SchlagerBlog

Today we released the January edition of our Milestone Documents newsletter. The primary focus is on the Progressive Era and World War I, but we also devote some attention to famous inaugural addresses in U.S. history.

In addition, with an eye toward Black History Month in February, we’ve launched a new survey: Which is the most important primary source document in African American history? The candidates are duly famous, and not all of them are “positive”–in keeping with the notion that history is not an unbroken line of ever-more-virtuous acts and events. Progress is always hard-fought. Herewith the five candidates we’ve chosen for the survey:

• Dred Scott v. Sandford
• The Emancipation Proclamation
• Plessy v. Ferguson
• Brown v. Board of Education
• Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech

It’s interesting to reflect on the importance of the Supreme Court in advancing–or delaying–progress at various times in the nation’s history. Also, it’s been 45 years since King’s seminal address. I wonder if in 45 years any of Barack Obama’s speeches or writings will make a similar list? I would bet so. It seems a stretch to think that the inaugural address of the country’s first African American president wouldn’t automatically be part of this kind of list, but maybe history will prove me wrong.

You can take our survey here.

Meanwhile, our press release “Who Is Inspiring Obama?” is getting some nice media hits today, including Forbes, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Yahoo.

With Barack Obama’s inauguration less than 3 weeks away, we have decided to focus some attention this month on famous inaugural addresses in U.S. history. To that end, we’ve chosen 5 standouts from history and are featuring them both at MilestoneDocuments.com and in a new press release. These five addresses are a fascinating group, ranging from addresses by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson during the early U.S. republic, to Abraham Lincoln’s stark, unforgettable second inaugural in 1865, and to those by FDR and JFK in the 20th century. In December we ran a survey asking readers to vote on which of these 5 addresses was the most influential in U.S. history, and the results are interesting: Lincoln’s second inaugural and JFK’s inaugural tied for the most votes, followed by Washington’s first inaugural.

There is no doubt that expectations for Obama’s inaugural address are sky-high. Having established his reputation with a luminescent speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and having built on his legacy as a gifted orator during the 2008 election campaign, Obama has set the bar high for his upcoming address. Whatever the result, I’m happy to report that the presidential historian Chester Pach–a valued contributor to our Milestone Documents series and the author of biographies of both Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan (forthcoming)–has agreed to write a complete analysis of Obama’s speech. This new analysis will be made available for free to all libraries that purchased Milestone Documents in American History, via the online Salem History database. In addition, we’ll offer it in an e-doc form on both MilestoneDocuments.com and on Amazon.com. Details will be forthcoming once the analysis is available in February or March.

I wonder how much, if at all, Obama will aim to bring his rhetoric down to earth in recognition of the economic crisis affecting the country. Or will he use the crisis as the opportunity to reach for the sky, oratorically speaking?

Political scandals and corruption are the headlines today over at the Milestone Documents blog. First, the Doc of the Day features the articles of impeachment of Bill Clinton from 1998. Clinton, who remains a political lightening rod even today, narrowly averted impeachment by the Senate on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. In addition, we have an “In the News” feature about the indictment of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich on corruption charges; the U.S. attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, believes that the governor sought to sell the open Senate seat of president-elect Barack Obama. Both posts feature links to relevant primary source documents in the two cases.

Meanwhile, over at MilestoneDocuments.com, we’ve added a new widget that offers history stories from the New York Times. The top stories at the moment include an obituary of a pioneering historian of African Americans, and a review of a book about medicine in the American West during the period of westward expansion.

What is the most influential inaugural address in U.S. history? Take our survey.

It goes without saying that every era is “historic,” but it’s also true that some eras are more fraught with import than others. Only time will tell whether historians view the present era as one such period, but it certainly feels that way now, doesn’t it?

Everywhere I turn these days, I seem to bump up against primary source documents and their importance in history. Just this past weekend on Book-TV (granted, most weekends it’s nothing BUT historians talking about documents!), I happened to see a conversation of presidential biographers. Robert Caro talked about the document from the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin that unlocked the key to Lyndon Johnson’s transformation from lowly junior senator to power broker; it was a handwritten chart in which LBJ tallied the favors he was doing (or not doing) for fellow senators who had sought his help with reelection races. In the same program Ted Sorensen talked about the libraries and documents that allowed him to write his new memoir, which focuses on his time serving John F. Kennedy. On another Book-TV program this weekend, the Lincoln biographer Michael Burlingame talked about the infamous Bixby letter, which he argues is clearly not the work of Lincoln himself but of Lincoln’s aide John Hay.

It’s all quite fascinating to anyone interested in history or goverment, of course, but it’s especially validating for those of us at Schlager Group, as we focus our energies on creating content that helps students and researchers utilize primary sources to better understand history. We feel fortunate to be working on stuff that matters. Just today we sent the first volume of our upcoming Milestone Documents of American Leaders to the typesetter. From Abigail Adams to Louis Brandeis to Bill Clinton to Frederick Douglass, Volume 1 is full of interesting figures and the documents that they produced, as of course are the other 3 volumes in the book, which we’ll likewise be sending to the typesetter in the near future. In the coming weeks, I’m hoping to write some blog posts that focus on some of these figures.

January promises awards announcements for our first title, Milestone Documents in American History, as well as news about some special content we’ll be creating about Barack Obama’s inaugural address and about the other noteworthy speeces he’s already given in his brief career. Work has also begun on our third title, Milestone Documents in World History, and I look forward to sharing tidbits from that editorial process as well.

Over at the Milestone Documents blog, the Doc of the Day is one of the most famous speeches in American history: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Pearl Harbor” speech. The photo here is of FDR signing the declaration of war against Japan, which he did a short while after delivering his address to Congress on December 8, 1941.

Today is a good day to revisit the press release we published last year at this time, “Five Things You Should Know about FDR’s Pearl Harbor Speech.” It’s a great tool for teachers and students, and in fact I should remind readers that we are offering a free 36 x 24 poster of these “Five Things” to any school or library that purchases Milestone Documents in American History. If you’ve previously purchased the title, not to worry: just call our distributor, Salem Press, and we’ll send along a poster anyway. The number is 800-221-1592.

I just finished reading Toni Morrison’s new novella, A Mercy. As a huge fan of her writing, and in particular of Beloved, which I consider one of the titanic achievements in American literature, I was eager to read A Mercy. It deals with the same subject, slavery, but from a very different perspective. Instead of the mid-1800s, Morrison imagines the late 1600s, a time in which the institution meant not just enslavement of African Americans but also enslavement of American Indians and whites too. I will leave it to others to write proper book reviews, but suffice it to say that I found A Mercy to be a compelling, superb piece of literature.

Although I don’t know what prompted Morrison to focus on this subject and era, it’s well documented that the idea for Beloved came from a newspaper article in a 19th-century newspaper.  The connection between history and literature is a rich area to explore; for readers interested in primary source documents, I call attention to an Amazon.com Listmania list that I created last week: “Study guides: Slavery in history and literature.” Among the items here are Frederick Douglass’s “Fourth of July” Speech (properly titled “What to the Slave Is Your Fourth of July?”), the Emancipation Proclamation, and Dred Scott v. Sandford.

Marcia Merryman-Means, whose head is otherwise buried in the manuscript for Milestone Documents of American Leaders, remarked today how interesting it would be to travel back in time–say, to the debate over the Compromise of 1850–to be able to tell someone like John C. Calhoun that America would elect a black president within 200 years. Indeed. Wouldn’t that be something?

Today we’ve published our December issue of the Milestone Documents newsletter. It focuses on the period between 1870 and about 1900, which the National History Standards refer to as “Era 6: The Development of the Industrial United States.” Indeed, the period contains several critical legislative acts related to the rise of big business (and the downside thereof), including the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Interstate Commerce Act. But this era also includes some documents that don’t, shall we say, reflect the best of American ideals and spirit: the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Dawes Severalty Act come to mind. These are a good reminder to students that American history is not an unbroken string of national progress and civic rectitude; our failures as a country are reflected in our documents just as our triumphs are.

This newsletter also features our first-ever survey. It asks readers to vote on which inaugural address was the most influential in American history (think Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Kennedy). The survey is open to the general public, so even if you’re not a newsletter subscriber, you can take the survey by clicking on this link. I’ll post the results in January.

The BBC Web site has a terrific article about Obama’s oratorical skill. It features interviews with various historians, political scientists, and scholars of rhetoric. Among the speeches it highlights are his speech on race, his speech at the Democratic National Convention, and his victory speech on election night. In addition, the article talks about some of the past leaders that Obama clearly echoes in his speeches, including Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.

I was happy to arrive at the office this morning to discover that our analysis of the Gettysburg Address (written by Carl Rollyson of Baruch College, CUNY) is #1 on Amazon.com’s bestseller list in the history category for e-documents. It’s fitting, since today is the 145th anniversary of the address. Over at the Milestone Documents Blog, where the Gettysburg Address is the Doc of the Day, you can learn that the address took Lincoln only two minutes to deliver (not a surprise, given that it’s only about 278 words in length). Doris Kearns Goodwin, in Team of Rivals (suddenly all over the cultural and political landscape), recounts how the crowd sat in stunned silence when Lincoln finished the speech, bewildered at its brevity, before applauding. The speech is “now considered the most eloquent ever delivered by an American president,” notes Rollyson in his analysis.

Over at the Oxford University Press blog, the historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written a wonderful piece about Obama’s election to the presidency. (You may have heard Gates read this same piece on NPR yesterday.) Aside from the obvious emotion of the event, I was fascinated by Gates’s words about the Emancipation Proclamation, when on January 1, 1863, “tens of thousands of black people huddled together all over the North waiting to see if Abraham Lincoln would sign” it. His description about the response of those huddled masses, when news came that Lincoln had indeed signed it, is fascinating.