The world’s first comprehensive online quantitative and qualitative encyclopedia of religious cultural history
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- published entries
- active experts
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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.
Prof. Edward Slingerland
Director, Database of Religious History
Recent Updates
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.
Read moreQuality 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.
Read moreAssess 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.
Read moreConnect 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.
Read moreLearn how to browse and search the Database
We have put together a video tutorial on using the database that covers: browsing the project, reading an entry, as well as searching and visualizing the data
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.