A Kind of Challenge to help out a historian - Crawling a list of HTML links and grabbing text from each link?

Yeah, well, in any reasonable world, you’d be able to count on lynx, curl, and wget on any un*x system, so I assume there’s some kind of license restriction that prevents Apple from including anything except curl.

But if you run which wget it will probably show up in /usr/local/bin/ or /opt/bin (I forget what MacPorts uses).

Have you considered the excellent Mac app called TextSoap? TextSoap - Automate Your Text Cleanup They offer many varieties of “HTML Cleaners”.