SchlagerBlog

Happy new year, everyone. Like many people I’ve talked to, I looked forward to catching my breath over the holidays–resting, reflecting, and planning. Alas, there was a wee gap between that vision and my reality. The final days of December were spent in a frenzy of work to get Milestone Documents in World History off to the printer. And now, back in the office this week, I have barely blinked, only to find that somehow it’s already Thursday afternoon. How did that happen? Oy.

In any event, we’ve had a good start to the year. This month, two key library industry publications have given awards to Milestone Documents of American Leaders: Booklist (via their Editor’s Choice award) and Choice (via their Outstanding Academic Title award). This gives us a 1,000 batting percentage with our publications as it relates to this pair of awards: our first two titles have each won both awards. Thank you to the Booklist and Choice awards committees for this recognition!

In addition to our forthcoming Milestone Documents reference sets in 2010 (World History in February, African American History in May, and World Religions in October),  we are tremendously excited about the upcoming launch of the redesigned MilestoneDocuments.com. We’re aiming for a February release, and I hope to be able to offer some screen shots of the new design/layout in the near future.

Also on our horizon this year is a new series of teacher materials based on our Milestone Documents content. We’ve assembled a killer group of educators to help us conceptualize this series. Again, stay tuned for news about that endeavor.

As a publisher focusing on history materials, we are always on the lookout for news items that point back to some of the primary documents we feature in our reference sets. An upcoming movie that is getting a lot of attention is Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, about Nelson Mandela urging the South African rugby team to win a championship and help unify the nation in the wake of the end of apartheid. Mandela is, of course, a titanic figure on the world stage from the latter part of the twentieth century. In my mind (and I’m hardly alone in this), his achievement in leading South Africa away from a bloodbath of revenge and reprisal following his release from prison and election to the presidency is nothing short of astonishing. It’s no surprise, then, that his 1994 inaugural address is included in our forthcoming Milestone Documents in World History. The address is a microcosm of the mindset that Mandela brought to his task as president: healing, forgiveness, building toward the future.

“The time for the healing of wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come. The time to build is upon us.”

In his analysis of Mandela’s inaugural address, our contributor Christopher Saunders draws some interesting parallels between Mandela’s address and Barack Obama’s inaugural address. As Chris notes: “When Obama delivered his inaugural address, many commentators in South Africa referred it to a ‘Mandela moment’ and reminded their readers of Mandela’s speech.” Readers who want to study our complete analysis of Mandela’s inaugural address can do so upon publication in a few weeks, provided their library purchases the set. If that’s not the case, readers will be able to download the analysis at MilestoneDocuments.com.

Another historic document that is in the news this week is the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act, which broke the final Native American land holdings into individual parcels and essentially completed the dispossession of native landholders. This week,  the U.S. government announced that it had agreed to pay $3.4 billion to settle a longstanding lawsuit over its mismanagement of Indian land trusts–mismanagement that goes back to the Dawes Act in 1887. Anyone studying the history of land struggles between the U.S. government and American Indians should examine the Dawes Act. The full text can be read at MilestoneDocuments.com, and readers can also download our expert analysis for immediate access as well.

This kind of current events tie-in is soon going to get a major boost from us. As we move closer to the relaunch of the dramatically overhauled MilestoneDocuments.com, we’ll be starting a new continuous updating effort that will help readers stay up to date with historic documents in the news as well as new ones that are appearing. This effort will bring a fresh, continually updated face to our Web site and give educators a useful new tool with which to help students explore and understand the past.

I’m happy to announce that additional Milestone Documents articles are now available individually from Amazon.com. We’ve been selling articles from Milestone Documents in American History on Amazon (as well as on MilestoneDocuments.com) for about year, but this week we have begun to load articles from the companion set, Milestone Documents of American Leaders. Thus, you can download articles that explain and analyze the primary documents of figures ranging from John Adams to George W. Bush to Susan B. Anthony to Frederick Douglass–and 100 more. Each article sells for $6.99 and carries the brand name “DocNotes,” so an easy way to find an article is to search for “DocNotes” plus the person’s name.

Although we will continue to build our deluxe, comprehensive reference sets (and users are still urged to check their library before buying an individual DocNotes article), offering our content by the article in places like Amazon and MilestoneDocuments.com is important, too, because so many students and teachers are served by library systems that won’t have our sets. We really do want to offer users the ability to get our content in whatever place or technology suits them best–whether via the library or the Internet or their mobile phone. While we’ve only just begun to tap the potential of this “anytime, anywhere” model of content delivery, there is no doubt in my mind that it’s the wave of the future.

Once the redesign for MilestoneDocuments.com is launched in early 2010, users will be able to download the American Leaders articles from our site, too, along with articles from our forthcoming Milestone Documents in World History.

Over the weekend, Apple gave quick approval to our newest apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch: Obama Speeches and Analysis and Lincoln Speeches and Analysis. Each app costs $1.99. In each case, we offer the full text of 4 iconic speeches along with complete expert commentary of the speeches by the Lincoln scholar Paul Finkelman (also the executive editor for our Milestone Documents series of reference books) and the presidential historian Chester Pach (writing about Obama). There are all sorts of cool features with these apps, from note-taking to highlighting to e-mailing to auto-scrolling. Learn more about them at the App store or in iTunes. Of course, both Lincoln and Obama are also included in our U.S. Presidential Speeches app (available in $.99 and $9.99 versions).

This past weekend, we showcased our Milestone Documents product line with an exhibit booth at the annual conference of the Texas Council for the Social Studies. It was an extremely rewarding experience for us, as we were able to meet hundreds of educators from around the state and introduce them to our materials. To celebrate the occasion, we gave away 3 Milestone Documents reference sets each day. I’m pleased to announce the winners here:

Day 1 winners

• Sarah Cook, Rockwall ISD
• Raff Saeed, Galena Park ISD
• Amanda Jimenez, Texas Tech University

Day 2 winners

• Margaret Eubanks, Goose Greek CSID
• Marilyn Wooldridge, Fort Worth ISD
• Alberto Guajardo, United ISD

Each one of these winners will receive the Milestone Docs reference set of their choice, which includes a 4-volume print set and free online access for their entire school via the Salem History platform.

In addition to the print winners, we gave away 50 iPhone apps for our new U.S. Presidential Speeches app. Half of the winners will receive the basic version, which includes the full text of 90 famous presidential speeches; the other half will receive the pro version, which also includes our award-winning expert analysis of each speech.

It was truly an exciting weekend for all of us here at Schlager Group, and we are already looking forward to next year’s TCSS conference in Houston.

Recently I had the good fortune to be interviewed by Mary Ellen Quinn of Booklist magazine for that publication’s “Bookmakers” section. That interview has just appeared in the magazine’s October 15 issue; it’s available online here.

The interview covers a lot of ground, from my founding of the company in 1997 to the launch of our reference imprint in 2007 to our creation of MilestoneDocuments.com to our new iPhone apps. We are working on multiple fronts to make our content available and attractive to students and teachers and history buffs wherever and however they want it, and I’m grateful to Mary Ellen and Booklist for giving me the chance to talk about our efforts.

Those readers who get the print version of the magazine will also see a full-page advertisement for our newest reference set, Milestone Documents of American Leaders, as well as a very positive review of that set (more on that in a separate blog post in the next day or so).

I’m excited to announce that today we have released our first applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. “DocNotes: Presidential Speeches” is available in Basic ($.99) and Pro ($9.99) versions. The Basic version includes the full text of 90 famous presidential speeches in U.S. history, while the Pro version includes the full document texts plus a customized version of our award-winning expert commentary on each speech. You can learn more about the apps here, or you can search on “DocNotes” or “Presidential Speeches” in the App store.

There are a number of useful features in these apps, including bookmarking, highlighting, and note-taking. The Pro version allows you to e-mail a document (and accompanying analysis) with your inline notes and colored highlights.

These apps offer a promising new front in our business, one designed to make our content available to users wherever they are, in whatever format is convenient. Our foundation remains our reference encyclopedias, with our individual expert commentary on MilestoneDocuments.com serving a complementary function for students and researchers whose libraries don’t buy our sets. Now, for the first time, our content is mobile. These apps offer a great research tool for history students as well as a convenient teaching tool for educators. Plus, for the history buff, they’re just fun to explore.

We’ve got many more apps in development, including ones on Supreme Court decisions, Barack Obama and Abe Lincoln, and teaching activities for U.S. and World History teachers. I’ll be sure to keep readers updated on our progress on this blog.

Today on MilestoneDocuments.com we are pleased to offer original analysis of Barack Obama’s inaugural address. This is a landmark for us in the sense that it’s the first time we’ve offered one of our e-docs for sale (and immediate download) that didn’t previously appear in one of our print encyclopedias. Although the Obama article follows the exact same format as the entries in Milestone Documents in American History, it was written well after that set was published. However, the advantage of having a site like MilestoneDocuments.com is that we can do special offerings like the Obama piece.

The full text of Obama’s address is available for free, as is a time line of related events. The expert analysis of the address, comprising 5,000 words, and available for $6.99 (but free to any library that has purchased MDAH via Salem History), was written by the presidential historian Chester Pach of Ohio University. The following excerpt will give you a taste of what Dr. Pach’s analysis is like:

Obama tries to forestall criticism from those “who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans.” He maintains that such critics do not appreciate what Americans have accomplished at times “when imagination is joined to common purpose.” He also insists that his election shows that voters have repudiated the cynics’ “stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long.” In short, Obama maintains that change—both in national objectives and in how Americans achieve them—is essential to economic recovery.

Dr. Pach analyzes the complete address in this manner, and he also discusses the historical context of the speech, provides a brief biography of Obama, talks about the intended audience for the speech, and offers questions for further study and research. All in all, it’s a fascinating look at what Dr. Pach rightly calls “the most anticipated political speech of the first decade of the twenty-first century.”

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.

As you probably know, today is the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. (And how strange that it’s also the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday.) To mark the occasion, we’ve adapted the entry on Lincoln in our forthcoming Milestone Documents of American Leaders and inserted it into a post at the Milestone Documents Blog. The entry was written by Paul Finkelman, a renowned Lincoln scholar and the executive editor of our Milestone Documents series. As many others have observed, the man who is perhaps our greatest president was also our greatest writer-president, and so it’s especially appropriate that we mark his birthday here in the Milestone Documents universe.

Speaking of that universe, the same abridged Lincoln entry also appears in our latest newsletter. The article had to compete for space with a number of other items on the February history calendar, including Black History Month and Era 8 of the National History Standards (Great Depression and World War II). Meanwhile, the fun never stops: We’re hard at work on our fall title, Milestone Documents in World History, and you’ll be seeing some news soon related to that publication.