<div style="padding:56.25% 0 0 0;position:relative;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/1055071918?badge=0&amp;autopause=0&amp;player_id=0&amp;app_id=58479" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write; encrypted-media" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" title="Welcome"></iframe></div><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script> Welcome to *US History 1, As Told By Contemporaries*! This is a brand new web-based self-study course I've been developing, based on course content I've written and the primary sources I've accumulated for my college and university students. I think it will be a useful tool for people who want to learn a little more about our American past, hear the voices of people who actually lived through the big events of that past, and get a better sense of how that past they experienced led to this present we're living through now. There are a bunch of ways you can engage with this content. First, you can open the section at the left called "Narrative Chapters" and then open a page such as "[[6.1 Imperial Warfare]]" and begin reading. You'll find that the content is divided into "pages" that try to express a single idea at a time in digestible chunks. These are the equivalent of PowerPoint slides in a lecture. There will be text and image(s) on each and every page of this web-text. But unlike a lecture, there will also be (purplish) links that will take you somewhere else. Most of them will take you to another page in this web-text that will expand on the idea that's highlighted. For example, on page 6.1, there are fourteen links to pages about the different wars and places I mention. These pages give more detail and typically include different images, to give you a bit more of a deep dive. Sometimes I link to the outside web when I think the idea I'm linking might be interesting to my readers, but it's not something that's super relevant to the US History topics I'm going to be covering in this content. Stuff you'll only ever see a link to once will be the most likely to have an outside link. Stuff we're going to return to again and again deserves an internal link. Also, if I have something particular I want to say about an idea, that you won't find on a third party page, I'll write my own. So you're welcome to follow the flow of the narrative I wrote, from 6.1 to 6.2 to 6.3 and so on. You can navigate one step back or one step forward at the bottom of each page or you can use the menu at the left. You can also jump around using the menu, of course. You could also follow the links to other pages and then page back to the narrative or just keep jumping from page to page, following what interests you. And you can watch a lecture [[Chapter 6 Lecture]] about this material, built on the narrative. Another way you can engage with this content is to pop open the other folder called "Topic Index". It contains all those additional pages that add more information to the narrative but don't fit inside it -- the links in the narrative pages. These are arranged in alphabetical order rather than chronologically based on the chapter where the links occur. Often a topic page such as "[[Eliza Lucas]]" will be mentioned a number of times in this history, so these pages might be linked to several chapters where the info is relevant. You can scroll through these topic names on the lefthand menu and open the ones that interest you. Then you can open another, or follow links that interest you in the pages you open and see where you end up. You could also use the search bar to look for very specific information, if you want to focus on a particular topic. The search will return not only the linked pages but everyplace the term is mentioned. *Another* thing you might try is to look at the "graph". You may have noticed that up on the top right of each page there's a little box with some dots connected by lines. The center one represents the page you're on and the others are all the other pages linked to it. You can see a blowup of that box by clicking on the arrow. Or you can change the "zoom" by dragging over the box. Or you can see the entire graph of the website, with ALL the pages, by clicking the three connected circles. You can drag over that to move and size it too, which helps you see things more clearly. If you hover over a node, you'll highlight all the things it links to. If you click-drag it, you can pull it around the graph. Play around a bit -- it's fun! Finally and maybe most importantly, in addition to all this information in all these pages, there's an additional folder called "Primary Sources" that is really the thing I had in mind when I started the ebook that led to this project. I think it's really useful to hear the voices of real people who lived through the events we're learning about, and who didn't know how everything was going to turn out in the end. That's why primary sources are so valuable: people are concerned about the events because *they're living them*, and their perspective isn't prejudiced or poisoned by "spoilers". There are at least a dozen primary sources for each chapter in this course, and I'll be adding more! Their pages include excerpts from letters, diaries, memoirs, political documents, newspapers, and all kinds of other sources that were produced in the moment. They're all less than 1500 words long; I've edited them so they get right to the point and don't go on too long. There are even more images. There's a little bit of scene-setting before each passage. And there's an audio file of me actually reading each one, in case you'd prefer to listen in addition to (or even instead of) reading. For example, the "[[1614 - Tale of Pocahontas]]" page has nearly eleven minutes of me telling you the story. It also has internal links to the three important people in the story (Pocahontas, Powhatan, and John Rolfe), so you can go find more info about each of them on their page as well as all the other pages they link to. And it has an external link to Samuel Argall, who (although he's the villain in this story) I didn't think was interesting enough to deserve his own page right now. Maybe in the future I'll discover something that makes him more interesting -- and that's the other advantage of a web-based text! But that's a story for another day.