SchlagerBlog

At some point in 1619 or 1620 (the date question arises because of England’s use at the time of the Julian calendar), John Rolfe, an Englishman who had ventured to the Virginia colony (and who married a young native woman known as Pocahontas), wrote a letter to Sir Edwin Sandys in which he mentioned the arrival of blacks to the colony:

“He brought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes, which the Governor and Cape Merchant bought for victuals (whereof he was in great need as he pretended) at the best and easiest rate they could.”

These “20 and odd Negroes,” all black Africans, were indentured servants, not slaves. But their mention in Rolfe’s letter is significant, because it represents the first documented case of Africans sold into servitude in British North America. Some 400 years later, an African American would be elected president of the United States.

This 400-year history is chronicled in fascinating form in our newly published reference set, Milestone Documents in African American History, which is arriving in libraries around the country this week. The 4-volume set opens with the full text and in-depth expert analysis of Rolfe’s letter, and it ends with several documents from the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency, including a 2009 U.S. Senate resolution apologizing for the “enslavement and racial segregation of African Americans.” In between are some 125 other primary sources that serve as a documentary history of African Americans and remind us that, in the end, the great sweep of African American history IS American history. To give you just a taste of what I mean, consider some of the documents the set explores:

• Slavery Clauses in the U.S. Constitution
• United States v. Amistad
• Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?”
• Emancipation Proclamation
• Ku Klux Klan Act
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s “Lynch Law in America”
• W. E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk
• Walter F. White: “The Eruption of Tulsa”
• Alain Locke’s “Enter the New Negro”
• Marian Anderson’s My Lord, What a Morning
• Martin Luther King, Jr.: “I Have a Dream”
• Stokely Carmichael’s “Black Power”
• Final Report of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Panel
• Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March Pledge
• Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address

The Constitution, slavery, emancipation and the Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, lynching, the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement, black power, scientific discrimination, economic disparity, 21st-century presidential politics–it’s all here, in compelling documentary form and analyzed and explained by a wonderful team of some 65 historians.

Like all sets in our “Milestone Documents” series, this one is a great value: purchase of the print set brings free access for an entire school or library to the same content online via Salem History. We hope African American History will be greeted with the same positive reception as the previous three sets in the series: American History (multiple-award winner), American Leaders (ditto), and World History (called an “essential purchase” in a starred Library Journal review just hitting stands today). If you are a librarian or educator, I hope you’ll consider buying the set for your institution.

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve decided to formalize a trend that has begun to dominate my (all-too-frequent) blog posts. Rather than writing about reference industry news and issues, I have been increasingly focused on education and classroom items, especially as they relate to using technology in the classroom. As a result, the new subtitle for this blog: “History. Education. Technology.” won’t surprise any of you. You will also notice some new links in the blogroll.

This evolution mirrors what is happening in our company. While our foundation and core have been in reference publishing, we are increasingly devoting time and energy to educational publishing via our Milestone Documents website. How do we help history educators teach? How do we help students learn? What new tools can we provide to improve history education and to assist the community of passionate teachers and historians? These are the questions that are occupying more and more of our time at Schlager Group, so it’s only natural that they should find their way into my blog posts.

A key word here is “technology.” Just as educators at all levels are struggling to figure out how to integrate technology tools into the classroom to enrich and improve the learning experience, we at Schlager Group are working hard to figure out how to adopt and deploy many of these same technologies in order to serve history teachers and students. This is no easy task. Like so many publishing companies, ours was built on a love of content, and it has been staffed by humanities grads who are steeped in the finest editorial tradition. This has allowed us to turn out award-winning materials of which we are rightly proud. At the same time, however, we have lacked the technical chops to properly position ourselves for the publishing revolution that is in full swing all around us.

To solve this problem, we have sought the expertise of others who can lead us into the future. These include Vector Media Group,  which has built a wonderful new platform for MilestoneDocuments.com and is helping us to refine our vision for the site even now. They also include River Valley Technologies, which has a long tradition in the scholarly journal marketplace but is now branching out to assist us in myriad ways. The company is based in India, but its director, Kaveh Bazargan, is based in the U.K. (I have seen the image of the bald, jet-setting publishing executive, and it isn’t me.) Through associations like these, we are fine-tuning, redirecting, and even revolutionizing our vision for our future.

That’s not to say that we have turned our back on the reference universe or the libraries and librarians that we love so much. Far from it. Even now, we are just days away from the publication of our next multivolume reference set, Milestone Documents in African American History, and deep in the trenches of producing a new set for the fall, Milestone Documents of World Religions. Like so many publishing companies, we are finding that we must operate in many spheres, and on many platforms, at once.

I do hope to write more frequent (and more interesting) blog posts, although I’m sure many of you have read that same sentiment on more blogs than you can count. It shouldn’t be difficult, given how many interesting things are happening at the intersection of history, education, and technology.

After a lengthy development process (is there any other kind?), we have finally launched version 2.0 of our MilestoneDocuments.com site. Over at the new site, you can read a welcome message from me that explains what the revamp is all about, the new content readers will find, and so forth.

When we released version 1.0 of the site about 18 months ago, I wrote here that the endeavor was admittedly an experiment. We wanted to see what kind of traffic we could draw, and what kind of per-article sales we could ring up, with a Web site built around our encyclopedia content but aimed squarely at students and teachers rather than librarians. That first version was indeed an experiment, and it looked it. It was hardly a design for the ages. Nonetheless, we learned a lot with that first incarnation, enough to make us want to invest in a more serious and robust iteration.

During the intervening 18 months, of course, the content industry–by which I mean book publishing, library reference publishing, Web publishing, textbook publishing, et al.–has been going through major upheavals, and there is no end in sight. As you would expect, we built the new site with many of these upheavals in mind, e.g. social media integration and a more nuanced treatment of the free/premium content mix that we are offering. At the same time, though, our eyes are still very much on the future, in the sense that more than anything, we see the site as a platform on which to launch future products aimed at students and teachers. Thus, expect to see further iterations as the educational publishing environment continues to change and as we continue to work on building new relationships with our audience.

But enough with the “vision thing.” I hope you will take a look at the new site and browse what we think is a pretty large amount of terrific content.

I’m pleased to announce the publication today of Milestone Documents in World History, the latest installment in our Milestone Documents series of reference sets. This 4-volume, 1,900-page set covers 125 essential primary documents from ancient history to the present. As with all of our Milestone Documents sets, the entries here combine the full text of the document with an in-depth, analytical essay by a historian that places the document in its historical context, explains what the text says and means, and describes the impact. If you want to see an example from the set, read our entry on the Haiti Constitution of 1801.

We’ve heard many times from librarians and history teachers alike how difficult it is to find good, authoritative resources on world history, so we think our new set will find a warm welcome in libraries around the country, whether they are school, public, or academic ones. Also, once again we offer a complete set of teacher activity guides for educators who are using the set; these are correlated to the National Standards for World History.

Finally, remember that all of our sets come with free online access (via Salem History) for an entire school or campus, and that access includes remote access from a student’s dorm room or home. As ever, it’s the best deal in reference publishing. If you want to order the set, just visit Salem’s Web site or call toll-free 1-800-221-1592.

I’m happy to announce that we have lowered the prices for most of our iPhone and iPod Touch applications. Our Lincoln and Obama apps are now just $.99, and our Presidential Speeches–Pro app is now only $4.99, an incredible bargain for an app that includes 90 famous presidential speeches in history PLUS our award-winning document analysis. For any social studies teachers whose classrooms have iPod Touches, I hope you’ll check out our apps and consider using them in the classroom. Our apps include the full text of important document texts, plus glossaries that define strange/unfamiliar references. And, of course, the 3 apps listed here also contain our expert analysis of each document.

We do still have a few more apps to launch later this year, probably in the fall. Chief among them will be our Supreme Court documents app, which we hope think will be a terrifically useful tool for teachers and students and a fun app for history buffs.

Last week several of us were lamenting how we never dress up any more; our office dress is always casual, since we don’t receive customers and rarely meet clients or partners. And then it came to us: why not institute a formal day at the office? Thus was born Formal Friday at Schlager Group. I think it’s funny and warped and appropriately off-beat. Our only advantage as a small company is to be nimble and flexible and able to turn on a dime. And that can extend to the way we dress, no?

In any case, here is a photo from our first Formal Friday. Our two offsite employees and our interns are missing, but the rest of the gang is here. Three guesses which one is the middle-aged male boss.

With the world’s attention focused on Haiti in the wake of the January 12 earthquake, we are making available for a limited period of time an entry from our forthcoming reference set Milestone Documents in World History: “Constitution of Haiti (1801).” This article discusses the history of Haiti, the slave revolt that became a revolution, and the creation of a constitution in 1801 that is a landmark on many levels. Although the constitution didn’t have a long life as a governing document, it was tremendously important, as it “launched the process of overthrowing European colonial rule in the Americas–rule that extended back some three centuries to the decades after Christopher Columbus’s historic voyage to the New World.” Read more.

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.

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).