This web site is designed to accompany American Realities – two volumes of historical essays written by J. William T. Youngs.
It includes sections devoted to each of the thirty articles in American Realities. And it also provides suggestions about historical writing, editing, and web authoring.
The current version of the site (Summer 2013) is under development and in an experimental stage.
“American history is an epic composed of many events: colonists made their homes in a new world; soldiers fought for independence; capitalists built giant industries; civil rights activists struggled for equality. In such episodes we encounter the emotions, thoughts, and experiences that made up the distinct worlds of the past. In the two volumes of American Realities my goal has been to re-create some of those worlds, to capture the immediacy–the reality–of life as lived in other eras. I have not tried to reduce all these events to a single pattern, but in the aggregate the chapters trace the course of American history from the distant past to the present.”