In my post about 2022 writing goals, I said that I was planning to complete my two works-in-progress, then shift to writing/completing a Bible study, then move on to the next volume in my Documenting America series.
I’ve written about this series before, but not recently. If you want to see some previous posts, look for Documenting America in the Categories box on this blog. I’ll give the short version here.
I began this as a series of op-ed pieces for our local newspaper after I bought a 20-book set The Annals of America, which published a lot of American documents. I saw how these could be worked into the op-eds, the local editor liked it, and I had four published before the guest op-ed program was cancelled. I kept writing the columns to see what frequency I could produce them at. I was up to 18 to 20, and was considering self-syndicating it, when I laid it all aside for other pursuits.
When easy self-publishing came along, and I was looking to put together a book to self-publish because my novel wasn’t ready, I decided I could cobble those columns into chapters in a book. That all came together quickly, and the first volume, Documenting America: Lessons From The United States’ Historical Documents, was published in May 2011 as an ebook and in Nov 2011 as a print book.
As the 150th anniversary of the Civil War was coming, I decided to put together another volume of documents from that time. I didn’t get it done in time for those anniversary years, but I eventually did publish it. Then, for a next volume, I decided to make about the development of the Constitution. I finished that in 2019.
The way the books work is I take a quote from some American document—not always a famous one, but one I think expressed things important in our national development. I take a large excerpt from that, in a couple of paragraphs explain its importance in its time, and link it to an issue we face today. My goal in doing this was not to show my intelligence but to introduce people to these documents, hoping they would then go ahead and find the document and read them in their entirety.
Did I meet this goal? This review on one of the books tells me that for some readers I did.
This is a great compilation of primary sources. The editor/author adds a few paragraphs of analysis but the bulk of the book is primary source material. Some sources are well known. The best part, though, is lesser known documents that are now more easily available in this book for readers.
What’s next for the DA series? I have completed the research and laid out the documents for the next volume, Documenting America: Run-up To Revolution. It looks like it will be a little harder to produce than the last three, which is one of the reasons why I’ve gone on to publish the next volume.
After that? I have identified six volumes based on historical eras I would like to produce. After that? We have so many documents, with many of them becoming easily available, I can see how this could easily be a long series, more than 20 volumes. Even 40 volumes long. Of course, as I’m now 70 years old, I would be doing good to make this a ten-book series.
I hope to write and publish the next one before 2022 ends, but we will see. Meanwhile, I’m happy with the series even as it is now. I have more sales of this series than of any other.