notes, documents, and dates from a lifetime of reading about the United States
Trimmed in June 2021; the older version of this page told the story of every page in order, which the site log now does better.
My name is Dave. I taught American history for thirty-one years, nearly all of them at a community college in Ohio: the survey, the Civil War elective, and, for one heroic decade, a night section that met Tuesdays, the one where the best questions came from. The Tuesday-night people were working parents, veterans, a nurse who did shift work, and a man who took the class because his daughter said he argued about history at dinner and should get it out of his system. He was the best student I ever had. If you were in one of those sections: hello, I hope it's going well, and I still have your final essays in a box in the basement, because as I may have mentioned, I am a sentimentalist.
The site began in 2015. Margaret, my wife, bought me a book on HTML for Christmas of 2014, as a joke with a serious edge to it (I had been retired for six months and was reorganizing the spice rack alphabetically, then by continent, and she could see where it was heading). It turned out that writing plain HTML is nearly identical to writing lecture notes: you sit with the text open, you get the structure right, you check your dates, and you resist the urge to add a background color. The first page was the timeline, because that was what I had. Everything else has accreted around it the way my desk did, and still does.
Because I made it, with a text editor, in the same chair, since 2015. No templates, no framework, no "site builder." The fonts are Georgia (designed for screens, holds up at every size, I will die on this hill) and the colors are the ones my old paper notebooks had. There is exactly one stylesheet and I have read all of it. When something on this site looks plain, that is because I chose plain, twice: once in 2015 and again in the March 2021 refresh. The whole site is a few dozen kilobytes per page, loads on a bad connection in the woods, and will still render in 2041, which is more than I can say for most of the modern web and I am only half joking.
Every date gets checked, and when I have been caught wrong, the log records it. My opinions are marked as such, usually by being in the first person. Books I rely on are listed at the bottom of each page, and the full shelf is on the reading list. Where a claim depends on a specific document, the documents page quotes it. If you need more than that, write and ask; I answer mail slowly but I answer it.
Can I use your timeline in my class? Yes. That is what it is for. Print it, project it, staple it to a syllabus. The print stylesheet is set up for all of it.
Can I republish one of the essays? Ask first. It has never once gone badly.
Why no comments section? Because 2015 me was wiser than 2021 me, and I intend to keep it that way.
Do you take ads / sponsorships / guest posts? No, no, and the one guest post I ever ran (Denny, on battlefield signage, 2016) needed forty-one edits and two apologies, and he will tell you the same.
Are you on the socials? The site is the social. See the previous answer about 2015 me.
The address is dave (at) this domain, spelled out for the spam robots, who are, after all, the heirs of the direct-mail tradition. Tell me what page you're on when you write; I can't tell you how many letters begin "you got a date wrong" and do not say where.
People ask why there is no photograph of me on this page. Because the web had thirty years of my face to work with and managed fine; and because a man who hand-codes in Georgia serif should not be the illustration.