia of religious cultural history

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What is the DRH?

The DRH is a massive, standardized, searchable encyclopedia of the current best scholarly opinion on historical religious traditions and the historical record more generally.

It allows users to instantly gain an overview of the state of scholarly opinion and access powerful, built-in analytic and data visualization tools.

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Prof. Edward Slingerland
Director, Database of Religious History

Accessible, centralized clearing house for historical data

The DRH is designed to serve as a centralized clearing house for scholarly knowledge of the historical record, bringing together a core of quantified, standardized data with qualitative comments, references to crucial resources, and links to on-line text and image databases.

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Quality scholarly opinion on historical traditions

For scholars, researchers, teachers and the general public, the DRH will function as a gateway to reliable, comprehensive knowledge concerning the history of religions around the world, and cultural history more generally.

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Assess the validity of scholarly generalizations

Scholars can quickly and efficiently check their intuitions concerning the temporal or spatial distribution of particular beliefs or practices against the historical record.

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Connect with other scholarly experts

For the broader historical community, the DRH will function as a venue for documenting differences in scholarly opinion, as well as providing a discussion forum for exploring the sources of expert disagreement.

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Discover entries contributed by top experts in the field

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Recent Updates

  • 447 published entries
  • 218 active experts
  • 74,925 expert answers

Want to contribute?

If you are a historian or religious studies expert, you can help make the DRH better. It is a great chance to contribute to an important academic resource.

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Our Partners

The DRH is a completely open-access, non-profit academic initiative.

Our commitment to outstanding research and education is made possible by the contributions of our partners and supporters. Every donation enables us to advance this project and increase access to the history of the world’s religions and cultures.

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