SchlagerBlog

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.

I’m happy to announce that our Milestone Documents articles are now available for immediate download through Amazon.com. (Click here to see the results.) Not all 130-plus articles from our first reference book are loaded just yet, but they should show up in the next week or so. Of course, these articles have already been available at our own e-commerce site for a few months, but we recognized that being available on Amazon could help us reach a wider audience. The price per article is the same whether you buy at MilestoneDocuments.com or at Amazon.com: $6.99.

As always, we encourage users to check with their school or public libraries first before buying an article, as they can get the content for free if their library owns Milestone Documents in American History. Nonetheless, we hope that this level of access will be useful to the many folks out there whose libraries do not own our book (and the accompanying electronic database).

We’ve just launched the November issue of our Milestone Documents newsletter. This month the focus is on the Civil War and Reconstruction era. The figure of Abraham Lincoln dominates the period, as you might expect–both in the historical record in general as well as in the key documents from the period. Some of the most famous words in American history were penned by the Illinois statesman: just think of his “mystic chords of memory” (first inaugural address) or the “better angels of our memory” (ditto) or “with malice toward none; with charity toward all” (second inaugural address). By the way, there is a fantastic source of Lincoln papers available on the Web for free here.

Aside from Lincoln, though, the era also saw influential documents such as Dred Scott v. Sandford, the trio of amendments passed at the end of the war to protect African American rights (the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments), and the bitter fight over Reconstruction, as seen in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Articles of Impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Fascinating stuff. Needless to say, the full texts of all of these documents are available (for free) on MilestoneDocuments.com.

Will next week witness the election of another Illinois statesman as president?

The Center for History and New Media, an organization housed at George Mason University and an essential site for anyone interested in digital history, has just launched a redesign of its main Web site. It’s very handsome and exhibits the same graphical clarity and ease of navigation that distinguishes all of the CHNM sites. According to Dan Cohen (the director of the CHNM), this marks the 4th redesign in 14 years of existence. I can relate to this. Although we only recently launched our own digital history Web site (MilestoneDocuments.com), we have already begun thinking about the future–how the site’s design could be improved and made more flexible to better reflect our growing list of content offerings. In any case, I urge you to check out the new and improved CHNM home page.

Yesterday over at the Milestone Documents Blog, we saw the biggest response in the site’s history to a fairly innocuous post: In the news: Presidential debates. Such is the power of link journalism, I guess. Of course, coming as it did on the heels of Wednesday’s debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, the post was well positioned to take advantage of the incredibly high interest level about the current presidential election. Call me an incurable optimist (and my staff often does), but I find it hard to be too pessimistic about the state of our country when so many people are so passionate about an election. Just one example: several sites are reporting that Obama’s campaign is on the verge of reporting its September fundraising figures, and that those figures may come in at or above $100 million. That’s just astonishing.

A final note on Obama: One of the best pieces I’ve read recently is over at the A. Lincoln Blog, where the historian Brian Dirck comments on the high expectations that Obama is now facing and relates those expectations to the ones faced by Abraham Lincoln, both before and after he took office.

The History Carnival is a monthly roundup of the best history blog writing; the carnival rotates to a different host site each month. The October carnival is at the American Presidents Blog, and I’m pleased to learn that the carnival has taken note of one of our posts at the Milestone Documents Blog: Jonathan Rees on Eugene V. Debs. Congratulations to Jonathan for his interesting and illuminating post. Jonathan, by the way, has his own history blog: More or Less Bunk.

This morning we released the October issue of the Milestone Documents Newsletter. We chose to focus the issue on the period of expansion and reform in American history between the early 1800s and the start of the Civil War. Thus, our featured articles focus on Andrew Jackson, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Seneca Falls Convention Declaration of Sentiments, among others.

We also feature some great study questions for students from a document that is not quite as famous as those I just mentioned but that has great resonance with current events: Andrew Jackson’s veto message regarding the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States. As historian Jenny Bourne Wahl notes in her analysis of the veto in Milestone Documents in American History, the country enjoyed a period of financial stability during the Second Bank’s existence. However, the bank’s power and influence had made enemies of many vital constituents, among them western farmers, Wall Street powers, and Jackson himself: “Although it is seriously flawed in its logic and economic reasoning, the veto is a masterpiece of propaganda, virtually a call to class warfare and xenophobia.”I’m sure social studies teachers and history educators can have a field day comparing this 1832 battle with today’s tug-of-war over the proposed Wall Street bailout.

Jackson’s veto message is also our latest spotlight document at www.MilestoneDocuments.com. At no cost, you can read the full text of the veto, see a time line of related events, and ponder some of the very interesting quotes from the document. Jenny Wahl’s fascinating analysis will set you back a mere 7 bucks.

One of our favorite contributors, Chester Pach of Ohio University, has written an interesting post over at the Milestone Documents blog about Dwight Eisenhower’s handling of the Little Rock school crisis of 1957. (Tomorrow is the anniversary of Eisenhower’s executive order ordering troops to protect African American students trying to attend Central High School; it will be the Doc of the Day at the Milestones blog tomorrow.) Among other things, Chester points out that one of Eisenhower’s motivations was appearance: He thought the crisis was making us look bad compared with our cold war enemy, the Soviet Union. I wonder what students today would think of a president using such seemingly superficial matters to justify–at least in part–a critical decision? I wonder what other major decisions might be seen in the same light? Of course, Eisenhower at the time probably viewed “appearance” as anything but superficial.

I love how studying primary sources allows you to delve into such questions. And how great is it that the Internet provides access to so many primary sources? All of us who are involved with history education, whether publishers or educators or librarians, need to find fresh new ways to take advantage of these digital history tools.

I was recently interviewed by Tyson Chaney for his Politics 2000 blog; our discussion focused on MilestoneDocuments.com–its purpose, scope, features, and future. My thanks to Tyson for his efforts.

Today is Constitution Day here in the United States, and as you would expect from a publisher that focuses on primary source documents, we have several initiatives to tell you about. First, we are continuing to give away free Constitution posters to any library or school that requests one. To date, we’ve sent out nearly 900 posters, and we’ve in fact had to go back for a second printing on the posters. Even if you haven’t yet ordered a poster, not to worry: the posters are not dated and can be used well into the future, so don’t despair if you have missed this year’s Constitution Day. The best way to order is to call Salem Press at (800) 221-1592.

We’ve also made the Constitution the featured document of the month over at MilestoneDocuments.com. You can read the full text, check out essential quotes, and view a time line surrounding the Constitution’s creation for free; for $6.99 you can buy our expert analysis of the document. Written by John P. Kaminski, who heads the Center for the Study of the American Constitution at the University of Wisconsin, this essay illuminates how the Constitution came into being, why it was structured as it was, and what its impact has been.

On our Milestone Documents blog, the Constitution is today’s Doc of the Day. Our post offers a useful overview of the Constitution and its creation and importance, including some words about one of its primary faults.

Finally, I’d like to highlight another scholar who is focusing on the Constitution: Harvard Law School professor Laurence H. Tribe, who has written a new book: The Invisible Constitution. Judging from the description at the publisher’s site, it sounds like a fascinating book.