Newly Launched History AI Chat Gives Guided Help to Students Searching World History Encyclopedia
With over 420 million peer-reviewed historical documents and resources, World History Encyclopedia’s AI Chat now makes it easier for students to sift through those resources to find answers to their questions.
NEW YORK – September 8, 2025 - World History Encyclopedia – the world's largest and most respected history encyclopedia – has launched a new History AI Chat to guide inquiry-based engagement with the Encyclopedia’s corpus of history materials. With the Chat tool, students and teachers can more easily sift through the over 23,000 peer-reviewed and unbiased resources and primary sources in the Encyclopedia’s database as well as Open University’s CORE Index of 420M academic papers. Access to the Encyclopedia and the History AI Chat is free.
When asked a question, the History AI Chat returns a brief answer, usually in a list, along with the links to each cited source and additional sources that present a more complete picture about what happened. Answers are brief so that students need to investigate all the sources to get the full answer. They can explore and learn, not simply focus on the shortest path to an answer.
“Inquiry-based learning is a powerful way to learn history but it is being lost in the quick-answer world of AI. We worked very closely with teachers and college-level faculty to make sure that the History AI Chat is a learning tool, not an answer tool. Its purpose is to guide investigation and the study of multiple viewpoints to questions about history,” said Jan van der Crabben, Founder & CEO of World History Encyclopedia.
For example, when given the question “What caused the War of 1812?” the History AI Chat replies with a paragraph and an abbreviated list of causes along with several other resources where more information can be found. The chatbot does not pull in information from the open web, nor does it write answers like generative AI. It can present the student with sources from WHE and from Open University’s CORE global network of academic articles, data, and content.
Anne Krive, a school librarian at the Moses Brown Schools in Providence, Rhode Island, said, “In contrast to 10 years ago, there is a firehose of information available to students and not all of it is accurate, and if discovered through a search or AI study tool, it may not have been curated or evaluated for truth, accuracy, or quality. On the other hand, World History Encyclopedia is accessible, credible, and it is free to use. I am thrilled that now there is an AI chat to make it easier to sift through World History Encyclopedia’s incredible library.”
“People are consuming information differently now, relying on AI search to answer questions and find content. World History Encyclopedia’s History AI Chat can only access the curated corpus of data from two globally respected and unbiased sources: World History Encyclopedia and Open University’s CORE Index. Using World History Encyclopedia, teachers can be confident that their students will have access only to an unbiased global repository of scholarly material,” added van der Crabben.
WHE is entirely free to search, read, and consume, which is why there are thousands of teachers in every country who use it. The chatbot is powered by Perplexity Sonar.
About World History Encyclopedia
World History Encyclopedia – which is free for everyone everywhere – is the world's largest and most popular history encyclopedia. All of the Encyclopedia's content is authored by historians, archaeologists, educators, and scholars. It is a trusted resource in classrooms and universities and recommended by esteemed institutions such as Oxford University, California State University, and Common Sense Education. There were over 89 million page views of World History Encyclopedia in 2024. Learn more at worldhistory.org or follow on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
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Media Contact
Jennifer Harrison for World History Encyclopedia
jennifer@pandopublicrelations.com
+1 916.716.0636
World History Encyclopedia has released a History AI Chat for the 2025/26 school year. Students and other users can use the chat to more easily sift through the over 420 million peer-reviewed historical documents and resources in World History Encyclopedia. Access to the Encyclopedia and History AI Chat is free. A simple query like “What caused the War of 1812?” or “What is Cleopatra famous for?” generates several paragraphs of information along with sources from the Encyclopedia, sources from Open University’s CORE Index of academic papers, and a list of related questions to guide users in exploring the topic further. See the History AI Chat at https://www.worldhistory.org/ai/.
World History Encyclopedia has released a History AI Chat for the 2025/26 school year. Students and other users can use the chat to more easily sift through the over 420 million peer-reviewed historical documents and resources in World History Encyclopedia. Access to the Encyclopedia and History AI Chat is free. A simple query like “What caused the War of 1812?” or “What is Cleopatra famous for?” generates several paragraphs of information along with sources from the Encyclopedia, sources from Open University’s CORE Index of academic papers, and a list of related questions to guide users in exploring the topic further. See the History AI Chat at https://www.worldhistory.org/ai/.