I think the project is going well. I have about 105 Primary Sources in there now, to match up with the first eight chapters of a total of fifteen. With the audio clips in each primary passage, that's probably about 17 hours of audio. Plus about five and a half hours of lecture videos. Plus 134 pages of chapter narrative with images, maps, and links. Plus 318 additional pages providing more info, images, and maps on topics and ideas I link to in the narrative. And I'm only about halfway done with the first pass through this material!
The process of writing the additional pages has been especially interesting and fun for me. While I may be more prone to this than other folks, it has been an experience of opening rabbit-holes that it would be really easy for me to dig into and follow in directions I think would be really interesting. For example, when I was adding a page to tell readers a bit more about Abigail Adams, I verified that when she wrote the letters to her husband John while he was attending the Second Continental Congress, from which I use a passage in a primary source page I call "1775-6 - A Woman at the Front", she was staying at the family farm in Braintree, about twelve miles from British-occupied Boston. I also verified that she was staying with her four children, who ranged in age from ten to three. This type of detail, I think, adds a bit to the set the scene for her letters to John Adams. I also learned that Abigail had been born into the politically-connected Quincy family, which meant among other things that her first cousin was married to John Hancock. Finding this out reminded me that I'm very interested in tracing families through American History. Similarly, when I was getting a little more background for a page describing Mount Vernon, I discovered that the 8,000-acre plantation on the Potomac had been acquired by the Washingtons in 1674, the year before Bacon's Rebellion. George's father Augustus had built the manor house, which then passed to his eldest son, Lawrence. George leased the estate from his brother's widow for five years beginning in 1754 (the year he started the French and Indian War) until he inherited it at her death in 1761. This also reminded me that it would be interesting to look at the Washington family's story too.
I'll be able to do that, and continue adding pages that dig into all these rabbit holes, once I complete the basic Web-Text this semester. Although it's probably going to be growing by several hundred more pages, including about 120 more Primary Sources just for US History 1, that will really only be the skeleton of an American History that I can keep adding to indefinitely. And I can add a US History 2 basic course module as well, and carry the story forward from Reconstruction through the present. I have about 725 pages in a "Gilded Age" research folder in my main, private vault. I could add lot of that to this project as well. The links -- especially of family connections through time -- could provide a different way for people to understand and engage with our past.
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