American Leaders here, there, everywhere
We are about a week away from publication of our second title, Milestone Documents of American Leaders. The mad dash to the finish line partially explains my silence on this blog over the past few weeks. Today I’m flying to Newark for a sales presentation about the set to our distributor, Salem Press. It’s a great opportunity to offer my vision for the set and the series in general, and it’s a good excuse to brush up on my PowerPoint skills.
Meanwhile, I’ve been doing some work to get the data for American Leaders in final, pristine XML shape for the electronic database that purchasing libraries get for free, Salem History. (And big news on this front: we’re offering an exclusive online article about Barack Obama’s speeches and writings for those libraries that buy the print set.) While doing that, I’ve realized that there are a number of April birth anniversaries for people covered in our set. Yesterday (April 22), for instance, was the anniversary of Robert Oppenheimer’s birth. (It was also the anniversary of George Washington’s influential Proclamation of Neutrality , which was our Doc of the Day at the Milestone Documents Blog.) Today is the anniversary of the births of both James Buchanan and Stephen A. Douglas, while Saturday is the anniversary of William Brennan’s birth. Next week sees birth anniversaries for Ulysses S. Grant (April 27) and James Monroe (April 28), while we’re just past the anniversaries for folks like Colin Powell (April 5), Allen Dulles (April 7), Frances Perkins (April 10), Henry Clay (April 12), Thomas Jefferson (April 13), and Roger Sherman (April 19).
We are in the early stages of a badly needed site redesign for MilestoneDocuments.com, and one of the things the redesign will accomplish is integration of the content from American Leaders with the content already in place from Milestone Documents in American History. And, above all, we will move closer to making the site an essential stop for information about famous primary documents in U.S. and world history. There is so much exciting stuff happening around the use of primary sources in the classroom, and we look forward to being a bigger part of that conversation in the months and years to come. Stay tuned for more news about our site redesign and new product offerings for students, teachers, and libraries.