notes, documents, and dates from a lifetime of reading about the United States
Site Log
I keep this mostly for myself, the way I used to keep the front of a plan book. If you find an error in these pages, this is where it goes to be confessed. Newest first.
2021 · June 12
Trimmed the About page and fixed a stale link to the Archives. Tinkered with the page counter script (again; see June 8). Everything on this site is now written down somewhere, which is either discipline or a symptom.
2021 · June 8
Glossary pass: fixed "gerrymander" (I had 1813 for two years; a reader in Salem set me straight, kindly), added writs of assistance, bread riots, and the slogans entry. Should have been weeding the garden.
2021 · May 30
The essays page went up: the 1850s piece I have been threatening for a decade, the clocks essay (my favorite thing on this site), the Brady photographs, and the one about ranking presidents. Footnotes and all. Margaret read the clocks one and said "you have been waiting years to write that." Correct.
2021 · April 18
Civil War page: added the 1860 election table and the secession dates. Also fixed a sloppy sentence about Vicksburg that a careful reader in Georgia underlined in an actual printed letter, mailed, with a stamp. The stamp is on my desk. I get to keep that.
2021 · April 2
Presidents table carried through the current administration. That page is now eleven printed pages, which the print stylesheet earns its keep on.
2021 · March 27
Reading list went up. Received one warm letter about the Zinn entry and one colder one about the O'Reilly. Both fair.
2021 · March 14
Site refresh: wider layout, cleaner tables, the nav now wraps onto two lines. Denny says no nav should need a second line; Denny uses a flip phone. Margaret says the color is better. Margaret is right, it was.
2021 · February 20
Documents page: fixed the Nicolay/Hay footnote after a reader in Rochester caught me confusing the two secretaries' Gettysburg copies. Embarrassing in the specific way that keeps a person honest.
2021 · January 9
Links page checked end to end. Two archives moved URLs; one Smithsonian page gone ( RIP). Added the "one dead site" note about Denny's battlefield pages, which I have been meaning to write since he took them down.
2021 · January 3
Added this log. The site is six years old this spring and it occurred to me I have no record of it. A historian with no records. Do as I say, not as I do.
2020 · October – December
Documents page built out through the fall: Declaration, Constitution and amendments, the whole Gettysburg Address, Seneca Falls, the Birmingham line. Started it in the spring when everyone was home and everyone was reading history; finished it at the kitchen table in October. The site got more traffic this year than in its whole previous life. Welcome, stranded students of the world. Hope you're all right out there.
2020 · March
The timeline got the 1969-2021 stretch, finally. Somebody wrote to ask why it stopped at 1968 and I did not have a good answer, other than that the file was ten years old and my energy wasn't.
2019 · August 9
Added the privacy page. It is nine lines long and honest. Also the phone pass: Margaret sat with my phone and showed me what the timeline looked like on it, and it looked like a ransom note, so now the stylesheet has a section for small screens. Learn from my shame.
2018 · September
Moved hosts, because the old host got bought by a company that got bought by a company. If you see a broken image anywhere, that's why; I found them all, I think, but two years of link-rot dies hard.
2017 · April
Presidents table went up, all forty-five at the time, one line apiece. A reader asked for it "in a form I can print and tape inside a cabinet door," which remains my favorite piece of user feedback in six years of doing this.
2016 · November
Fixed the 1820/1821 Missouri Compromise date error. Margaret knew it off the top of her head; I had to look it up, which tells you which of us read the footnotes. Also fixed Alaska 1867, which readers have now caught me getting wrong twice, in 2016 and, yes, again in a timeline edit in 2018. It is right. I checked it four times. Seward's Folly, check the man's name if nothing else, that's my mnemonic now.
2016 · February
The independence and civil-war pages went up. The tea chest count (342) came from a student who counted the inventory in Edmund Dana's 1834 letter, or so she claimed in a citation I no longer have, but the number is right anyway.
2015 · June
The site began: one timeline page, hand-coded, tested in two browsers. It looked wrong in one of them and I did not care. I do now. A little.
Errors still outstanding, that I know of: none, which is how the last stretch before a correction letter always feels.