Unfortunately, a single document is not always enough to achieve this goal. After all, primary sources have their own shortcomings. The text of a law offers no context. An eyewitness to events can offer only their perspective. Good secondary sources benefit from a wide range of primary sources, so why can't students gain a similar perspective?

That's why as we begin to expand the supply of sources in the Milestone Documents U.S. History II collection—our newest documents include the Gay Liberation Front Platform Statement and Warren Harding's “Return to Normalcy” speech—I've begun working on document pairs. The idea is to add perspective by bringing documents on similar subjects together in order to raise issues that one document alone could never offer.

While three documents can be better than two and four documents can be better than three, the idea behind pairs is to offer enough additional information to improve discussion, but not so much that the additional document provides diminishing returns. While there are always far more than two sides to every story, the idea is to hint at a multiplicity of perspectives without bogging a discussion down with so much unnecessary theory that it would confuse anyone in an introductory U.S, History class.

While I haven't quite picked every document for what will eventually be an X document, I've already faced a number of interesting problems when trying to choose what issues to tackle. Of course, the easiest pairs to imagine would be documents from different sides of a single struggle: Republicans versus Democrats, reformers versus the establishment, etc.

However, what happens if you don't want to highlight views that are racist or otherwise wildly out of date? In these instances, I've leaned towards multiple perspectives on reform. Like nearly all Milestone Documents, these perspectives will be introduced and followed by discussion questions. The nature of those questions run more along the lines of “Which approach do you think was most successful?” or “How might those approaches have complemented one another?” rather than turning every controversy into a debate about two equivalent sides.

Another thing that pairs allows teachers to do that can't be done in a single document is hint at the geographical diversity of a historical phenomenon. “How did segregation in the North compare to segregation in the South?” is one question I wrote recently. “Was the Depression different for people in the East than in the West?” is another question I'd like to ask if I can find the right documents to support that kind of analysis.

Since primary sources are what historians use to create their interpretations, how can we as teachers use them to get students to do the same? If one primary source is good for promoting one kind of historical thinking, multiple primary sources can be even better since they suggest even more sophisticated kinds of thought.

For me, this whole exercise is a follow-up to the kind of bounded research exercise I've used for many semesters now. The more students can make connections between documents to draw conclusions about the past, the more they'll understand what historians do, because they'll be doing it themselves in class.

As always, please feel free to send suggestions for documents or textbook articles directly to me at Jonathan.Rees@csupueblo.edu.

Milestone Documents offers free instructor accounts with full access to our entire collection and instructor resources. Click here to get started.

It was my full intention to make the quizzes very challenging, and I confess that if I have not read the document in question freshly, I can’t necessarily intuit my way to the right answer on some them. They are indeed nitpicky in some cases and demanding complex thought in others. Making them really rigorous was the only way I could justify having a “multiple choice” assessment at this level. If the students all tank them consistently, though, I will need a new strategy for these.

So—this semester (after checking a few weeks’ performance to see if the Fall was an unhappy fluke) I will use them in class (not as a review, but as content) to show students how to read with discrimination. If this takes up too much time or derails my lecturing, etc., I may have to rewrite a bunch of these to make them more—obvious? I don’t really know—but I’m hoping the upcoming term brings more success.

Any inputs any of you may have, especially if you have used these quizzes with your students, would be very welcome.

I’ve been working on document overviews for many of the Western and World Civ II documents, and after a slowdown after Thanksgiving, I’m back in the saddle with them. It’s a lot of fun to do these, and I feel like my own professional skill set is growing from reading and contextualizing a lot of texts that I have not necessarily bumped into before. It makes me very grateful for Milestone Documents as a concept, and for all the other people out there putting these documents forth for the platform. As I understand it, the Milestone team will soon be embarking on an effort to add overview sections for all documents in the collection that don’t currently have one.

As always, please feel free to send suggestions for documents or textbook articles directly to me at cunningham@gonzaga.edu.

Milestone Documents offers free instructor accounts with full access to our entire collection and instructor resources. Click here to get started.

I consistently get positive feedback from my students about their experience with Milestone Documents, including how much they enjoy encountering so many different primary sources. For both beginning and advanced students, the time spent with primary sources provides the opportunity to hone the always-important skills of critical thinking, careful reading, and information literacy—on top of making the story of history more interesting and lively! I always cluster the primary sources with one of the Milestone Documents textbook articles for context, and that works really well. I find that most students rise to the challenge of reading even the difficult primary sources when presented with the opportunity and the context for why it matters.

Have you ever wished that a particular primary source was available here? Please just let me know! The Milestone Documents team is continually working to expand the collection, and we would love to include the sources you’d like to use! The current options are excellent ones, but I— like you—have a few others that I also like to use in class, and we’ll be working on adding those to the collection this year.

We heard from instructors in response to a recent survey that they would like to see an even wider array of documents and would like them all to have an overview/introduction. The Milestone Documents team will be launching an initiative this year to make sure that every document has an overview. I also will be working with them to make sure that we have an even more diverse range of documents, including diversity in type (legal, religious, literary, etc.) as well as in the people groups represented. We will particularly focus on adding documents in the areas of Native American history and women, gender, and sexuality. I also am hoping that we can add a textbook unit on women’s rights movements.

Please send me an email at kmccoy@pointloma.edu. I’d love to hear from you about how you use Milestone Documents, what you’d like to see done differently, and what specific documents and textbook articles you’d like us to add. I’m looking forward to hearing from you and continuing to work toward improving this already excellent teaching resource!

Milestone Documents offers free instructor accounts with full access to our entire collection and instructor resources. Click here to get started.

For example, the new source recently uploaded to Milestone from The History of al-Tabari (AD 10th century), on the murder of the caliph Uthman, yields insight into resistance to his rule and worries within early Islamic culture about political governance. A short document like this, though challenging to read, helps one to understand the past for its own sake, and that is why it is important. On the other hand, a document like The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity (AD 203) reads more easily because it is an inspiring account of two women who persevered in their deepest beliefs despite immense familial pressure. It connects meaningfully to contemporary conversations about feminism, identity, and religious freedom; its intimate quality helps students see empathetically through the eyes of others. Both kinds of documents are important for young people in our classes to encounter.

Another way I have found to connect students to primary sources is through hypothetical debates using documents and characters imaginatively. I mentioned this in my first blog post in September 2018. For example, “King John should sign the Magna Carta.” A positive team argues this perspective and a negative argues against it; both teams utilize a series of primary sources from Milestone that I have taught in class during the previous two weeks. The rest of the class votes on the winning team in the debate, and those students receive bonus points. These exciting events have proved the most memorable part of my world civilization courses. The Milestone team will soon be posting the rubric and the handouts that I use with my students, and I hope they will be useful to other instructors.

A recent survey shows that many Milestone users desire more sources in women’s history and gender history, social history (such as deeds, grants, tax, and court records), environmental history, sources from West Africa such as the Epic of Sudiata about the founder of the Mali Empire, and sources on Sunni/Shi’a identity, such as from Taqī ad-Dīn Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah, the medieval Sunni Muslim theologian. These are helpful suggestions that we will pursue.

Other suggestions included more document overviews. We actually added some missing overviews in 2018, but this year, Milestone will launch a wider effort to cover all the remaining documents that have no overview/introduction.

I am now serving as subject editor for both World History I and Western Civilization I courses. Please feel free to send suggestions for documents or textbook articles directly to me at jtstuart@umary.edu.

Milestone Documents offers free instructor accounts with full access to our entire collection and instructor resources. Click here to get started.

The original coverage of the textbook articles in this particular course came from concepts I had been teaching (and TA-ing for my profs) for years, and they blended well with the kinds of primary sources I was using. As my syllabus changes from year to year, I find that it would be nice to have more of them. If anybody out there has ideas on other topics we might write these articles for, it would be very good to discuss that. Please reach out to me at cunningham@gonzaga.edu. I would love to hear from you!

I’ve been going through all the texts with an eye for catching typos and keying errors that may have been made early on during the mad rush to get a great database going. There have not been many errors at all, but it will add to the quality of the data base to get them expunged.

I’m also looking carefully at the quizzes, many of which I wrote last year and the year before. I confess that I’m not always sure what I was trying to get the students to be aware of when I put these together. Each document demands a different kind of understanding. It seems to me that if you have multiple choice questions at the college level, they better be worth the trouble. Some of the quizzes I wrote are, I admit, really nitpicky, and even interpretive, rather than merely content-based—which means there may be philosophical disagreements with the answer or even the question. In any event they ARE a great teaching tool, but if you’re looking for a quick and easy assessment, some quizzes may pose challenges. I’d be open to revising or even rewriting some of them, per the input of other instructors out there.

I’ve had some exchanges of ideas with the Milestone Docs editorial staff about the supporting material that accompanies the primary sources in the collection. At present I am writing a good many “overviews” for newer documents that don’t have them, and I’m wondering if down the road every text needs the larger commentary that also sometimes exists (e.g. “Explanation and Analysis,” “About the Author,” “Audience,” etc.). The argument for it is that we will all have a more complete product—the argument against is that it can be spoon-feeding, and that offering this material robs us of the opportunity to test them by asking to give their own explanations. So I’m wondering if, like the quizzes, the auxiliary material should be available for a virtual “Instructors Manual” and leave the students only the overview. This is something I’ll be discussing with the Milestone team and the other subject editors of the collection in the coming months.

Eric P. Cunningham

Gonzaga University

Milestone Documents offers free instructor accounts with full access to our entire collection and instructor resources. Click here to get started.

My goals as subject editor include keeping track of any coverage gaps in primary sources and textbook articles and making recommendations to Milestone Documents to fill those gaps. Hearing from you about weak areas would help tremendously, so for now please email me at jtstuart@umary.edu. We’ll be investigating a tech solution (e.g. message board) that might better serve this purpose in the future. I will do my own assessment and report to you in the future about additions to the collection.

I also want to evaluate which primary sources really need expert commentary, because not all sources have such commentary at present. Again, your input on the sources you commonly use that need development in this particular area would be a great help.

I really look forward to generating a dialogue and connecting a community of instructors around these topics.

As teachers of history, we need to believe in the ability of our students to connect meaningfully with the past. They need to encounter it in primary sources and not have it mediated merely through a textbook. This takes a lot of work, but it is amazing how the foreign ideas, strange notions, and lack of political correctness in ancient texts spur them to take an interest. Most of my students are non-history majors, but I make all of them keep a journal on each of the 50 primary sources from Milestone Documents that they read during the course of a semester. They can do it, if shown how and held to a high standard. Let’s work together to improve the World and Western Civilization I content for the sake of our students, because you never know for sure which document will be the one to captivate the unsuspecting student.

Joseph T. Stuart

University of Mary

Milestone Documents offers free instructor accounts with full access to our entire collection and instructor resources. Click here to get started.

The only thing about that class I haven’t changed since I adopted it is Milestone Documents. Easy, inexpensive online access to a wealth of primary sources in U.S. History along with short introductions and textbook sections that I can assign a la carte has fit well in every iteration of my class that I’ve developed.

Since I started serving as the U.S. History II editor, its usefulness has only grown because the good folks at Milestone Documents have been able to track down nearly every document I’ve ever directly referred to in class, so that the match between what I assign and what I cover has been near perfect. The advent of reading quizzes for individual documents only makes it more useful for the online version of my class.

However, as I’m sure most of you know, one of the most the wonderful things about teaching history is that you can teach the same time period in a thousand different ways, and all those iterations can be just as valid as the other. That’s why Milestone Documents is revising and expanding its offerings in U.S. History II, so that we can all take up more content that fits however we want to teach this subject.

That’s why I want to hear from you, my fellow Milestone Documents devotees. What documents from the latter half of American history would you like to see included in the collection? What sub-topics from this period do we not have enough coverage in now? How can we make the documents in the U.S. History II collection better fit the way you teach this subject?

If you’d like to try to answer any of these questions, for now you can contact me directly at Jonathan.Rees@csupueblo.edu. In the future, Milestone Documents will be establishing a system for customers who teach in various historical subject areas to talk to each other not just about content, but about pedagogical methods and other ways to make their classes more effective.

Some of the first efforts at revising our existing collection will be appearing shortly. These will include new document overviews for Andrew Carnegie’s “Wealth,” Anzia Yezierska’s “How I Found America,” and the Principles and Beliefs of the John Birch Society. More announcements along these lines will also appear shortly.

In the meantime, rest assured that Milestone Documents refuses to rest on its laurels. As higher education and teaching are changing, so have the options that instructors have for what to assign and how exactly to assign it. I remain grateful to work with a company that is committed to keeping up with the times, and which can help us all produce the most interesting and useful classes that we can imagine.

Jonathan Rees

Professor of History

Colorado State University – Pueblo

Milestone Documents offers free instructor accounts with full access to our entire collection and instructor resources. Click here to get started.

Although I love the breadth of the U.S. History sources in the current Milestone collection, I have also identified some key areas where the collection has some gaps and needs more coverage. The Milestone Documents team and I are excited about working on filling in these gaps, and this is a priority for us in the coming months. We would also really love to hear your feedback on these areas and any other gaps you’ve noticed.

The parts of the collection we’re currently working on are:

• Adding more primary source documents from Native Americans.


• Adding more primary sources that reflect women’s voices and experiences, including those of women of color. I am thinking particularly about significant women’s history themes like suffrage, temperance, the abolitionist movement, women and the westward movement, and nineteenth-century religious and spiritual movements.


• Adding to the commentary that accompanies some of the primary source documents that we do already have from colonial American women.



I would really love to hear from you! If you also use Milestone Documents, you’ve probably had the same experience I have: while it contains most of the types of sources I’m looking for, there are always a couple of others I wish it had. Please feel free to email me with any thoughts you have about how we can add to the collection for U.S. History to 1877 at kmccoy@pointloma.edu. I am really looking forward to a dialogue with you and hope that we can create a community of instructors who talk about these topics together. I’m sure all of our courses will benefit from our discussions! We’ll look for additional ways of enabling that conversation, but for now I’d love to hear from you via email.




I’m looking forward to being part of continuing to add to the already impressive collection that Milestone Documents offers, and I hope you’ll join me in the process!

Kelli McCoy




Point Loma Nazarene University




Milestone Documents offers free instructor accounts with full access to our entire collection and instructor resources. Click here to get started.

]]> Blog 2018-09-24T14:58:54+00:00 https://www.milestonedocuments.com/news-opinions/view/10-meet-the-team-ben-painter https://www.milestonedocuments.com/news-opinions/view/10-meet-the-team-ben-painter#When:19:05:19Z

Get to know creative director Ben Painter in this Q&A. Ben is responsible for the design and appearance of both products and advertising, in addition to playing a key role in strategic direction and company operations.




How did you get started in your field?

I wanted to be a lawyer. Luckily that didn’t stick through college. I was fortunate to have a supportive faculty at SMU. Our collaboration led me to writing, which led me to restarting SMU’s Literary Festival, which led to me making a speech before my then future boss, which landed me employment at Schlager Group as an assistant editor, which sums up the beginning of my current track.

It seems now like it should have always happened this way, but at the time I was dangerously close to selling life insurance for a living. That might be right for some, but I’m thankful I found a different path.

What do you love about working here?

To have found a group of smart, dedicated individuals to work alongside makes it easy to openly disagree, debate, and find better solutions to our challenges. Though perhaps this isn’t the only thing I cherish about working here, it speaks to our elemental makeup: work smart together, not that anyone here would agree with such a glib statement, which is a thing I also love. And of course my list could be much longer. It could include the many personalities and policies that make the day-to-day operations pleasant. Still it strikes me that everything we do comes second to my previous platitude.

What exciting things do you have coming up in the next few months?

As we put 2016 to bed, I’m not sure where to begin. We spent the last year expanding our team with two new key players—overseeing sales and tech—and refining our process. There were quite a few moments in the last year that made us take a second or third look at the way we build products and do business.

2017 represents a big step forward for us. We will build new products, implement features we know our customers want, and find ways to leverage technology to drive our content business more effectively.

Maybe I missed the question though. In the near future I’m going to start looking at our company site with eyes toward a redesign. We also have a new production platform underway. I’m excited to see good progress there. Today we had cupcakes. Boo-ya.

If you could pick the office playlist what would you pick?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDqP7kcr-sc

Favorite charity?

Maybe it makes me a bad person, but I’m not a seeker of charities. The right ones always seem to find me—not the other way around. Most recently I did some work with Music Is Our Weapon via my participation at an art auction (as an artist, not patron). So I guess they are my current favorite charity. But tomorrow I might end up at a grocery store and be asked to give some money to some sort of cancer. At that time my answer might change.

So my favorite charity? I’m not so sure. But in the words of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: “There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

Number 1 played song on your iPod?

Given that the last time I played a song through my iPod it was probably 2009, the answer to this question is probably irrelevant, not to mention potentially embarrassing.

Currently, my jam is Birthday by The Sugarcubes, were I to pick one song that found me at the right moment to want to hear it again and again.

]]> Blog 2016-11-30T19:05:19+00:00 https://www.milestonedocuments.com/news-opinions/view/10-meet-the-team-sean-dove https://www.milestonedocuments.com/news-opinions/view/10-meet-the-team-sean-dove#When:15:50:10Z Sean Dove joined Milestone Documents in January 2016 as our first in-house software engineer and web developer. Graduating from the University of North Texas in 2011 with a B.S. in Business Computer Information Systems, he is responsible for improvements to the Milestone Documents site design, functionality, and user experience, as well as developing new features and integrations with other platforms.

How did you get started in your field?

I was fortunate enough to get a paid internship during my last year of college doing tech support for a financial services company. I was hired full-time there after graduating and worked my way up to software/web developer over the next four years. Being friends and bandmates with my now-coworker Ben Painter, we had batted around the prospect of coming over to Milestone Documents a few times over the years. Luckily the stars aligned and I finally decided I was ready for a new challenge around the time that Milestone was fully committing to the idea of bringing their development in-house.

What do you love about working here?

This is my first experience being a solo developer – previously, I had only worked within teams, surrounded by more experienced developers who could point me in the right direction if I got lost – so I was nervous about the challenge of wading into a major existing product with minimal guidance. Thankfully, the experience has been great and I couldn’t ask for a better, more supportive environment to work in. There’s a great group dynamic in our company, a genuine sense of being on a team and a passion for the work we’re doing.

What exciting things do you have coming up in the next few months?

We’re in the process of a substantial, on-going redesign and overhaul of the site’s appearance and functionality. A lot of existing features are being improved and stream-lined to optimize the experience for both instructors and students, as well as the addition of new features and general quality-of-life enhancements.

If you could pick the office playlist what would you pick?

I think there’s a surprisingly broad swath of things we’re all OK with, despite some generational divides and significant differences in taste. Bowie, ABBA and Kate Bush would all probably make the cut. Or maybe just the Stranger Things soundtrack on repeat as we approach Halloween.

Favorite charity?

In-Sync Exotics is a non-profit wildlife rescue/sanctuary in Wylie, TX, that takes in injured and neglected animals, specializing in big cats. Great people doing often heartbreaking work.

Number 1 played song on your iPod?

A tie between “Harnessed in Slums” – Archers of Loaf, and “Alex Chilton” – The Replacements. This feels accurate.

]]> Blog 2016-10-19T15:50:10+00:00